Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Jr. has good news and bad news for America.
The good news, according to Clarke, is racism and police brutality ended in this country way back in the 1960s. That should be a relief to everyone who still worries about racial problems that no longer exist.
The bad news is a new civil rights movement that’s adopted the slogan “Black Lives Matter” is in reality an anti-American, terrorist organization. And, get this, according to tweets Clarke sent out last week:
“Before long, Black Lies Matter”—the sheriff’s clever twisting of the slogan—“will join forces with ISIS to bring down our legal, constituted republic. You heard it here first.” And, “I have been right on every call I have made about these subversives. I will be right again.”
The really sad news for Milwaukee County, of course, is that Clarke still draws a salary from taxpayers even though he spends most of his time spreading such racist hatred on Fox News, auditioning for a full-time job in right-wing broadcasting.
If Clarke were white instead of black, not even Fox News would dare put him on the air. An ignorant, white bigot spewing such racist nonsense would be dismissed as, you know, just another ignorant, white bigot.
But Clarke gets to play a Fox News expert on race and law enforcement because he’s one of the few African American elected officials willing to spout ridiculous absurdities that have all the ignorant, white bigots in the Fox audience nodding in agreement.
And Fox really doesn’t care whether what Clarke says has any basis in fact.
One of Clarke’s most astonishing statements came on Bill O’Reilly’s show in June after white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine black worshippers at a prayer meeting in Charleston, S.C.
When O’Reilly asked whether Clarke had any experience with white supremacists or hate crimes based on race or religion in Milwaukee, Clarke rejected the entire notion of hate crimes.
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“No, that’s hyperbole and that’s demagoguery,” Clarke said. He later added to his comment on hate crimes saying, “No … I don’t experience that here in Milwaukee.”
Well, it is true that Clarke wasn’t involved in stopping the horrific white supremacist killing of six people and wounding of four others by a murderous skinhead at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek three summers ago.
But after the incident was ended by Oak Creek police, including Lt. Brian Murphy, who survived being shot 15 times by racist gunman Wade Michael Page, Clarke set himself up as the media spokesman to put himself in the center of all the national publicity.
After the media left, apparently, the heartbreaking tragedy slipped from Clarke’s mind.
Clarke’s national audience doesn’t realize how little the sheriff has to do with law enforcement in Milwaukee County, where every community has its own police department.
Two years ago, Clarke lost another major responsibility when Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele and the County Board removed administration of the House of Correction from Clarke after he’d wiped out job training and educational programs, drug and alcohol treatment and was mistreating prisoners by feeding them the equivalent of dog food.
His department’s dwindling responsibilities now include patrolling parks and freeways, providing security for the Courthouse and holding suspects awaiting trial in the County Jail. Clarke disappears from public view for months on end, except for his hateful rants on Fox.
A Jim Crow-Era Sheriff
Lest you think I’m overstating Clarke’s appeal to hate groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the national organization monitoring activities of extremist hate groups including the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, racist skinheads and anti-government militias, just published a profile of Clarke on its Hatewatch website.
The headline was: “Sheriff David Clarke Plays a Straight-Talking Cop on Cable TV, But His Agenda Springs from Far-Right Extremism.”
The report noted Clarke was named Sheriff of the Year in 2013 by the so-called Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, a radical group promoting the extremist Posse Comitatus doctrine that county sheriffs, assisted by “posses” of armed citizens, are the supreme law enforcement power in the U.S.
In the Jim Crow era, that kind of supreme power over life and death was placed in the hands of openly racist sheriffs who considered African Americans to be less than human.
Clarke is a throwback to those ugly times, using the most vile, racist language to attack African Americans who protest police officers who use deadly force against unarmed blacks.
On Fox, Clarke has referred to black protesters as “garbage,” “filth,” “scum” and “subhuman creeps.” He’s said: “They’re black slime and it needs to be eradicated from American society.”
That sort of vicious hatred toward black citizens was once common among racist sheriffs throughout the South who policed their communities by day and conducted cross burnings and lynchings as Klan members by night.
It’s no longer acceptable in modern law enforcement, whose responsibility is to protect citizens of all races, not eradicate them.
