Police Investigate Suspicious Flyers With 'Bias Material' Found At McLean Homes

MCLEAN, VA — The Fairfax County Police Department is investigating several reports of “suspicious flyers portraying bias material” found in McLean Thursday morning.

Police said residents found between 40 and 50 flyers in several neighborhoods in the western part of McLean. The flyers were in sealed plastic bags weighted with bird seed.

The FCPD said the flyers seemed to be placed at houses at random. Police did not give more details on the flyers' content.

Homeowners alerted officers to the sealed plastic bags "containing a propaganda flyer weighted with bird seed on their property," police said.

FFXnow reported Friday that at least one of the flyers appeared to be attempting to recruit residents to the Loyal White Knights, a branch of the Ku Klux Klan that operates in North Carolina and Virginia.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, condemned the distribution of the flyers in McLean.

“This type of white supremacist hate is becoming all too common nationwide and must be challenged by Americans of all faiths and backgrounds,” CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper said in a statement Friday. “Racism, white supremacy and other forms of bigotry must be repudiated whenever and wherever they appear in our society.”

Police said they are working to determine the origin of the flyers and are investigating them as a possible “bias crime or incident.” At this time, the flyers appear to have been randomly distributed, police said.

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In June 2021, about 30 flyers with antisemitic propaganda targeting Fairfax County school board members were found in Fairfax Station. The flyers said that they were distributed by the Loyal White Knights and addressed the board members as “Jew-inspired, communist, queer-loving sex fiends.”

Similar incidents have occurred in other jurisdictions in Northern Virginia. For several years in a row, residents of Loudoun County have complained about KKK and other white supremacist flyers, held down with bird seed, showing up outside their homes around Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January.

The Loudoun County Sheriff's Office has yet to catch the people responsible for the racist flyers in the county.

A bias crime, also known as hate crime, is any unlawful action committed against a person because of race, religious conviction, ethnicity, national origin, disability, and sexual orientation, according to the FCPD.

A bias incident involves behaviors that, though motivated by bias against a victim’s race, religious conviction, ethnicity, national origin, disability, and sexual orientation, are not criminal acts but may be classified as a violation of civil statutes.

Victims or witnesses of a bias crime or incident should contact the FCPD at 911 for an incident as it is happening, or the FCPD's non-emergency number at 703-691-2131. Anyone with information about the flyers in McLean or anyone who may have noticed anything suspicious is asked to call the McLean Police station at 703-556-7750.

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