Prosecutor praised violent racists
It seems a pattern is emerging here. Back in November Clayton John Hickey, an emergency medical technician at Regional One Hospital, showed up at the polls in Olive Branch wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a Confederate flag, a noose and the words “Mississippi Justice.”
Before he got that job, he was a Memphis police officer.
Now we have former Collierville assistant prosecutor Mike Cross. Turns out he also likes white nationalists.
He resigned Tuesday afternoon – after his embrace of them became public.
In Cross’ social media postings, which were unveiled during the civil trial of fired Memphis Light Gas & Water employee Mike Goza, he called the Unite the Right protesters – one of whom killed a woman, Heather Heyer, with his car in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 – “good guys” and “good God-fearing patriots.”
While it’s unclear in court documents as to whether Cross’ praise came before or after Heyer was murdered on Aug. 12, 2017, what is clear is his embrace of violent, murderous people.
Those would be the same types that he, as a prosecutor, was charged with putting away.
But before Cross became a prosecutor, he, like Hickey, was a Memphis police officer. Goza, who is suing MLGW over its decision to fire him over his social media postings praising the Charlottesville white nationalists and disparaging black people, described Cross as a friend. That’s not hard to believe. But what’s especially disturbing about Cross is that he was in a job that put him in charge of the lives of people in Shelby County and in Memphis – where 52 to 64 percent of the people are African-american.
That also was especially disturbing about Hickey, who was fired by Regional One.
That means that if Cross likes white nationalists, he encountered scores of people who they dislike; people who they feel superior to and who they have no qualms about controlling through violence.
And if more Hickeys and Crosses are out there, in emergency medicine and in law enforcement and criminal justice, that means there’s a problem.
It’s a problem that won’t be easily solved, but it’s one that must be taken seriously – before the mostly-black public here become casualties of extremists who’ve become part of the agencies that are supposed to protect everyone.
It’s not as if no one was warned.
More than a decade ago the FBI said that white supremacists were infiltrating law enforcement and identified it as a concern. But apparently, national and local law enforcement agencies haven’t devised a system for screening out employees or potential employees with white supremacist links.
White supremacists are only caught, it seems, when they slip up.
Hickey, for example, quit his job with MPD in 2010 after being caught with alcohol and an underage girl in his car. His noose shirt, which was posted on social media by an onlooker, was what got him fired by Regional One.
Now that Cross has quit, it remains to be seen whether the cases he handled will be investigated in light of his postings.
So, in this age of right-wing extremism, law enforcement and other public entities have a new challenge. They must work on devising a system to screen out bigoted employees or potential employees.
Maybe that system involves a newfangled psychological test or a more extensive background test. Or maybe it involves checking with the Southern Poverty Law Center to see whose names appear on the membership lists of hate groups – past or present.
In fact, all the energy that the MPD put into spying on political and social justice activists, something that a federal judge last year determined to be in violation of a 1978 consent degree, might be better focused toward figuring out how to ferret out white supremacists who may exist in their ranks.
But something must be done, because right now, according to the SPLC, 36 hate groups are active in Tennessee, while 14 are active in Arkansas and 13 are active in Mississippi.
With that many hate groups around, anyone in law enforcement or in criminal justice, or in any position of authority who gives a shout-out to white supremacists – either on purpose or unwittingly – empowers them.
And if any of them are extolling what happened in Charlottesville, there’s no telling what other tragedies that can lead to.
Tonyaa Weathersbee can be reached at tonyaa.weathersbee@commercial appeal.com or on Twitter at @tonyaajw.