Kenosha Police Sheriff's Chilling, Racist Comments About Black Teens Resurface
Kenosha police sheriff David Beth's very recent history of racist comments has resurfaced. During a 2018 press conference about a shoplifting incident at a local Tommy Hilfiger store, Beth made absolutely chilling remarks about the young Black people, including teenagers, who committed the petty crime.
"I bet you, if I looked at their criminal records, if I went back and looked at their school transcripts, you'd see that these three males aren't very successful," Beth said in front of news reporters. "If they can't complete high school, if they get in trouble in high school, they have a criminal record. If they do drive by shootings, if they sell or give heroin to other people, if they come and steal thousands of dollars...if we don't think this cost's society and the people of our community and our nation, if we don't think that that costs us billions of dollars, you're wrong, Let's put them in jail. Let's stop them."
He continued, "At least some of these males are going out and getting 10 other women pregnant and having small children. Let's put them away. At some point, we have to stop being politically correct. And I don't care what race they are, I don't care how old they are. If there's a threshold that they cross ... We put them away. We put them away for the rest of their lives so that the rest of us can be better."
“I think at some point society has to get so fed up that they are no longer willing to tolerate people who are not an asset to society," he continued. "I think we have to create a threshold where, once you cross the threshold, Wisconsin, the United States, builds warehouses where we put these people who have been deemed to be no longer an asset, that are really a detriment, like these five people,” Beth said. “I have no issue with these five people completely disappearing. At (this) point these people are no longer an asset to our community and they just need to disappear.”
"We've got to get a handle on these people. And maybe what we've got to do is build warehouses that after this generation is gone, and they've perished in these buildings, we can turn them into something else. Maybe it'd be malls. Maybe Amazon will buy these warehouses later, but at some point we have to get rid of this group of people. We have to lock them up and not let them continue to harass, to scare, to hurt, to steal. We have to get to the point that we no longer will put up with it. We're all afraid of being politically correct. I'm tired of being politically correct. I don't think I'm saying anything different than most people in society aren't thinking, but they're afraid to say it."
Beth went on to say, "You have to wash your hands with these people. We're allowing this group of society to ruin our children and our grandchildren's future. We have got to try our best to save the future of our communities in our state, in our country."
Despite the fact that the press conference was about a group of young people with no serious criminal record, that committed a petty crime during which nobody was injured (a police chase did lead the driver of the getaway car to crash into two cars, though the vehicles only sustained minor scratches and nobody was injured, according to KenoshaNews.com), Sheriff Beth brought up police shootings: "When someone gets shot by a police officer, I understand there's mistakes. I got it. But when, when a person comes out with a gun and a police officer shoots him and there's a riot. We got to take action on it."
The ACLU and many more on social media have called for the resignation of Sheriff David Beth and others in the Kenosha police department:
On Sunday (August 23), Kenosha police officer Rusten Sheskey shot Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man, seven times in the back while his three children watched from the back seat of his car. Miraculously, Blake survived and was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was in serious condition. Blake's father says his son is paralyzed from the waist down as a result of the incident. Blake was reportedly trying to break up a fight between two women when police arrived on the scene and shot him.
In the days since, protests and violence have erupted in Kenosha. The National Guard was called out on Sunday night, and on Tuesday night, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a white man with known connections to white supremacist groups, opened fire on protestors with an AK-15 semiautomatic rifle and killed two people. Rittenhouse was arrested, charged with first degree murder and released on bond.
Watch police sheriff David Beth’s full 2018 comments, below:
