BOISE, Idaho — Idaho made international headlines over the weekend when 31 masked members of a white nationalist group were arrested in Coeur d’Alene. The city’s mayor and police chief updated the public through a news conference on Monday.
After a call from a citizen warning he had seen men “looking like a little army,” police found the members of the Patriot Front inside of a U-Haul truck during a traffic stop Saturday, according to The Spokesman-Review. They were arrested on suspicion of conspiring to riot at the North Idaho city’s Pride in the Park event.
Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White provided a handful of new details at the conference, including that the riot was planned to take place on Sherman Avenue. The U-Haul was found to contain riot gear and at least one smoke grenade.
But more questions remained. White said he didn’t know who the riot was meant to target or why Coeur d’Alene was chosen as the site of the riot, and he declined to comment on whether firearms were found on the men.
The police department received 149 phone calls on Monday morning about the arrests, including one from as far away as Norway, White said. He said they were a ”50/50 split,” between local calls of support for the police and anonymous angry calls from those upset about the arrests. White confirmed that users on far-right social media platforms have doxxed Coeur d’Alene officers, publicly identifying them and publishing personal information about them online.
“The other 50%, who are completely anonymous, who want nothing more than to scream and yell at us and use really choice words, offered death threats against myself and other members of the police department merely for doing our jobs,” White said.
At least one person who was not a member of the press showed up to Monday’s conference to falsely claim the group detailed by police were actually members of the FBI. His words echoed a conspiracy theory that has been making its way around the internet. White quickly shut down the accusation.
“To be very clear here, these were not law enforcement officers that we arrested,” White said. “These were members of the hate group Patriot Front.”
Mayor Jim Hammond, who was sworn into office in January, also took the podium. It was his first press conference as mayor. He brought up Coeur d’Alene’s history of once being home to a neo-Nazi compound, insisting that the city had since become a place that “respects and welcomes everyone.”
The Patriot Front is described as a “white nationalist hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center that branched off the group that was involved in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which killed one demonstrator. The Patriot Front has a manifesto that’s called for preserving the U.S. as a white state.
The Anti-Defamation League described it as a white supremacist group that regularly “uses social media to promote racism, antisemitism and intolerance.”
Only two of those arrested on Saturday were from Idaho, according to Kootenai County Jail records.
“We are not a city that wants to discriminate,” Hammond said. “We are not a city who wishes to bring any hurt upon anyone. It’s important because Coeur d’Alene has experienced that before. We’re not going back to the days of the Aryan Nations. We are past that. And we will do everything we can to make sure that we continue to stay past those kinds of problems.”
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