Senior Kentucky police official instructed recruit to shoot black teens for smoking weed

The former assistant police chief of Prospect, Kentucky once instructed a recruit to shoot black people if he caught them smoking marijuana.

As Louisville's WDRB reported Friday, Todd Shaw, the ex-assistant police chief of the suburban Louisville police department, sent a number of "highly disturbing racist and threatening Facebook messages" to a recruit.

When asked by the recruit what the "right thing to do" would be if he found three teens smoking marijuana (as per an assignment), Shaw wrote back that the recruit should disregard right and wrong.

"F--- the right thing," Shaw wrote, according to newly-unsealed court records. "If black shoot them.”

When the recruit followed up with questions about what to tell the theoretical teens' parents, Shaw doubled down.

"Call their (pa)rents," he wrote. "If mom is hot then f--- her … if dad is hot then handcuff him and make him suck my d---."

"Unless daddy is black," Shaw continued. "Then shoot him."

The former police official resigned from his post late last year amid investigations into his conduct, and has fought to keep the messages, which are part of the public record under Kentucky law, away from the press. This week, however, Jefferson Circuit Court Judge Judith McDonald-Burkman ruled that the messages must be released to the public.