Today, Explained - Kenosha

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times by police and the protests escalated all the way to the NBA. Gina Barton, investigative reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, explains. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Kenosha, Wisconsin is about halfway between Milwaukee and Chicago. And for a while, it was a pretty booming industrial town, but now it's considered more of a Chicago suburb. This is Gina Barton. She's been covering Kenosha for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Around five o'clock on Sunday, the police got a call about a domestic incident in Kenosha and they responded and they found some sort of disturbance that involved Jacob Blake and some women.

It's not clear exactly what was happening. Some onlookers have told us that he was actually trying to break up a fight between the women. At some point, he became involved in a scuffle with the police officers who used a taser on him, we found out recently, and it was not effective. So then we've all seen this video of Jacob Blake standing up, walking kind of slowly around the front of his car and opening the door to get in. His three children were inside. He opens the car door with his back to the officers. One of them grabs him by the shirt and shoots him seven times point blank in the back.

He falls down onto the steering wheel and the horn starts blaring and people start screaming. Wow. Why the fuck y'all just shoot him? Why the fuck y'all just shoot that man? The police call for medical assistance, and Jacob Blake is airlifted by helicopter to the hospital, put into surgery. About 24 hours later, the news comes out that he has, in fact, survived and is expected to be paralyzed from the waist down. And within hours, mass gatherings of demonstrators and protesters are starting to take to the streets in Kenosha. By the time the sun goes down on Sunday, there are hundreds of people who have taken to the streets and the unrest escalates to fires being set, windows being broken.

An entire car lot was set on fire that first night. The protests continued on Monday night, and that's when things started getting worse in terms of property destruction after dark. There were several businesses that were burned in two different neighborhoods of Kenosha. The National Guard was called out. So that night, there were 125 troops. And by Tuesday morning, our state officials had realized that that was not enough. So on Tuesday night, there were 250 National Guard troops, as well as a huge police and sheriff's department presence. And equally as many protesters, or maybe not quite as many, but the thing with the protesters was they weren't all in the same place. And I think that is when the situation became difficult to control.

The line of officers marched into the park where the main protests had occurred, drove everyone out of the park relatively easily. But then once they had left the park, it seemed as if law enforcement didn't have a plan of where the people should go next. They kept ordering them to disperse, but then when people didn't, they kind of didn't know what to do. The other issue that we've had at these protests, not only this week, but all summer, is armed civilians, some of them officially calling themselves militias, some of them calling themselves other things, the Boogaloo Boys, the Kenosha Guard, have been coming in to the protests, they police and had asked the police and sheriff's department, hey, why don't you deputize us so we can help you? And the sheriff said his response to that was, oh, hell no. But in any case, the police were not arresting these men with guns on curfew violations. They weren't trying to clear them from the area. And in fact, a lot of people now have seen this video where sheriff's deputies

from Kenosha were giving water to some of these armed militia members and in fact saying, we really appreciate your help. One of these armed citizens who turned out to be a 17-year-old from Illinois named Kyle Rittenhouse, he shot a man in the head and that man falls to the ground and dies. We're not exactly sure what prompted Kyle Rittenhouse to start shooting. What we know is that then Rittenhouse starts running. At some point, he trips and he's on the ground and two other people were trying to disarm him. He fired at both of those people, hitting one of them in the chest and abdomen area and killing him.

And then the other man was shot in the arm. Hey, he just shot them! Hey, dude right here just shot them! Dude right here just shot all of them down there! At one point in this video, you can see him walking with his hands up, and the bystanders are trying to tell the cops, he just shot some people, that's him, he's the guy.

And the police who are coming and the people in armored vehicles don't seem to hear, don't seem to realize. And then the shooter just walks away. Someone injured straight ahead. Someone injured straight ahead. He ends up back home and he's arrested the following day. Authorities announced the arrest of 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse of Antioch, Illinois, in connection with the fatal shooting of two people,

a 26-year-old from Silver Lake and a 36-year-old from Kenosha. I think this is what a lot of people struggle with, right? It's that you watch a video of an unarmed Jacob Blake surrounded by his family members trying to get into his SUV where his kids are. He gets shot seven times in the back. Then you watch this kid walking down the street with a semi-automatic rifle. Everyone's screaming, pointing. He just shot people. He just killed two people. And he just walks by multiple armored police vehicles and cruisers and eventually goes home and goes to sleep. The sheriff in Kenosha did address that very question yesterday. How did they just let this guy walk away? And I think there were two things at play here. One is when you have a lot of

white men walking around with guns, people get used to seeing them and to thinking like, oh, that's just the militia guys, you know, which is kind of scary in itself. Kyle Rittenhouse is a young white man. Jacob Blake was a young black man. The other thing that the sheriff said about this incident is that it was, in fact, a very chaotic scene. And I believe him about that. It was crazy. People were screaming. Armored vehicles are really noisy. Police sirens, yelling. So it is possible that no one realized that Rittenhouse is the one everybody was pointing to. Maybe nobody could actually comprehend what they were trying to say, and it just sounded like panic screams to them. How does this escalate after Kyle Rittenhouse kills two people on Tuesday night?

The shooting of Jacob Blake had received national and international attention on Sunday, Monday. After the shootings on Tuesday night, the story became even bigger and the spotlight was shining even brighter on Kenosha. The Federal Department of Justice announced that they were going to conduct a civil rights investigation into the shooting of Jacob Blake. The State Department of Justice started putting out information about the shooting itself, hours and instead made a statement saying, basketball is not important right now. We're not going to play. We need to urge our lawmakers to do something about this and to hold police accountable. And we should note here that NBA players and coaches have been talking about this all week, right?

LeBron James, Doc Rivers. Just watching the Republican convention and this, they're spewing this fear, right? Like, all you hear Donald Trump and all of them talking about fear. We're the ones getting killed. We're the ones getting shot. We're the ones that were denied to live in certain communities. We've been hung. We've been honed, we've been shot, and all you do is keep hearing a fear.

It's amazing why we keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back. That snowballed into the NBA postponing all of their games on Wednesday. WNBA did the same thing. Right. Some baseball games, some soccer games. I think hockey had like a moment of silence. On Wednesday night, during his speech, Vice President Mike Pence addressed it briefly, saying, Too many heroes have died defending our freedom to see Americans strike each other down. We will have law and order on the streets of this country for every American of every race and creed and color.

There are definitely some people in Kenosha who were hearing Mike Pence's message about preserving law and order. One of those people was Kyle Rittenhouse, who we've seen photos from him that were published by BuzzFeed of him in the front row at a Trump rally. But the timing was poor, considering that one of those people who claimed to be out there promoting law and order killed two people. More with Gina in a minute. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp.

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iGaming Ontario. Gina I imagine a lot of people are hearing about Kenosha, Wisconsin for the first time because LeBron James is talking about it, because Mike Pence is talking about it, because of what happened to Jacob Blake and what Kyle Rittenhouse did. What do people need to know about Kenosha to really understand what happened there this week? I think people should know that Kenosha has a long history of problems between the police and the citizens. But unlike Milwaukee, Baltimore, Minneapolis, some of the other big cities where these sorts of shootings have happened, I don't think race is necessarily the only factor at play in Kenosha. In Milwaukee, for example, white people

tend to have a pretty good relationship with the police and black people don't. In Kenosha, no one has a good relationship with the police. In Wisconsin, we were the first state to pass a law that required outside investigation of police shootings. So the agency where the officer is employed can't do the investigation of a fatal police shooting. And that happened because in 2004, the Kenosha police shot a young man named Michael Bell point blank in the head. Michael Bell was white. Back then, police departments could investigate their own officer-involved shootings. That Kenosha police department over there investigated themselves.

And in two days, the co-workers of the men that killed my son found that the shooting was justified. That's not enough time to do an investigation at all. And of the five shootings that we are aware of since that time, three were white, one was black, and the other we don't know. Those are fatal shootings. And another incident that escalated the focus on police brutality here in Wisconsin was in 2016 when the Milwaukee police shot and killed a man named Seville Smith. Seville Smith was shot and killed by an officer following what police say was a traffic stop and a foot chase. And at that point, we had a lot of violent demonstrations and civil unrest in Milwaukee with buildings being burned

and bricks being thrown, confrontations between police and members of the public. So there haven't been effective reforms of this police department since the early 2000s? As far as I can tell, there have not been effective reforms at the Kenosha Police Department. How did they handle Jacob Blake's shooting? To their credit, they called in the Wisconsin Department of Justice to do the investigation immediately. So I see that as an improvement.

They're trying to be more transparent. They're saying we're going to hand this off to somebody with more expertise than us in investigating these kinds of officer-involved shootings. So I do think that that was a positive thing. The issue that continues to present itself, though, is I think all of these protests have shown that citizens want transparency, right? They want to know what's happening. And if bystanders had not recorded video, we might never know what happened to Jacob Blake. People might believe the police version of events or not believe it the officer involved and confirmed that Jacob Blake had been teased before he was shot and that there was a knife on the floorboard of his car. attention on Kenosha right now? Does the fact that, you know, multiple sports leagues are postponing games and athletes are making statements, does that greater scrutiny mean Kenosha, Wisconsin might take reform a little more seriously? I have hope that this shooting and everything that's happened since could possibly bring about some substantive changes in Kenosha and in the state of Wisconsin.

One issue that we've had here, as in many other places, is the partisan divide. So for a long time, we had Republicans in charge of both chambers of the legislature and in the governor's mansion. And they were not necessarily inclined to institute a lot of police reforms. Now, we have a Democratic governor and we have a group of Republican legislators who are also seeing that change is necessary. So on Wednesday, a set of bills to reform policing and police accountability was unveiled here in Wisconsin. We'll see how far it gets. And unlike so many of these cases that we're used to seeing, including George Floyd, including Breonna Taylor, including Ahmaud Arbery, Jacob Blake might actually be around to advocate for himself and for change?

Jacob Blake is expected to survive, and his family has already come out with some really strong statements about how unhappy he would be with all the violence that's occurring. And his mother made some really strong statements the other day about how if people will just focus on each other's humanity, things will change. We are the United States. Have we been united? Do you understand what's going to happen when we fall? Because a house that is against each other cannot stand. Gina Barton is an investigative reporter covering criminal justice at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She hosts a podcast, too. It's called Unsolved.

I'm Sean Ramos for them. This is Today Explained.