Bart Alsbrook resigned as interim police chief of an Oklahoma town late last August, after he was revealed as the former leader of a neo-Nazi group. One year later, he has a job at a different police department 15 miles away.
Alsbrook, 50, is the former Texas coordinator of Blood & Honour USA, a racist skinhead group with neo-Nazi ties. He also ran a pair of neo-Nazi video and music companies and a skinhead website glorifying pictures of racist beatdowns, and was charged with the attempted murder of another skinhead—but had his case dropped when the alleged victim refused to testify. Those ties came to light when Alsbrook was named interim police chief of Colbert, Oklahoma last year, leading him to resign under pressure. Now he’s landed another job in a nearby police department. And this town says he’s there to stay.
Alsbrook did not return a request for comment.
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Alsbrook was named Colbert’s interim police chief on August 22, 2017. The appointment was unfortunately timed for him. Just 10 days earlier, white supremacists had held a deadly rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, prompting the hate-tracking group the Southern Poverty Law Center to release a map of known hate groups in America. Colbert’s local TV KXII found one local hate group: a neo-Nazi record label registered to the area.
Calling itself the voice of the skinhead hate group Blood & Honor USA, the site sells openly neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan music, as well as Nazi and Confederate paraphernalia. The company was registered to Alsbrook, KXII found.
What’s more, in 2005, the SPLC reported that Alsbrook had attended a gathering of racist skinhead groups. At the time, he was Blood & Honour USA's Texas coordinator, and ran the skinhead video production company NS88 Videos. The company name is neo-Nazi code, with “NS” often referring to “national socialism” and “88” symbolizing “heil Hitler.”
Web registries also revealed Alsbrook’s Nazi ties dating back to at least 1996, when the Dallas Morning News reported that Alsbrook had registered a gruesome “Skinheads USA” website.
"This page is designed to correspond with other White Nationalists on the Internet and to provide links, addresses and phone numbers of other Pro White groups," the skinhead website read, above pictures of skinheads attacking black and Latino men. "It's directly mainly toward Skinheads and the more 'in your face' crowd.”
Alsbrook also appeared in multiple pictures with hate groups, including a picture from Blood & Honor’s manifesto, and appears to have posed in a balaclava with a semi-automatic rifle and a T-shirt reading “terror machine” in pictures published by the SPLC.
When Alsbrook’s Nazi ties were first revealed last year, the Sherman Herald Democrat watched two mid-2000s skinhead documentaries (“White Terror” and “Skinhead Attitude”) in which Alsbrook openly described his involvement in the violent groups.
“We have a saying that C18 is basically the militant wing of Blood & Honour,” Alsbrook told documentarians of one of his skinhead groups. “The C, of course, stands for combat. The number 18 is the first letter of the alphabet—one being ‘A’ and the eighth letter being ‘H.’ AH, which stands for Adolf Hitler. So when you draw it out, it is Combat Adolf Hitler, which represents a fighting force, combat in the name of national socialism and Adolf Hitler.”
In 1995, Alsbrook was charged with attempted murder, after a fellow skinhead was stabbed 24 times. The case went nowhere after the victim refused to testify. Alsbrook maintained that the victim had falsely identified him. When KXII began digging into his past, Alsbrook blamed the website registries on identity theft, claiming skinheads stole his wallet and started using his name in the 1990s. He did not attempt to explain his appearance in the documentaries. Public records searches suggest he is the only person of that name living in the U.S.
Alsbrook resigned from the Colbert department shortly after his past was made public.
But Alsbrook’s new employer says that’s all water under the bridge. Alsbrook started a new job as a reserve officer in the police department of Achille, Oklahoma, KXII reported this week. The police chief there told KXII that he’d known of Alsbrook’s neo-Nazi past, but that he’d since moved on, and was no longer racist.
Members of hate groups can leave their organizations and become de-radicalized. Some, like Derek Black, whose father founded the oldest hate forum in America, have gone on to pursue anti-racist work. But law enforcement also has a long history of attracting members of hate groups, or people who are sympathetic to hate groups. Participation in a hate group is grounds for firing in some departments, and officers across the country have variously been fired, suspended, or have voluntarily resigned over their hate-group membership in the past month.
Achille’s city government said they’re standing behind Alsbrook.
“We don’t consider something from 20 years ago,” Achille City Clerk Laura Stanley told the Herald Democrat this week of Alsbrook’s hiring.
Alsbrook gave the Herald Democrat a similar comment last year before his resignation. “Left all that racist stuff behind me 15 years ago,” Albrook texted them in 2017. “Been helping people ever since. I have a clean record so I volunteered to be an unpaid police office a few years back.”
A decade earlier, he’d been repping Blood & Honor at the skinhead conference.
