By Dee J. Hall, Wisconsin Watch
A militia member patrolling the streets of Kenosha on Aug. 25 claimed that police on the scene told him they planned to herd demonstrators toward the armed men — and then leave.
In a widely shared video from that evening when two people were killed, Ryan Balch, who said he served a “tactical advisement role” among the armed citizens, is seen telling protesters: “Do you know what the cops told us today? They were like, ‘We’re gonna push them down by you, because you can deal with them, and then we’re going to leave.’”
It is unclear to what extent such a plan was carried out, and Balch insisted in a lengthy Facebook post the next day that the militia members “never agreed to this.” But by 11:45 p.m., two protesters were shot to death and a third was wounded by an Illinois teenager who had answered the call to take up arms and protect the city.
Balch made the same allegation on a video captured minutes before the shootings. There, he told citizen journalist Kristan T. Harris of The Rundown Live, an independent news and talk radio program: “The cops told us they were going to send them (protesters) at us and then run.”
Balch was identified as the militia member making the claim on video by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors and exposes hate groups and other extremists. On Aug. 30, the group published a story about Balch’s immersion in far-right extremism.
Harris, who livestreamed hours of the protest, said from his vantage point, it did appear the police moved the protesters closer to the militia.
“Why would they send them (protesters) this way?” Harris said in an interview with Wisconsin Watch. “Out of 360 degrees, you choose the one degree that is right down the militia’s throat? And I think that’s a question for the police.”
Messages left with the Kenosha Police Department and Mayor John Antaramian’s office asking about the alleged cooperation between police and the militia were not returned.
Balch can be seen in an Aug. 25 video with 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse of Antioch, IL, who allegedly shot to death two protesters, Anthony Huber, 26, of Silver Lake; and Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, of Kenosha. Rittenhouse is also charged with wounding Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, of West Allis. Rittenhouse’s legal team argues that he acted in self defense.
The shooting followed a militia group’s widely disseminated call to arms to protect property “from evil thugs.” A former Kenosha City Council member was among the leaders of that group, the Kenosha Guard.
In his Facebook post, Balch recounted patrolling and rendering first aid with Rittenhouse while occasionally clashing with “agitators” — whom he described as people unaffiliated with Black Lives Matter, militias or other groups mingling in the city. A text sent to Balch Tuesday was not returned, and his Facebook profile was no longer publicly visible Thursday.
Militia, police cooperation documented elsewhere
Cooperation between Kenosha law enforcement and armed citizens, if true, would be the latest example of officers encouraging such mobilizations around the country. Chuck Tanner, research director for the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which scrutinizes racist, anti-Semitic and far-right social movements, said his group has seen several instances of cooperation between law enforcement and armed civilians.
“I don’t think anyone knows the full scope that that’s occurring on, but even the number that we’ve seen is really troubling,” Tanner said. “There’s no way that law enforcement should be anywhere near these types of groups.”
Journalists and researchers have documented similar permissiveness or collaboration between police and militia in places including Albuquerque, Curry County, Oregon and Hood County, Texas. And in Wisconsin, the morning after the shooting fatalities in Kenosha, former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Jr. said he would not condemn people who take up arms in the absence of police action.
“You can’t have government officials and law enforcement executives telling people, ‘Do not take the law into your own hands,’ ” Clarke said on the Mark Belling Show on WISN-AM. “Well, you’re forcing them to!”
On Thursday, two militia members from Hartville, MO — Michael M. Karmo, 40, and Cody E. Smith, 33 — were charged with illegal possession of firearms after a tipster said the men, who were arrested at a Pleasant Prairie hotel, planned to loot in Kenosha and possibly shoot people there.
According to the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, the men, whose criminal records prohibit them from possessing firearms, were in Kenosha for President Donald Trump’s visit Tuesday. Agents seized an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun, two handguns, a silencer, ammunition, body armor, a drone and other materials.
“Karmo told (the tipster) he was going to go to Kenosha with the intention of possibly using the firearms on people,” according to the criminal complaint. “(The tipster) feared that with Karmo’s increase in conspiracy theory talks and other ‘crazy’ political talk, he was not in the right mind set to have a firearm.”
Balch recounts evening
According to Balch’s narrative on Facebook, he joined other armed civilians on Aug. 25 to “protect citizens, their property and their livelihoods.” At some point that evening, a Kenosha police officer approached and “told us that they were going to be pushing protesters towards us because we could deal with them,” he wrote.
Balch wrote that his group never agreed to that plan and “switched to a protect the public stance, including BLM (Black Lives Matter), Antifa and the public at large.”
Balch also said he witnessed a scene, widely circulated on social media, in which an unidentified officer in an armored vehicle labeled “Sheriff” tossed a bottle of water to Rittenhouse before the shooting. In the video, the officer can be heard saying, “Hey, thank you guys again” and “We appreciate you guys, we really do” while other officers ordered nearby protesters to leave.
In the post, Balch described the offer of water as mocking, accusing the police of earlier “gassing” militia members who were running an aid station.
“KPD made a conscious decision to abandon the people of Kenosha to people they felt justified in using machines and weapons of war against. And were going to piss them off and drive them at us and let the chips fall where they may,” Balch wrote.
“It is my belief that we only faced one monster out there that night. The Government,” he added on Facebook. “It sought to agitate, and create a situation where this would happen.”
Former Kenosha Ald. Kevin Mathewson — a leader in the Kenosha Guard militia — told Wisconsin Watch in an email last week that while Policue Chief Daniel Miskinis and Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth publicly rejected help from armed citizens following the deadly shooting, officers on the scene “welcomed us well and thanked us all night.”
In a follow-up message, Mathewson said he left downtown before dark and did not know if law enforcement offered to herd protesters toward militia members.
Lawsuit: Police seeking to ‘silence’ protesters
Protesters also are claiming unequal treatment in a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday on behalf of four people cited by police for violating the county’s curfew. The suit alleges that Kenosha police and sheriff’s deputies arrested more than 150 peaceful protesters for violating the county’s curfew order while ignoring armed militia and vigilantes violating the same curfew.
Law enforcement officials “use this ordinance to silence the voices of those who peacefully demonstrate against police brutality while allowing pro-police activists and militias to roam the streets without fear of arrest,” it charges.
Kenosha County enacted the curfew – which was rescinded on Wednesday – as fires, looting and other property damage erupted after Kenosha Police Officer Rusten Sheskey, who is white, shot Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old black man, in the back seven times on Aug. 23. Blake remains paralyzed from the waist down.
Samuel Hall Jr., an attorney representing Kenosha County, called the protesters’ lawsuit “entirely without merit” in a statement issued Wednesday.
One of the arrested protesters who filed the suit, Kenosha native Adelana Akindes, told WPR that she spent 24 hours in jail without a phone call.
“We did feel like we were being made an example,” she said. “We were off the streets, and it was a way of saying, ‘We don’t want you back on them. We don’t want you back out there.’”
Law enforcement’s handling of Rittenhouse’s arrest also has raised charges of disparate treatment of vigilantes and protesters.
Kenosha law enforcement allowed him to walk away from the scene after shooting three people and return to Illinois, where he was arrested the next day. Video of the shooting aftermath shows witnesses yelling to police that Rittenhouse had shot people and the teenager walking past police vehicles with his hands up.
“For him (Rittenhouse) to even be able to shoot somebody and still walk away from the scene — I mean they talked about finding a knife inside of the car, not even on Jacob Blake’s person,” Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes said at a press conference last week. “And this guy’s carrying around a long gun and kills somebody, (and) just walking freely, was able to get back home to Illinois.”
Balch’s far-right roots – and recent posts
Balch has a social media history of amplifying racist messages, including the words of Adolf Hitler and white supremacist Richard Spencer, according to research by Michael Edison Hayden, senior investigative reporter for the Southern Poverty Law Center. Hayden said Balch also had aligned himself with the boogaloo movement, whose members generally believe American racial and political divisions will fuel another civil war — or they hope for such a conflict.
In his Facebook post the day after the shootings, Balch mentioned a possible civil war — one that he wants no part of.
“I’m seeing people refer to this as the start of some ‘civil war’ in certain communities,” Balch wrote. “I don’t know about that but it’s even clearer to me after the fact that we need to unite under a common cause and stop letting them trick us into killing one another and destroying one another’s lives.”
Balch later sought to distance himself from the boogaloo movement in a separate post following SPLC’s probe of his social media history, calling it “wrong” and “misguided” to have promoted racism and Nazi ideology.
On Wednesday, Balch removed his Facebook cover photo which had featured an igloo — a symbol of the boogaloo movement. The page was no longer visible as of Thursday.
A ‘persistent threat of lethal violence’
In a report released late last month, former FBI special agent Michael German documented the infiltration of white supremacist extremism into the ranks of some U.S. police and sheriff’s departments. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have warned that adherents of the ideology pose a “persistent threat of lethal violence.”
While “only a tiny percentage of law enforcement officials are likely to be active members of white supremacist groups,” German wrote in the Brennan Center for Justice report, the harms of such affiliations “could hardly be overstated.” The center, based at New York University, works to reform and defend justice and democracy.
Hayden, the SPLC reporter, said the prospect of police aligning with armed militia “is obviously very dangerous,” and “is a huge danger to people of color.” He added that it is even more dangerous if police officers, like militia members, have been exposed to far-right racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
“The danger is that this stuff has a way of really scrambling people’s brains and getting them to think about allegiances towards race and not towards their neighbors and not towards the country. And it really, really, really stokes violence,” he said.
NOTE: The home page photo shows Ryan Balch, a member of a Kenosha militia, patrolling the streets there on the night of Aug. 25 shortly before two protesters were fatally shot. (Photo by Kristan T. Harris of The Rundown Live, provided by Wisconsin Watch)
Jim Malewitz and Vanessa Swales of Wisconsin Watch contributed to this story, along with Keenan Chen of First Draft, an international nonprofit concerned with trust and truth in the digital age. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (wisconsinwatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.