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How Police Used Antifa to Investigate Far-Right Proud Boys (Published 2019)
Testimony over a brawl at the Metropolitan Republican Club has focused on extremists who also skirmish online.
How Police Used Antifa Information to Investigate Far-Right Proud Boys
Testimony over a brawl at the Metropolitan Republican Club has focused on extremists who also skirmish online.
A New York City police detective, when asked on the witness stand this week how he had identified members of a far-right group called the Proud Boys, gave an unexpected answer: the department, investigating a brawl in the city last October that involved the group, had relied in part on information posted online, much of it gathered by anonymous, self-described anti-fascists.
“There was a tremendous amount of what we call ‘doxxing,’” the detective, Thomas Mays, testified, using a slang term for the practice of disclosing personal information online. “Names that were given for the individuals.”
For the past week, jurors in State Supreme Court in Manhattan have been immersed in the unfamiliar world of the Proud Boys and their political enemies, often known collectively as Antifa. They have heard testimony about a subculture of battling groups, described as extremists who fight not only in the streets but also online.
The trial concerns the events of Oct. 12, when Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys, appeared at the Metropolitan Republican Club on East 82nd Street, where he reenacted the 1960 murder of a Japanese socialist by a teenage ultranationalist. Protesters had gathered outside.
Afterward, as multiple videos show, 10 members and associates of the Proud Boys surrounded and beat four people — believed by the police to have been members of Antifa —who had circled the block to approach them.
The four who were assaulted refused to talk with the police. They were identified in an indictment only as Shaved Head, Ponytail, Khaki and Spiky Belt. Their whereabouts are unknown.
With no victims to put on the stand, prosecutors have relied on video to make their case against the two men now standing trial, Maxwell Hare and John Kinsman, pointing to footage of them kicking and punching opponents. They are charged with attempted assault and riot. (Seven other men connected to the Proud Boys have pleaded guilty to charges including riot, disorderly conduct and attempted assault, and an eighth is awaiting trial.)
Mr. Hare, prosecutors said, initiated the fighting by charging at the black-clad protesters. Mr. Kinsman, they added, did not even remove a burning cigarette from his mouth as he grabbed the bars of an iron fence for extra leverage during a series of kicks.
Lawyers for Mr. Hare, 26, and Mr. Kinsman, 39, have suggested, however, that their clients were acting in self-defense.
To buttress their case, they have elicited testimony that masked figures the night before the event threw bricks through windows of the Republican club, spray painted anarchist symbols on its front doors and left behind copies of a threatening communiqué. Among other things, the leaflets said “our attack is merely a beginning” and called Mr. McInnes a “hipster-fascist clown.”
Hoping to orient jurors, prosecutors called to the stand an expert in extremism, who offered a primer on both Antifa and the Proud Boys.
The witness, Oren Segal of the Anti-Defamation League, testified that Antifa is a loose-knit association of people who “physically confront those who they view as Nazis and fascists” and can have an elastic definition of those terms. Members, he said, typically wear black clothes and cover their faces, sometimes look to brawl and have used bottles and bike locks as weapons.
The Proud Boys, Mr. Segal said, view themselves as defenders of conservative values and put a premium on confronting or attacking leftists. He said the group’s leaders have used bigoted language about Muslims and women and that “violence is built into the ideology,” due largely to Mr. McInnes, who started the Proud Boys in 2016.
Mr. Segal then outlined levels, or “degrees,” the Proud Boys recognize. Third-degree members, for instance, tattoo the name of the group on their bodies, and under rules that were in effect in October 2018 but have since been revised, members reached the fourth, or highest, degree by getting in a physical confrontation or getting arrested.
Although the defendants are the ones who stand formally accused of breaking the law, Antifa is both nowhere and everywhere in the trial, physically absent from the courtroom but invoked regularly by the defense.
Mr. Hare took the stand on Thursday afternoon, telling jurors that he had joined the Proud Boys in early 2017, seeing it as “a group of blue collar men who love America” and like to drink together.
He also said he considered Antifa to be a “violent, militant, anarchist group” and said he was afraid when protesters showed up outside the Metropolitan Republican Club during Mr. McInnes’s speech.
Mr. Hare, an Amtrak employee, said that he had not punched one of the protesters at the start of the clash on 82nd Street as Detective Mays testified, but instead had tried to remove a mask that person was wearing. Later in the melee, he said, he kicked and punched others to protect himself.
He first spotted the small group of masked protesters when they were about 70 feet away, Mr. Hare said. He moved toward them, he claimed, because he believed they posed a threat. “They were attacking us,” he said. “They were going to hurt us.”
Under cross-examination, which will continue next week, Mr. Hare acknowledged that he had become a fourth-degree Proud Boy the week before the conflict on the Upper East Side. He had traveled to Providence, R.I., where he helped provide security for a right-wing rally and at one point punched someone in the face.
Mr. Hare’s testimony was in keeping with the defense strategy to put Antifa on trial in absentia, citing violent acts connected to the group and asking law-enforcement witnesses to agree that the four protesters would have faced charges had they been found.
Mr. Kinsman’s lawyer, Jack Goldberg, has questioned how the authorities were able to locate the Proud Boys but not the Antifa members.
Investigators testified that they tried to figure out the identities of Spiky Belt, Shaved Head and the others, with no success.
Detective Mays said that the police sought information from the F.B.I.’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and had “monitored” what he called Antifa protests and meetings.
And Daniel Schoenfeld, an investigator with the district attorney’s office, said that he and colleagues had obtained a search warrant from Google to check records of phones in specific spots on the Upper East Side and had given images of the supposed Antifa members to a private facial recognition company.
The task of identifying the Proud Boys appeared to be comparatively easy — and not just because of the names and pictures posted online by New York City Antifa on social media sites.
Mr. Schoenfeld cited a “key differentiation” that gave investigators an advantage: the Republican club provided them with a list of people who had obtained tickets for Mr. McInnes’s talk.
