“The flag has no association with racism, hatred, bigotry,” he said. Now, Jacob is the president of Thin Blue Line USA, one of the largest online retailers devoted exclusively to sales of pro-police flags, T-shirts, neckwear and jewelry. While in high school in West Bloomfield, Michigan, he had attended a memorial service for a police officer who had been killed on the job.

He had seen the image of the flag on patches and stickers, he told The Marshall Project, but not an actual flag. In 2014, a white college student named Andrew Jacob was watching protests of police killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice. Now, as police again become the focal point of a fight for racial equality in the U.S., the flag has returned to both mirror and amplify divisions.īut how did this flag come to be so pervasive? And what does it really stand for? County officials in Oregon recently paid $100,000 to a black employee of a law enforcement agency there, after she said she was harassed by coworkers for complaining about her colleagues displaying the flag at work. But it has also been flown by white supremacists, appearing next to Confederate flags at the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Those who fly the flag have said it stands for solidarity and professional pride within a dangerous, difficult profession and a solemn tribute to fallen police officers. Officers have worn versions of the flag on face masks while clashing with protesters in Baltimore and in Washington, D.C. When deputies hoisted the flag outside government buildings in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Orange, California, the sheriffs in both communities were sharply criticized. Recently, the flag was flown from the back of a car alongside protests in South Dakota, and burned outside the Utah State Capitol. As protests over policing continue to convulse cities throughout the U.S., one symbol keeps showing up: a black-and-white American flag with one blue stripe.

What does the black flag represent