Former Supervisor of D.C. Metro PD Intelligence Indicted for Tipping off Leader of Proud Boys About Impending Arrest
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of the Columbia announced on May 19, 2023, that a former Metropolitan PD officer was indicted for allegedly tipping off a leader of the Proud Boys about his impending arrest. NBC News reported that the former officer, Shane Lamond, 47, the former supervisor of the department’s intelligence branch, was handed three counts of making false statements and one count of obstruction of justice. He was alleged to have had numerous contacts with Enrique Tarrio, the one-time leader of the far-right militia group called the Proud Boys, just days before the assault on the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021.
Tarrio is now a convicted criminal, having been found guilty of seditious conspiracy for his role in the attack on the Capitol. But he was not present for the storming of the seat of Congress. He had already been arrested and was barred from entering the city on Jan. 5, 2021. Why? He had participated in the burning of a Black Lives Matter flag on Dec. 12, 2022, while at a D.C. event supporting then-president Donald J. Trump. Yet it was in the interim, between the issuance of the arrest warrant and the arrest itself, that Lamond was accused of playing a criminal role. Lamond was later accused of tipping Tarrio off about the warrant. The grand jury claimed that on a flight to the D.C. region from Miami on Jan. 4, 2021, Tarrio communicated with an individual, telling them information about his pending arrest that he allegedly received from Lamond. Tarrio was subsequently arrested when he arrived in D.C.
Prosecutors alleged that Tarrio and Lamond had been in communication from July 2019 to Jan. 2021. They’d messaged hundreds of times during that period, and Lamond was alleged to have expressed strong support for Tarrio and his far-right beliefs. They communicated via multiple services, including an encrypted one called Telegram, which allowed them to destroy more than 100 of their messages. Lamond told Tarrio about the pending arrest and claimed to Tarrio that he’d tried to convince his fellow police officers that the Proud Boys weren’t racist. Two days after the Jan. 6 attack, he told Tarrio that he was hopeful none of the Proud Boys were going to get arrested, saying, “I support you all and don’t want to see your reputation dragged through the mud.”
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