LPD says officer left Oath Keepers around 2014, but membership log raises questions

The Anti-Defamation League identified LPD officer Jacob Bury as a registered lifetime member of the extremist group. LPD says Bury left the group just before ‘extremist’ designation.

The Laramie Police Department said it investigated one of its officers in February when the department was made aware of that officer’s connection to the Oath Keepers, an extremist paramilitary group.

According to an LPD spokesman, the officer was affiliated with the group no later than 2014 — his involvement lapsing shortly before the Oath Keepers became more active and more visible. This contradicts an earlier statement from LPD that the officer left “many years prior” to the group’s extremist turn.

But the Anti-Defamation League and a local police accountability group argue that Oath Keeper membership, even before 2014, is cause for concern.

Further, leaked membership logs appear to show the officer joined the Oath Keepers in the summer of 2016 — two full years after the group was explicitly designated “extremist.”

The officer in question could produce no record of his sign-up date, but he attests — and LPD reiterates — that he joined before the “extremist” designation and was surprised to learn he was still on the membership rolls.

The lack of clarity surrounding the officer’s involvement with the Oath Keepers has renewed a fierce debate in Laramie about police transparency and civilian oversight of law enforcement.

LPD officer named in leaked Oath Keepers membership log

An Oath Keepers membership log was leaked by the whistleblower group Distributed Denial of Secrets and analyzed by the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL identified 81 individuals holding or running for office, 117 individuals currently serving in the military and 373 members of law enforcement.

As the Casper Star-Tribune reported last week, that included three members of law enforcement in Wyoming.

Laramie Police Officer Jacob Bury was one of those three. The leaked membership log lists him as a lifetime member.

The Laramie Police Department said in a statement last week it had learned of the officer’s involvement with the Oath Keepers when the ADL reached out more than seven months ago.

“This incident was investigated as a personnel matter according to our standard internal process,” LPD’s statement reads. “The officer’s membership occurred many years prior to the organization being classified as extremist and the officer was not active in the group. The officer directed the group to immediately cancel and revoke any membership attributed to him/her.”

The Oath Keepers are “anti-government extremists” according to the ADL. They were founded in 2009 by Stewart Rhodes — a man now facing charges of “seditious conspiracy” for his involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot.

The Oath Keepers have gotten a lot of press lately — as Rhodes and others connected to Jan. 6 face the possibility of prison time — but they have been active for years. The Oath Keepers notably put boots on the ground to counter protesters during the 2014 Ferguson Uprising — a movement calling for police reform in the wake of a police shooting. They have been markedly opposed to movements such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa in the years since.

LPD’s internal investigation involved an interview with Bury, during which he told LPD leadership that he was only a member of the Oath Keepers in 2013, or early 2014 at the latest.

Albany County for Proper Policing (ACoPP) is a local organization that advocates for greater police transparency and accountability. The organization said in its own statement last week that LPD was misrepresenting the facts.

The membership log itself suggests that Bury joined the Oath Keepers in 2016 — two full years after LPD said he joined.

“It is unfortunate to see that LPD has chosen to delegitimize this issue by inaccurately stating that Officer Bury joined the Oath Keepers before they were identified as an extremist organization,” ACoPP’s statement reads. “Officer Bury paid to be a lifetime member in August of 2016 — two years AFTER more aggressive tactics were used.”

Responding to this criticism, LPD spokesman Lt. Ryan Thompson said the department was aware of the possible 2016 join date. He writes in an email:

Rachel Grinspan, Director of Law Enforcement and Civil Rights for the ADL, spoke with Chief (Dale) Stalder on Feb. 22, 2022, and said the dates noted in their information were merely dates associated with the data cache ADL received from the open source journalist. Chief Stalder had a conversation with ADL analyst Alex Friedfeld on Feb. 28, 2022, who said the data leak showed a ‘lifetime’ membership and could have joined the Oath Keepers on Aug. 1, 2016, but that it could not be confirmed by data.

Bury asserted that he joined in 2013 or 2014. But the data leak showed a possible join date of 2016.

LPD trusted Bury’s version of events.

“Our investigation showed the officer’s own admission of 2013 or 2014,” Thompson writes in the same email. “The officer was asked to go through their private email account in an attempt to find any receipts, correspondence, etc., although was only able to access their account back to 2016 … There was absolutely no evidence of any criminal activity, nor any biases discovered.”

Thompson would not say whether any disciplinary action had taken place, saying it was a personnel matter.

Membership in a group such as the Oath Keepers violates LPD’s own policies, which prohibit membership in “any organization, association, movement, or group, which has adopted a policy of advocating violence or acts of force to deny others their Constitutional rights, or who seek to alter the form of government by unconstitutional means, or who advocate racial or religious discrimination as a political philosophy or objective.”

Thompson said following the internal investigation into Bury, a reminder about this policy was sent to all officers. He also said anyone claiming Oath Keeper membership today is “not fit to be a police officer anywhere in the country.”

Is 2014 really better than 2016? ADL says no.

LPD’s original statement said Bury’s Oath Keeper membership “occurred many years prior to the organization being classified as extremist.”

By Bury’s own admission, that’s not accurate.

Bury told LPD he joined in 2013 or 2014 — not “many years prior” to the organization’s “extremist” classification, which also occurred in 2014. That year, the ADL labeled the group “extremist” following the Bundy Ranch standoff; 2014 was also the year Oath Keepers sent members to Ferguson.

However they word it, LPD claims Bury left the Oath Keepers before the group’s extremist turn in 2014.

But the ADL itself takes a harder stance, claiming the group has been extreme since its inception.

“Even for those who claimed to have left the organization when it began to employ more aggressive tactics in 2014, it is important to remember that the Oath Keepers have espoused extremism since their founding,” states an ADL report published last month. “And this fact was not enough to deter these individuals from signing up.”

Since those early days, the organization has sought to embed itself in civic institutions.

“The group places a focus on seeking institutional power by specifically targeting current and former law enforcement, military, and emergency services personnel with their messaging and recruitment in the hopes that they will be able to utilize these unique skill sets to advance their cause and that the presence of group members in these institutions will obstruct any order, law, or action that the organization deems unconstitutional,” the ADL report states.

Lt. Thompson said there’s no evidence Bury still holds any views espoused by the Oath Keepers.

“We’re concerned anytime anybody is affiliated with, or alleged to be affiliated with, an extremist organization,” he said. “Regardless if it's Oath Keepers or something else, that’s absolutely cause for concern. That’s why we looked into it. As far as concern for him now – yeah, it will be monitored, but there’s been no complaints, no evidence of any biases or anything like that as far as how he conducts himself.”

Renewed calls for civilian oversight

Around the time the Anti-Defamation League was speaking to the Laramie Police Department, the local debate surrounding civilian oversight was reaching a peak.

In February, the city’s temporary police-community relations board recommended to city council that it further investigate the creation of a civilian oversight board.

A month later, the council rejected that recommendation on the narrowest of margins — and only after private conversations convinced one councilor to call for a reconsideration and flip his vote from “yes” to “no.” Later, some councilors would say they voted against the oversight board for fear of police resignations.

At the time, those opposed to civilian oversight argued frequently that LPD was unfairly blamed for the rampant problems in the Albany County Sheriff’s Office.

“That was our struggle with everything happening with Derek Colling,” Lt. Thompson told Cowboy State Daily last week. “Derek Colling never worked for the Laramie Police Department. They’re going to take it out on us (anyway). It’s not enjoyable and nobody wants that, but it is what it is.”

According to ACoPP, this latest revelation casts doubt on that argument.

“LPD knew about this in February and has been reassuring the community that LPD does not need oversight because they keep a clean house,” the organization’s statement reads. “How should the public view those reassurances now that we know of at least one officer engaged in extremism? Should the public trust LPD’s reassurances when they failed to be transparent about this issue until they were forced to?”

Those opposed to the creation of a civilian oversight board also argue such a board would be illegal under state law. But the legal reality is not that cut and dried. And several community leaders — including ACoPP’s Karlee Provenza and Cheyenne NAACP President Pastor Stephen Latham — argue that police, unique among other civil servants, deserve a greater degree of scrutiny.

“There’s only one other job where people get that kind of power and that’s in the military,” Latham told WyoFile in June. “There’s no other job where people have the legal right to stop you and pull arms on you and even kill you if necessary.”

From the earliest days of the debate, those opposed to a civilian oversight board have argued that calls for such a board constitute an attack on law enforcement, and stem from unfounded distrust of local police agencies.

Thompson said he regrets that the presence of a former Oath Keeper on the police force will hurt community-police relations.

“It’s a very big concern,” he said. “You don’t want a police officer thinking that way at all. That’s not a concern with this particular officer. Nothing in the investigation was anything remotely close to that.”

But for ACoPP, the call for civilian oversight is not about distrust of the local police force. As Provenza told WyoFile in June, it’s about making sure the government “serves the people” — especially when it comes to that government’s armed agents.

This latest revelation about a sworn officer of the LPD having a “lifetime” membership with the Oath Keepers simply underscores the need for civilian oversight, ACoPP argues, even for a department that prides itself on professionalism.

“After being told many times by LPD leadership that their office does not have any need for community oversight … it is clear the public has been falsely reassured that the problems we see in policing elsewhere do not happen here,” the statement reads. “It has now happened here.”