Last Sunday, the Green Bay Packers played the Dallas Cowboys in a playoff football game.
Also last Sunday, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke was flying from Dallas to Milwaukee, apparently wearing clothing with the Dallas Cowboys logo. A Milwaukee man, Dan Black, saw the sheriff and asked “Are you Sheriff Clarke?” (apparently Mr. Clarke was missing his trademark cowboy hat at the time) and when the question was answered in the affirmative, Mr. Black shook his head and walked away. The sheriff asked him “you have a problem?” Mr. Black again shook his head and continued walking.
For this heinous act against Sturmführer Clarke, when the flight landed Mr. Black was confronted at the Milwaukee airport by six deputy sheriffs and two K-9s!
Not content with merely abusing his power in this way, Clarke then took to the official Milwaukee County Sheriff’s office facebook page and wrote
Great! the Sheriff has announced he now has the right to “knock you out” if you don’t approve of the sports team he likes.
But wait folks, we’re not done yet! Yesterday, an update to the story appeared, again on the official facebook page of the department .
Someone in the department found a picture of Mr. Black and added the text “Cheer up snowflake… If Sheriff Clarke were to really harass you, you wouldn’t be around to whine about it.”
That, my friends, appears to be a death threat. Attached to the photo of the guy who shook his head at the sheriff for wearing Dallas Cowboys gear. The guy who was confronted by armed deputies and attack dogs when he got home. The guy who the sheriff threatened to knock out next time he sees him.
I am willing to bet that there was more to it than the guy just shaking his head.
What was the guy’s problem in the first place? The fact that the Sheriff was rooting for the other team? If that’s all there is, why did Black feel it necessary to confront someone rooting for the other side.
If really all that happened was Black shook his head at the sheriff for wearing the wrong costume, then Black was a dick and Clarke abused his power. But again, I’m willing to bet that there’s more, since the linked story was gibberish (the OP’s version was much better written)
On a 1 to 10 scale of outrage (10 being genocide, 1 being bad service at a McDonalds), I’d give this about a .05 until there’s some actual coherent info.
The photo on the Milwaukee County Sherriff’s office facebook page is pretty damning. Even if one does not take the “shaking his head” story at face value, I’m at a loss to imagine what Mr. Black could have done to warrant that, though I’m sure Bricker will be happy to explain why it’s perfectly acceptable for a sherriff’s dept to put up such a post.
It could easily be just for the Cowboys paraphernalia. Clarke is an elected official in Wisconsin and he’s wearing Cowboys stuff the day the Packers are facing them in the playoffs. Is a headshake that hard to imagine from a Packers fan?
I don’t think that’s what the article says. They quote Clarke claiming there was some indicia of possible assault, but only quote Black for the proposition that the head shake was all that happened.
He was asked for comment about the situation and responded, not to Fox, but with a Facebook screed.
But hey, I like the idea of preemptively knocking out goofs. Can I start with Falcons fans this weekend, or should I only threaten constituents?
On an unrelated note, of course an asshole like that would be a Cowboys fan.
I agree that the we have only Black’s side of the story re: the head-shaking. However, the rest of Clarke’s action should be viewed through the lens of his statement of his “right to pre-empt a possible assault”. Clearly whatever Black did was not to the level of actual assault.
The head-shaking could have been the Packer-Cowboy rivalry, or it could be that there have been multiple calls for Clarke to resign due to spending the majority of the year palling around with Trump and appearing on talk shows instead of, you know, doing his job.
I went to look up this story and oddly enough what popped up first was a story about Clarke getting berated by a drunk guy during a flight last September for being a Trump supporter. So maybe that made him a little hair triggered this time. Or maybe Clarke wasn’t so blameless the last time.
It depends on what happened. If Black elided from his account important facts that change the meaning of the confrontation on the plane, I suppose the sheriff’s office may have thought that using social media to send a response was tit-for-tat.
You may believe that the citizen is free to trash talk on social media but the sheriff is not. I’m not sure there’s any legal relevance to that view.
I haven’t seen any evidence that Black is trash talking on social media. And I’d expect that if he did in fact elide important facts from his account, that the Sherriff’s office would respond with a statement, not threatening facebook posts.
Also, I find your opinion that we cannot hold elected law enforcement officials to a slightly higher standard than everyday citizens to be saddening, if unsurprising.
You can invent any standard you please, and apply it to anyone you please.
But we, as a society, enact laws to create standards. It’s those laws I am referring to. You seem to want to announce your personal standards as though they were some principles of universal agreement.