The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday called for Kenosha Police Chief Daniel Miskinis and Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth to step down, condemning the law enforcement leaders’ response to protests after the shooting of Jacob Blake.
“Their actions uphold and defend white supremacy, while demonizing people who were murdered for exercising their first amendment rights and speaking out against police violence,” Chris Ott, the executive director of the ACLU of Wisconsin, said in a statement.
Two people were killed in a shooting late Tuesday night amid unrest in the small southern Wisconsin city. Kyle Rittenhouse, a white Illinois 17-year-old, was charged with first-degree intentional homicide after the shooting.
Four nights of protests in Kenosha have followed the caught-on-video police shooting of Blake, a Black 29-year-old man. Rusten Sheskey, a white officer, fired repeatedly at Blake outside a vehicle carrying his children on Sunday. Blake was left paralyzed.
Protests on Wednesday night proved peaceful.
Describing the deadly shooting the previous night, Miskinis underlined in a Wednesday news conference that “everybody involved was out after the curfew.” The ACLU accused Miskinis of blaming the victims.
In a statement, the ACLU also criticized Kenosha County sheriff’s deputies for allowing the shooter to leave after the bloodshed and said Beth “excused” their failure.
In 2018, Beth said after five Black people were arrested in connection with felony shoplifting that “society has to come to a threshold where there are some people that aren’t worth saving. We need to build warehouses to put these people into.” The comment has received fresh attention this week.
The Kenosha Police Department and the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Department didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
