Kenosha County sheriff's 2018 comments that some people 'aren't worth saving' resurface after violence
Category: News & Politics
Via: tessylo • 4 years ago • 3 commentsBy: JR Radcliffe, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Kenosha County sheriff's 2018 comments that some people 'aren't worth saving' resurface after violence
Controversial 2018 comments by Kenosha Sheriff David Beth have sparked renewed outrage as the city deals with the aftermath of an officer shooting a Black man in the back on Sunday , and a white teenager who's been charged with shooting three and killing two people during subsequent protests.
Following the arrest of five people for shoplifting close to $5,000 of merchandise from Prime Outlets in Pleasant Prairie and a subsequent high-speed chase that ended in a collision with another vehicle, Beth delivered a strong message about the perpetrators, three Black men and two Black women from Milwaukee.
"I'm to the point where I think society has to come to a threshold where there are some people that aren't worth saving," Beth said. "We need to build warehouses to put these people into it and lock them away for the rest of their lives. These five people could care less about that 16-year-old who just got his driver's license yesterday. They drove through a red light, they stole thousands of dollars worth of clothing, and they don't care.
Beth received backlash for the comments in 2018 and wrote an apology , then met with the Kenosha NAACP president Veronica King, who said it was a good start, but many leaders felt it didn't go far enough. From the Kenosha News :
“Victims are very important to him. And as a public safety person, he should be concerned,” King said. “That still doesn’t give you a reason to deviate and let your emotions take control.”
King said Beth’s comments about “warehousing” individuals for life were inappropriate, saying treatment and rehabilitation should be the goals.
“You don’t warehouse human beings,” she said.
King said she asked Beth if his response would have been the same if the suspects were white.
“He said, ‘Absolutely,’” she said. “He didn’t care what race they were and that race wasn’t a factor in his statement.”
Ald. Anthony Kennedy called it the best "sorry/not sorry" he'd ever heard . “You need to do better and you can do better,” Kennedy told the Kenosha News at the time. “I’m not willing to give him a pass.”
JR Radcliffe can be reached at (262) 361-9141 or jradcliffe@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JRRadcliffe.
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What a racist scumbag.
The racism may not be the cause of the shootings. The Kenosha police have apparently not had a problem with shooting unarmed white people too. The police investigate themselves so ...
This won't stop until it becomes possible to collect civil settlements directly from police retirement funds reducing the present income of retirees and the future retirement income of current police officers.
After a couple of successful lawsuits, the current and retired police will "police' their own ranks.
They need to carry their own personal liability insurance like most other "professionals." Soon no one will be willing to cover them after having to pay out for a cop's stupidity. Or we could take it out of their union's funds. Solving the racism issue will tough, we pretty much will have to fire all the current police and administrators and start over. Racism is so ingrained into their daily lives that they don't see how it affects the public.Oh, and this blue line shit has got to go. It only enforces the Us vs. Them mentality.