'He failed the community': Rittenhouse slams lack of police in Kenosha and says ...

Kyle Rittenhouse has blamed the city of Kenosha and governor of Wisconsin for the chaos of August 2020, saying there should have been more police and the National Guard. 

Rittenhouse, 18, spoke to Tucker Carlson for an interview broadcast on Monday night.

Asked where the police were, in the chaos and rioting after the shooting of Jacob Blake, Rittenhouse replied: 'I'm not sure really.'

He added: 'They have a hard job, for sure.'

He criticized the leadership of the state and city.

'The National Guard should have been called August 23.

'The city of Kenosha failed the community.

'The governor, Tony Evers, failed the community.'  

Rittenhouse sat down with Carlson days after being cleared on Friday of homicide, attempted homicide and reckless endangerment in the shooting deaths of Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, and the wounding of Gaige Grosskreutz, 27.

Jurors decided the rifle-wielding teen opened fire in self-defense as the trio chased and attacked him during the August 2020 riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin sparked by the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a black male.

His unanimous acquittal prompted accusations from the left that a 'racist' two-tier justice system favors white defendants and gives a green light to heavily-armed vigilantes.

Conservatives, meanwhile, have lauded Rittenhouse for protecting his community against lawlessness and pointed out that not a single person he shot at during the fiery chaos was black. 

'He's 18. He didn't get into this to make a political point. This is his community and they were burning it down,' said Carlson, speaking to DailyMail.com hours before his exclusive interview aired on Monday on Tucker Carlson Tonight.

'I don't think he sees himself as a poster boy for anything. In fact, he emphatically doesn't. And that's part of the tragedy of it, I don't think he ever wanted any of this.'

Carlson had a production crew embedded with Rittenhouse and his legal team throughout the murder trial for an hour-long documentary to be screened next month on subscription service, Fox Nation.

Carlson is adamant that jurors reached the appropriate verdict despite what he slams as a slew of racist smears and groundless links to white supremacy from liberal commentators.

'What's so distressing, is that nobody seems willing to assess Kyle Rittenhouse on his own terms,' Carlson said of the Antioch, Illinois native.

'My view after spending a few hours with him and talking to him about his life is that he was not an especially political kid. You know, he liked Andrew Yang.

'He was a 17-year-old kid from a working class family who always had a job. He was a fry cook, a lifeguard, this is not someone from a privileged background - just the opposite.

'He wasn't in a militia. He had no weird views on race. If anything, he's probably pretty liberal on race.

'He went to Kenosha because a bunch of his relatives lived there, he worked there and he was upset because of what was happening there.

'The police were doing nothing about it. The mayor of Kenosha was doing nothing about it. The governor of Wisconsin allowed it to happen. And so it fell to the 17-year-old kid.

'The kid takes a stand against violence and he's immediately threatened.'

Carlson said he supported Rittenhouse's version of events from the start because he watched video clips of the shootings which would eventually form the bedrock of a successful defense which argued that Rosenbaum, Huber and Grosskreutz were the aggressors who presented a threat to his life.