welcome back, everybody. we are following breaking news out of fort worth, texas. officials in the town of colleyville have confirmed the agency is conducting s.w.a.t. operations outside of a synagogue, currently a hostage situation, it seems. the star-telegram reporting that authorities are negotiating with a man who has taken people hostage. colleyville police sergeant darren nelson saying negotiators have, in fact, made contact with somebody inside of the synagogue, who they believe, in fact, is a suspect. the man could be heard having a one-sided conversation in what appeared to be a phone call during a live stream of the reform jewish synagogue s shabbat service. this was being live streamed on facebook while this was going down and we have been following this thing for the last several minutes or so. this was a congregation established in 1999, again, in the town of colleyville, which
staging area at a nearby middle school. but they are keeping everybody incredibly far away, even when you try to get near the crossroads here where the synagogue is across the street, police have been ushering us away to the back end of this parking lot. how far are you away from the synagogue then? are you on the other end of the parking lot at this point? yeah. yeah. we re a couple blocks away at this point. so it s been a lot easier to look at aerial footage and live streams from up ahead from some local television outlets but yeah, they re keeping us pretty far away. do you know if this synagogue has any security in place in general on a normal day? we do not know, but we have definitely not heard there was any form of security inside with whoever may be indoors at the moment. and you talked about possibly getting an update from local police. are they holding a press conference or just giving a kind of press update, press avail in a little bit? yeah, just a press update
can do, as we just heard from the leadership in the jewish community, is that we all continue to pray and hope for the very best in this and that the outcome, no one is hurt. but certainly will have some advantage if they see if they re able to see inside of that synagogue. it will give them some ideas of what is taking place and more importantly, how they need to proceed in an event such as this too. we have seen uptick in domestic terrorism in this country and i m not saying that this is terrorism to any respect. we have no confirmation of that. but nonetheless, we have seen an uptick in that here in this country. there has been violence at religious institutions like synagogues as we have seen as well. is there a different approach when it comes to law enforcement and dealing with a situation specifically at a religious institution like a synagogue?
is a dallas-fort worth suburb. i want to bring in american university professor and author of hate in the homeland: the new global far right. cynthia, welcome. i want to be transparent about the fact that we were going have you on to talk about something different, of course, what was happening and going on in washington, d.c., in the investigation into january 6th. you joined us last week as well to talk about the very same thing, but instead, we are now following this breaking news situation out of texas, so, we appreciate you switching gears for us, but of course this is your expertise, situations like this one. the fact is, we don t know a lot about what is happening there. we know it s a synagogue. we know this is a suburb of fort worth. we know there are congregants inside this synagogue. we currently know there is a negotiation happening with the hostage taker, between the hostage taker and police. on the scene. we have seen an uptick, as i was talking about with cedric a
situation. we don t know a lot here, so we should be completely frank with our audience as this thing is developing. it just popped up as i cam but this is a fairly precarious situation, considering the fact that this is a religious institution. this is a synagogue, and we have a possible hostage situation in which police are currently negotiating with those hostages with congregants inside. how does something like this go down? how do they work through this, law enforcement? well, as far as law enforcement is concerned, it s going to be one of these situations where, yes, there s going to be a hostage negotiator, maybe a number of negotiators with different areas of expertise who very much are going to contribute to this process. the fact that we don t know very much at this time is certainly very anxiety feeling for people in the community and those who have families and friends that are inside that synagogue but i