Democracy Dies in Darkness

A police chief got rid of a neo-Nazi. Then came the hard part.

An Illinois police department’s year of reckoning shows the difficulties of fighting far-right extremism in law enforcement

May 8, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Police Chief Ken Scarlette of Springfield, Ill., quickly took action when he learned a neo-Nazi officer was on his force. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
20 min

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Around 6 a.m. one Friday last year, Springfield Police Chief Ken Scarlette was jolted awake by a call from his deputy, whose tone was grim: “We have a problem here.”

The problem was Aaron Paul Nichols, an officer with 18 years’ service who also had served for two decades as a U.S. military reservist. Anonymous activists had released an online report unmasking Nichols as a white supremacist behind tens of thousands of social media posts seething with hate.