Meet the ‘homegrown violent extremism’ researcher behind the crackdown on pro-Palestinian students at USC

Student protestors at the University of Southern California, not a place usually known for its campus activism, have thrown the school into crisis. Administrators cancelled the commencement speech of their Muslim, Pro-Palestinian valedictorian after a pressure campaign from Zionists threatening the speaker. They then called LAPD onto campus to brutally arrest 93 students protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. And now, administrators have abruptly canceled the universities’ 65,000-attendee “main-stage” commencement event, and other commencement speakers have launched a boycott.

The key administrators who made these decisions are facing calls from their own faculty to resign. Among them is Erroll Southers, the university’s “Associate Senior Vice President of Safety and Risk Assurance”, who oversees USC’s campus police and collaboration with LAPD. The L.A. Times notes that not only was Southers involved in the decision to silence Asna Tabassum but that the university has “referred questions about security” to him.

Who is Erroll Southers?

A longtime police official, Erroll Southers is a prominent figure within LA city politics. He is the president of LAPD’s Board of Police Commissioners, the “civilian” oversight body that rubber stamps every LAPD expenditure. LAPD’s Police Commission purports to offer a forum for public conversation and input. However, at a Police Commission Community Meeting at Bishop Alemany High School just after Tabassum’s speech was canceled, Southers and his Police Commission colleagues shut down every public comment about Tabassum as “off-topic” and forcibly ejected three public commenters – all of them Black men – from the meeting.

The purpose of this enforced silence is to bury the deeper connections between Southers and Israeli influence on U.S. policing. Southers’s role in the crackdown on anti-Zionism must be understood within his long career of racism, Islamophobia, and Zionism including, among other things, a paper co-authored by Southers that classifies signs of Muslimness and identification with Palestinians as potential characteristics of “Homegrown Violent Extremism.” His career and work also reveal the deep ties between Zionism, academia, and LAPD’s “counterterrorism” surveillance programs. 

After working for multiple police forces, including the FBI, Southers built an academic career as an “expert” in terrorism and “Israeli counterterrorism strategies”. He has spent decades teaching at the “International Institute of Counter-Terrorism” in the Israeli town of Herzliya. Southers has also served as an Associate Director and Director of CREATE, a Department of Homeland Security research hub hosted by USC. In other words, Southers is a lifelong cop and federal agent, and an academic link between an Israeli counterterrorism research institute and one run by a federal spy agency in Los Angeles.

Demonizing Black and Muslim communities

Southers is an expert at using reformist language to secure more resources and political cover for the police state. His brand of racism is characterized by the liberal platitude of opposing “all forms” of extremism and the use of euphemisms to sanitize racial profiling. Southers routinely speaks about white supremacist militias, and is quick to disavow the notion that there is a single profile for an “extremist”. However, the presence of white supremacists in Southers’ extremism rosters does nothing to undercut the racism of his work; instead, he uses “white supremacy” as an analogy to demonize its own victims. In Southers’ own words: “An American who embraces a Muslim Identity ideology within the United States is a home-grown violent extremist, and so too is an American who embraces an ideology positing racial superiority and advocating violence.”

Southers conducted his research on “radicalization” among the Somali community in Minnesota. And in his PhD thesis-turned-book Homegrown Violent Extremism, completed at USC, Southers assembles a taxonomy of “extremists” including “Black Separatist” and “Muslim Identity” extremists alongside white supremacists.

Southers accuses “Black Separatist” extremists of “racially based hatred, black supremacy and/or black separatist ideologies”, omitting any analysis of power or political context to equate “Black Separatists” with segregationists. Elsewhere, in media appearances, Southers has also branded “Antifa”, an ill-defined catch-all term for decentralized approaches to opposing government repression and police violence, as a form of Homegrown Violent Extremism.

Similarly, Southers classifies “Muslim Identity Extremism” as “a worldview that there is a predatory relationship between “the West” (broadly, the United States and Europe) and the Islamic world (Muslim-majority nations). The perceived motivations for Western aggression include control of natural resources, as well as the destruction of Islam as a religious or political force.” Southers pathologizes criticism of US and Western imperialism as a sign that a Muslim is a potential “Muslim Identity extremist”.

Another article, co-authored by Southers and published by USC CREATE under his directorship, goes even further. This article lists “Radicalization Characteristics” that include:

• “pervasive frustration or anger toward the United States”
• “Strongly identified with Muslims perceived as being victimized (Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans, or Muslim Kashmiris)”
• “Adopted dress, grooming, or conduct increasingly indicative of Muslim identity (paid off debts, observed dietary laws, women donned fuller covering, men let their beard grow)”
• “Converted to Islam as an adult”
• And even, simply “Comes from Muslim immigrant community”

We must ask: are Muslim and Arab students at USC safe with a professor and an administrator who sees their religious and ethnic background and their identification with Palestinians and other oppressed peoples as “radicalization characteristics”? Are Black communities safe with a Police Commissioner who characterizes movements to end police violence as a form of “extremism”?

Racist surveillance programs and profiling

Southers did not just theorize about Muslim and Black radicalization. He actively supported the development of surveillance programs which target Black and Muslim communities. Los Angeles was a pilot city for the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program, in which police cultivated “community partners” to report on suspected extremists. These “community partners” included several Zionist organizations, as well as Muslim organizations with close ties to law enforcement. CVE has been widely discredited for overt Islamophobia and racism. Public records show that Southers sat on the Community Advisory Committee of LA’s CVE program and wrote a letter of support for a federal Department of Homeland Security grant to expand the program.

Communities in Los Angeles organized to block this grant to expand CVE in 2018, but CVE lives on today in the form of LAPD’s Providing Alternatives to Hinder Extremism (PATHE) program, in which LAPD is training teachers, counselors, and faith leaders to spy on youth for signs of radicalization.

Sometimes Southers simply employs euphemisms to advocate for racist policies. In an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post, Southers complains that Americans, compared to Israelis, are too hostile to racial profiling: “the mere mention of the ‘P-word’ (profiling) in the English lexicon, invokes images of shredding the Constitution.” He then extols Israeli airport security, which routinely discriminates against Palestinians, claiming that Israel uses “behavioral cues and responses” to identify threats in a way that is consistent with civil liberties. In another interview, he whitewashes NYPD’s infamous “Stop and Frisk” practice as nothing more than “selective enforcement, which employed in other ways can be successful.” He even brags that he has “engaged in selective enforcement when I was a gang officer in Santa Monica.” Southers’ affection for Israeli profiling practices and his own predilection for “selective enforcement” should be taken into consideration when judging his qualifications for his USC job and Police Commission role.

From academic complicity to academic rebellion

We echo the demands from the students that USC divest from death, whether it’s Israel’s genocide in Gaza or LAPD’s murderous policing in South Central. We also support the calls from faculty for the administrators responsible for endangering and censoring their students should resign. USC must also end its partnership with the Department of Homeland Security and shutter USC CREATE. Finally, we call on academics to expose and organize against colleagues who develop racist theories for the national security police state – to follow the lead of their students and move from academic complicity to academic rebellion.

Southers is the embodiment of the liberal racism that pervades USC, and academia as whole: one that can celebrate “Arab Heritage Month” while locking up nearly one hundred students for protesting a genocide against Arab people in Palestine. This racism nominally opposes white supremacy in Charlottesville but not in City Hall, the Oval Office, or the Knesset. It’s telling that the egregious censorship of a non-Black, non-Palestinian Muslim has finally brought the spotlight on Erroll Southers. For too long, both Zionism and the ordinary anti-Black machinery of policing – the two pillars Southers’  career has been built on – have not been recognized as racist. 

Luckily, the students rising up in what Palestinians are dubbing the “Student Intifada” are helping to change that. And they know, as do we, that the number one indicator that someone is on a pathway to committing violence won’t be found in any of Southers’ research papers on “extremism”: it’s putting on a police badge or an IDF uniform.