A former interim police chief in Oklahoma is back on the job one year after revelations of his ties to a neo-Nazi group forced him to resign.
Bart Alsbrook, 50, stepped down as interim police chief in Colbert, Okla., last August after he was outed as the former leader of racist skinhead group Blood & Honour USA, according to The Daily Beast. Alsbrook reportedly also ran a pair of video and record labels, as well as a skinhead website promoting racially-charged violence.
Bart Alsbrook is the former coordinator of Blood & Honour USA, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as an international coalition of racist gangs. (Image courtesy of the Herald Democrat)
Moreover, he was once charged with the attempted murder of a fellow skinhead. However, the case was later dropped.
The damning ties came to light after Alsbrook was named Colbert’s interim police chief on Aug. 22, 2017 — less than two weeks after hundreds of white supremacists and Neo-Nazis descended on Charlottesville, Va. for the violent “Unite the Right” rally. The deadly protest prompted advocacy group The Southern Poverty Law Center to release a map of all the known hate groups in the U.S. A Neo-Nazi record label registered to Alsbrook was among them.
According to local station KXII, the label dubbed itself as “the voice” of the skinhead hate group and sold neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan music and Confederate paraphernalia. Alsbrook, who served as Blood & Honour USA’s Texas coordinator at the time, also headed a neo-Nazi production company called NS88 Videos.
Facing pressure, the former skinhead resigned from Colbert PD after his past was made public. However, It wasn’t long before neighboring town Achille, Okla. brought Alsbrook on as a reserve officer in their department, KXII reported.
The former police chief’s racist past didn’t seem to be a big deal to his new employer, considering it was almost 20 years ago. Achille police chief Christopher Watson admitted he was aware of Alsbrook’s neo-Nazi ties prior to hiring him and insisted Alsbrook had moved on from his racist ways.
“He was involved in some kind of group (in the past), and wanted out,” Watson told the station. “And the only way he figured he could get out would be to move far away.”
