In June, Buzzfeed published the findings of the Plain View Project, a systematic investigation into white supremacist sympathies among police officers nationwide. The project searched the Facebook pages of officers in a dozen cities, including Phoenix, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Dallas. It turned up an extraordinary—if not exactly startling—amount of posts with violently racist imagery, language, and memes. In Philadelphia, 327 officers—of 1,073 who could be identified on Facebook—had posted white supremacist content, more than a third of whom had one or more federal civil rights lawsuits filed against them. At least 64 of the officers were in leadership roles. Almost all of those identified have remained on the force since the investigation.

I’ve thought of these numbers in recent days, as liberals and leftists have demanded more rigorous investigation and severe prosecution of white supremacist terrorism. In the wake of the massacre in El Paso, allegedly committed by a white man in revenge for what he called a “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” countless op-eds and tweets implored federal and local law enforcement to treat such terrorism with the same severity it has historically treated the threat of Muslim extremists. Many on the left thus applauded when the FBI announced domestic terrorism investigations into both the El Paso and Gilroy shootings.

These demands were understandable. Amid such tragedy, there is always a desire for cathartic action, for a reparatory response commensurate with the degree of the injury. Even people who typically mistrust the violent deputies of state power fantasize that the state might, for once, deploy them for the purpose of righting a catastrophic wrong. Moreover, America is a philosophically retributivist society. The worst deeds must be met with the worst punishments, and the worst word we have for an act of violence—the deed for which the worst punishments are reserved—is “terrorism.”

But there is a contradiction at the heart of this call for more counterterrorism. If you believe, as I do, that America under-polices white racist violence for endemic reasons—namely the association of whiteness and innocence in the American imagination, the white supremacist sympathies of U.S. law enforcement, and the white supremacist foundations of the republic itself—it is both incoherent and wrong-headed to advocate further empowering the security state to combat white terrorism.

American policing is a project in many ways synonymous with a project of racial control. Demanding that same apparatus abandon its raison d’être in favor of combatting its own authorizing ideologies is nonsensical. In short, white supremacist police cannot be expected to police white supremacy. But more importantly, there has never been an expansion of the investigatory or punitive power of the American security state which has redounded to the benefit of racial and religious minorities. Quite the opposite. The more powerful law enforcement becomes, the easier it is, as a legal and statutory matter, for investigators to peer into the lives of marginalized people, the more severe the punishments meted for their perceived crimes, and the more abuses they will suffer at the hands of law enforcement. There is no reason to believe that the expansion of the powers of the FBI to investigate and charge domestic terror cases would be used only or primarily to target white terrorists.

