US fire chief caught on camera ‘refusing to help crash victims because they’re black’

Shocking footage has emerged in the US that appears to show a Kentucky fire chief refusing to provide assistance to a family involved in a road traffic accident because they are black.

The video, captured on the body camera of a police officer for the Bullitt County Sheriff’s department, purports to show Southeast Bullitt Fire Chief Julius Hatfield responding to an accident involving a white man in a pickup truck and a black family of four.

According to WDRB News, which obtained the video, the initial stages show Hatfield offering to help change the tyre on Loren Dicken’s pickup to “save [him] a bill”.

Hatfield is then showed Dicken to a waiting ambulance and, according to WDRB News, he saw that the white crash victim was picked up from hospital by firefighters and taken to the local station, where his car was waiting for him.

By contrast, the video shows Hatfield standing by and saying nothing as Chege Mwangi, the black driver involved in the crash, tells police he has no roadside assistance to help with his damaged vehicle.

A police officer can later be heard saying on the radio that he has “a family of four from Cincinnati, I got to do something with”, to which a voice, reported by WDRB News to be that of Hatfield, responds: “We ain’t taking no n*****s here.”

Mr Mwangi told WDRB News that he noticed at the time he wasn’t receiving the same treatment from the fire department as the other crash victim, but that he thought little of it since neither he nor his wife nor his two children were injured.

WDRB News said the sheriff’s department had confirmed that the voice heard in the video was Hatfield’s. It also confirmed that, while it is bleeped out in the footage, the term he used was a racist slur.

Approached for comment by the local station, Hatfield said he did not remember the incident itself but that “sometimes there is a slip of the tongue”.