D.C. police officers who fist bumped a member of a far-right group known as the Proud Boys on July 4 did not face any discipline, after the Metropolitan Police Department said it didn’t have the facts to determine whether they had violated agency policy.

Video footage captured by independent journalist Ford Fischer showed at least four officers, one of whom appeared to be smoking a cigar, hold out a hand for a fist bump from a Proud Boy. This occurred while police were escorting the group to a bar following a scuffle in front of the White House during a permitted flag burning protest.

As the Proud Boys walked, one officer with @DCPoliceDept held up a first to “Pound it” with a cigar in his mouth. pic.twitter.com/fOyaJ0hnjk

— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) July 4, 2019

“I think that we have to find the context under which that happened,” D.C. police chief Peter Newsham told DCist two days later, at a protest planned by Proud Boys. “I don’t know what the context was, I don’t know who the person was, I don’t know why they fist bumped, so we’ll take a look at that and see if it’s something that needs any attention. I do think that probably it was somebody who was taking that image that was purposely trying to paint the police in a negative light, but we’ll see.” He added that the officer smoking a cigar was “clearly a violation of policy.”

Newsham declined at the time to say how the police department would be looking into the context of the footage.

Fischer, who runs digital media outlet News2Share, contested Newsham’s claim that he was trying to make the police look bad. “My philosophy is that I livestream so people can see events beginning to end whenever possible,” he told DCist in response. “In the case of the fist bump, my tweet pretty plainly showed what happened and explained it without judgement. The entire context is viewable in the original livestream.”

According to D.C. police spokesperson Brianna Jordan, “An internal investigation concluded that there were insufficient facts to determine if a violation occurred.” When asked for follow up about the officer smoking a cigar, which Newsham characterized to DCist as “clearly a violation of policy,” Jordan responded, “After further review, it was determined that there was no policy violation.”

Luke Rohfling, a Proud Boy involved in the planning of the July 6 rally, believes that the police shouldn’t have faced any discipline. “It was a fist bump,” he says. “Cops are friendly with people who are friendly with them for the most part. It has nothing to do with ideology.”

The Proud Boys are an all-male group formed in 2016 that describes its members as “Western chauvinists who refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.” The group was banned by Instagram and Facebook over the company’s policies against hate groups. (While the Southern Poverty Law Center calls the Proud Boys an extremist hate group, the group rejects the label and has sued SPLC over the categorization.) Many of their rallies and get-togethers have featured incidents of violence.

Much of the criticism of officer conduct in the footage revolved around concerns that the police would show favorable treatment to Proud Boys during a July 6 far-right rally that the group helped plan in Freedom Plaza, which led to an organized counter protest in the neighboring Pershing Park. Ultimately, MPD and U.S. Park Police officers mainly succeeded in keeping the two groups separate during the day’s events, avoiding any large-scale scuffles.

The fist bumps happened two days earlier, shortly after a permitted flag burning outside the White House on July 4. Members of the Proud Boys tried to interrupt the event, and law enforcement intervened in the fracas. In the end, two members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a far-left group advocating for the collapse of the U.S. capitalist system, were arrested (the charges were ultimately dropped.) After the incident, D.C. police provided an escort for the Proud Boys back to a bar.

“I wasn’t surprised to see the police fist bumped the Proud Boys,” says Carl Dix, a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party who was involved in the flag burning, “and I wasn’t surprised to see them cleared.”

Previously:
Two People Were Arrested After The Far-Right Rally And Counter Protest In D.C.
D.C. Police Officers Fist Bumped A Proud Boy After Clashes In Front Of White House

This story has been updated to clarify that the investigation did not make a determination about whether the officers who fist bumped a Proud Boy violated policy.