Here’s How Police Are Being Trained To Deal With Incels
Some men in the “incel” (involuntary celibate) community want the state to intervene in their dating lives. These sexually frustrated men believe that society is biased against them, so they should be given a “government-issued girlfriend.” Incels have attracted attention from the authorities—just not in the way they would like.
This week, the California Specialized Training Institute is advertising a training session for police across the state who want to learn more about domestic terrorism. Alongside anarchism, radical environmentalism, white supremacy, and the sovereign citizen movement, the flyer lists “involuntary celibate extremism” as one of the threats. It went viral after independent journalist Ken Klippenstein shared it on social media.
For several years now, U.S. authorities have treated incel-related mass shootings as a serious security risk. The phenomenon of incel counterterrorism is an interesting window into how the U.S. government makes sense of newfangled threats and how far its surveillance reach goes.
The training session this week is hosted by the Orange County Intelligence Assessment Center, one of the many “fusion centers” created by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to share intelligence between local and federal law enforcement. Although the fusion center has not yet responded to a California Public Records Act request for course materials—the law gives it 10 days to do so—other leaked documents hint at what the class might teach.
In 2020, hackers released millions of fusion center documents in an incident known as BlueLeaks. Some of these documents include federal intelligence bulletins and educational materials on the incel menace.
The Colorado Information Analysis Center’s 2019 slideshow on “violent extremism,” like the Orange County class on terrorism, lists incels alongside white supremacists, black separatists, anarchists, sovereign citizens, environmentalists, and anti-abortionists. It defines incel ideology as the belief “that women cannot be trusted and are not entirely human, but robot-like androids who only crave sex with attractive men. They believe they are ugly and no amount of self-improvement will attract women. They want access to women’s bodies without their input.”
As possible ways to deal with incels, the slideshow suggests “intervention” by their “online community,” “authorities,” and “acquaintances.” The next slide cites the case of a Utah man who was sentenced to prison for posting on Facebook that he was “planning on shooting up a public place” and “killing as many girls as I see.”
Law enforcement puts a lot of energy—perhaps more than the public realizes—into tracking down violent online fantasies. In August 2019, the Portland Police Bureau’s Criminal Intelligence Unit put out a bulletin seeking information on a Reddit user who wrote (and then deleted), “People ask ‘are you ok’ – but never ‘Are you planning to commit mass murder at the Black Lives Matter march in downtown Portland, OR on August 18, 2019 ot 19:00 local time with an Ruger-556 AR-15 style rifle and ammunition purchased from Northeast Arms in Salem, OR?'”
The bulletin says that the user is “believed to be 13 years old, going into the 8th grade,” includes his alleged photo, and reports that he has “has posted content consistent with the incel movement.”
In May 2020, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center uploaded a memo from Verizon about a Yahoo Answers user who posted that he felt “like bringing a gun to school” because he is “white and racially bullied on a daily basis” and called an “incel loser.” The memo includes the user’s name, date of birt
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