The African-American sheriff of Milwaukee County has issued a no-nonsense challenge to Missouri's lieutenant governor, who claims President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are obsessed with race: Prove it!
David Clarke, one of Wisconsin's leading law enforcement officers, took strong exception to what Peter Kinder said Monday, when he told
Newsmax TV's Steve Malzberg, "there is more racism in the Justice Department than there is anywhere I see in the St. Louis area."
Story continues below video.
Note: Watch Newsmax TV now on
DIRECTV Ch. 349 and
DISH Ch. 223
Get Newsmax TV on your cable system – Click Here Now
Kinder, Missouri's second in command, went on to accuse "the Holder and Obama left — and their minions … are obsessed with race while the rest of us are moving on beyond it."
But Clarke isn't buying it.
"I don't know what he had to substantiate that when you make those kind of charges, regardless of who it is," Clarke told Malzberg.
"And I'll say that with Eric Holder, President Obama, [New York City Mayor] Bill de Blasio or [the Rev.] Al Sharpton. He better have the accurate data and substantiation to make such a charge."
Clarke and Kinder's verbal swordplay comes a week after the Justice Department released a scathing report about the Ferguson, Missouri, police force, which they said was plagued by racism and anti-minority police tactics.
The Justice Department found incidents of racism in the Ferguson police department and recommended changes — despite the fact that white officer Darren Wilson was cleared of criminal and civil-rights charges in the shooting death of unarmed black man Michael Brown, 18.
The tragedy last August triggered race riots and sparked a nationwide debate about race and law enforcement. Last week, two Ferguson police officers were shot during one protest outside police headquarters.
Clarke has been critical of the intervention of Obama and Holder into the Ferguson crisis, but he highly respects them.
"I'm not suggesting that President Obama or Eric Holder are racist, but they view everything through the prism of race. Everything they look at is through the lens of race, and that's been destructive," Clarke said.
"Look, these gentlemen are very important people. When they talk, people listen. They have an awfully big stage and when they talk they need to choose their words carefully and they know that.
"In not being careful in how they select their words and the phrases they used, they've created a pathway with this anti-cop sentiment we're seeing."
Clarke said that lack of care has been "destructive" to everyone involved in the Ferguson case.
"If law enforcement officers, American police officers, are a defender of the rule of law, [then] without the rule of law, you no longer have a democratic state. You have chaos, anarchy," he said.
"That's the danger in all of this … who else is going to go into these urban centers, these American ghettos and protect law-abiding black people? … It's the American police officer — the white American police officer, I might add."
Kinder told Malzberg on Monday that law enforcement in Missouri has "come an enormous way in 50 years. That's not to say we don't have still more to do."
He also said the Ferguson protest movement was based on a lie — a discredited claim that Brown had his hands up and begged, "Don't shoot!'' before he was shot dead by Wilson.
"It's bad enough the protesters were behaving that way, but we have a right to expect much more from the attorney general … and the president of the United States … Instead, what we got too often from them was incitement of the mob and encouraging disorder in Ferguson and disrupting the peaceable going-about of our daily lives in the greater St. Louis region. It's been enormously destructive and enormously hurtful.
"Ferguson is not a slum area, it is not even a declining area. It is a stable community filled with good people, solid businesses, and it was experiencing something of a renaissance of small businesses in the area where the rioting broke out before the 9th of August."
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.