A Virginia cop who worked as a high school resource officer has been suspended and recommended for termination amid allegations that the officer was a recruiter for Identity Evropa, a white nationalist organization.
In a tweet shared on Monday, Chesterfield County Police Department chief Col. Jeffrey Katz wrote that he was “aware of alleged online activities of one of our officers” and was determined to authenticate the officer’s white nationalist ties. Later that day, Katz tweeted that the officer had been removed from his position and administratively suspended while the police chief’s recommendation for termination is being processed.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch said that it received an email making the allegations from a Colorado Springs-based antifa group last week. On Wednesday, The Times-Dispatch sent the email containing the allegations to Chesterfield police officials and asked the department about the officer.
The Times-Dispatch, along with the Daily Beast, has identified the officer as 31-year-old Daniel Morley, a resource officer at L.C. Bird High School in Chesterfield. When reached for comment, a Chesterfield County public information coordinator declined to confirm the identity of the officer until the termination is finalized. The Chesterfield County Police Department also sent Splinter its statement from Monday that its “Office of Professional Standards continues to actively investigate these claims” against the officer.
The Daily Beast reported that an analysis of Morley’s social media showed he had been involved in white nationalist movements since he was a teenager. Per the Daily Beast:
Beginning in 2006, he used the Danimal876 name to post on white supremacist forum Stormfront. He identified as a 19-year-old from Chesterfield. In his first post, he responded to a person looking for more “national socialists” in the area. Later, in an unrelated post chided a woman for not “know[ing] that a National Socialist and a Nazi were the same thing.”
“I consider myself a White Nationalist,” he wrote in 2009.
His views, as he expressed them late 2018 and early 2019 in Identity Evropa chat rooms, do not appear to have significantly changed. From his Stormfront days until present, he counseled fellow white nationalists to steer away from appearances of overt racism, while still furthering racist aims.
“A good strategy would be to steer the definition of ‘racism’ towards ‘racial hatred.’ We don’t hate other races, so we’re not racists,” he advised an Identity Evropa member in October. “After all, the word isn’t going away. May as well control it.”
Under Virginia law, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a police department must follow the “Law Enforcement Officers Procedural Guarantee Act” prior to a police officer’s firing. The law requires an officer be notified of “all charges, the basis therefor and the action which may be taken” in writing, and given five days to respond to the charges unless the officer agrees to a shorter period.