Clarke: Jesse Jackson’s Chicago March Selfish, ‘Exploitation of a Situation’

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke (D) criticized Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Chicago protests as “exploitation of situation” on Friday’s “Varney & Co” on the Fox Business Network.

Clarke stated that the rally in Chicago headed by Jackson “highlights, I believe, the self-centeredness and the selfishness, and it’s the nature of this group. The people who are going to participate in the tradition of the Magnificent Mile, the retail that goes on in that area, had nothing to do with the Chicago police shooting. Many of those people are from out of town, they’re not even from the state of Illinois, the city of Chicago, and the retail that goes on down there has nothing to do with city government. This is an exploitation of a situation and once again, Jesse Jackson tries to totally dismiss the black-on-black crime, 433 homicides year to date…and he has the gall to stand in judgement of what he calls a police culture, but he didn’t talk about the culture of the black-on-black crime. The black criminals, and all the violence that goes on in the city of Chicago, the fine city of Chicago, even the South Side, with many law-abiding citizens down there, that’s no big deal, but every once in a while, we have an anomaly like we have here ,and, by the way, this officer still retains his presumption of innocence, he has not been convicted of anything. I saw the tape. You know what, anybody who says that someone walking down the street within the lunge area that police officers know about with a knife is not a threat, does not understand the nature of policing, and the reasonable law enforcement officer standard. But the process, which I talk about incessantly, that I believe in our criminal justice process, they’ll figure this out, and I believe that they’ll get it right.”

Clarke added that he would “respect” the rulings of the justice system, “I’m not going to allow anybody in the united states to take these outliers if you will, these situations, and they’re all tragic where a law enforcement officer engages in something that makes us raise our eyebrows or shrug our shoulders, because we haven’t heard from this officer.”

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