Kentucky Fire Chief: "We Ain't Taking No Niggers Here"
[There was a video here]
A Bullitt County, Ken. sheriff's deputy was responding to a car accident this past September when his body camera recorded county fire chief Julius Hatfield making a racist remark.
In the body camera footage obtained by WDRB, the officer can be heard saying, "Well, I've got a family of four from Cincinnati, I got to do something with." You can then hear Hatfield respond, "We ain't taking no niggers here."
At the scene of the two-car accident on Interstate 65, the officer's body cam depicts Hatfield offering to help Loren Dicken, whose truck got a flat tire in the accident. "You got a jack, ain't you?" Hatfield asks. "If you show me where them things is at, I'll get my guys to start changing the tire for you." According to WDRB, firefighters picked Dicken up from the hospital and had his car ready and waiting for him at the firehouse.
Dicken is white and the other family involved in the crash—Chege Mwangi, his wife, and their two children—are black, and claim they were never offered the same help from firefighters. He told WDRB that he "didn't think anything of it" because his family wasn't injured in the crash and their car "didn't need assistance."
Though it would appear that Hatfield's racist remark was not part of an isolated incident.
When Asian-American WDRB reporter Valerie Chinn inquired at a public meeting about alleged financial mismanagement and empty firehouses, Hatfield implied she didn't understand English:
"Why are there so many firehouses that are empty?" WDRB's Valerie Chinn asked Hatfield at the meeting.
"Do you understand English darling?" Hatfield replied. "Do you understand English?"
Hatfield tried to have Chinn and her photographer removed from the public meeting.
"Turn that camera off," Hatfield ordered. "I've asked you that in a nice way. Buddy, call the cops and get them here."
"I asked you once tonight if you understand English," he added. "I'm speaking English."
Hatfield apparently later apologized to Chinn. He also told her that he "doesn't remember" the accident involving Mwangi and his family and that "sometimes there is a slip of the tongue."
