A national police training association is facing backlash after distributing a research-style paper to its members that referred to Black Lives Matter as a "terrorist group," and depicted protesters as wanting to "overthrow the U.S. government,” according to the Associated Press. 

A member of the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association gave the troubling document to the news outlet, noting that the 176-page paper was full of lies and misleading statements about Black people who protest. 

The association, which goes by ILEETA, said it is "committed to the reduction of law enforcement risk through the enhancement of training for criminal justice practitioners." It holds an annual conference that the Associated Press said was the largest gathering of law enforcement trainers in the world, and also distributes guides as well as research papers among its thousands of members.

But in October, members were sent an email with a paper called “Understanding Antifa and Urban Guerrilla Warfare.” The Associated Press gave the paper to experts for review, including Sherice Nelson, assistant professor of political science at Southern University and A&M College, and Yale racial bias professor Phillip Atiba Goff.

“This document is below the belt because of how much misinformation there is, how many conspiracy theories there are, how much violence it promotes and how many reasons it gives to justify dehumanizing people,” Nelson said. 

Goff told the news outlet that he and other police executives were horrified by the claims made in the paper and believe it should not have been sent out. 

Both Nelson and Goff said the paper was dangerous, because it falsely conflated Black Lives Matter protesters and others with terrorist groups, while also making unfounded claims that the movements are funded by China and Russia. 

The paper states that there are Black Lives Matter members working as “trained, dedicated snipers” in certain cities, and bashes the FBI as well as the media for focusing on white supremacist terrorism. 

According to the ILEETA paper, protests over police shootings are simply cover for “hard-core, terrorist trained troops.”

“Extreme acts of violence are expected and called for,” the paper asserted.

“This is disturbing to read but not at all surprising to me. This is the type of thinking that is sadly pretty prominent within police culture,” said Scott Roberts, Color of Change senior director of criminal justice campaigns.

The startlingly inaccurate document is part of a much larger wave of what experts are calling "police nationalism." Dartmouth Professor Jeff Sharlet wrote a lengthy Twitter thread in October about the way police advocates have formed an entire identity and movement around opposing Black Lives Matter through social media-fueled conspiracy theories and outright racism. 

"Growing dominance of 'Blue Lives Matter' flag w/in Trumpism suggests a formation close to but not identical w/ both white nationalism & police state: I'll call it 'police nationalism.' Identity founded on fetishization of an explicitly brutal & implicitly racist idea of policing. Police nationalists are white supremacists (including occasional non-white ones; it's an infectious disease) who don't want to think of themselves as such. Police nationalism allows them to fetishize force as 'law' and relieves them of having to think about what law is," he wrote. 

"I've been reporting on the Right for 20 years. I believe self-definition matters. Police nationalists now call their flag 'Back the Blue'–a statement they experience not as non-partisan but as transcending partisanship. It's an assertion of ultimate authority. But worse, implicit in the slogan 'Back the Blue' when used by police nationalists is the fantasy of a coming conflict (which aligns neatly with QAnon's idea of a 'storm') in which 'backing the Blue' will mean choosing a side in a civil war not so much feared as anticipated," Sharlet added. 

The Associated Press also highlighted that the document includes false claims that Black Lives Matter had planned attacks before the 2020 elections in November.

“It’s stunning. It’s distressing in many ways. It’s untethered to reality. I worry that it leads to people dying unnecessarily,” Goff said. 

The document shared by ILEETA with its many members went on to include unverified claims that U.S. military officials who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have expressed concern about Black Lives Matter, because they've "witnessed these types of terrorist groups organizing, creating insurgencies and the horrible consequences of it.”

When asked by the Associated Press about the research, ILEETA executive director Harvey Hedden not only defended the falsehoods in the paper, but he also aired his own criticisms of people protesting over police shootings. 

“Just like law enforcement, I am afraid BLM has earned some of these criticisms and others might be over-generalizations,” Hedden said, before adding that there were always "differences of opinion on training issues."

The term "Black Lives Matter" gained popularity in 2013 during the protests over the killing of Trayvon Martin. Since then, the term has come to represent a variety of things including its use as a general term for the widespread movement against police violence, as well as multiple non-profit organizations. 

There is a long history of law enforcement in the United States stoking backlash toward movements against racism and police violence by calling it "terrorism" or implying it is supported by foreign actors. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Tim Weiner told NPR that former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover considered Martin Luther King Jr. an "enemy of the state." 

"Hoover saw the civil rights movement from the 1950s onward and the anti-war movement from the 1960s onward, as presenting the greatest threats to the stability of the American government since the Civil War. These people were enemies of the state, and in particular Martin Luther King [Jr.] was an enemy of the state. And Hoover aimed to watch over them. If they twitched in the wrong direction, the hammer would come down," Weiner said. 

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