Officials look to remove constable
It’s over ‘absolute racist’ posts on his Facebook page
Berks County officials are investigating a county constable whose Facebook page contains numerous posts supporting violence against black protesters and other racial messages that have raised public concern.
County officials on Monday started receiving complaints that Pete Dardas, the constable from Bechtelsville, was posting racist messages.
Dardas was first elected as the constable from Bechtelsville in 2009 and reelected to a second six-year term, but is not currently certified by the state as a constable, and Berks has no record of him doing court-related or poll work for the county over the last decade.
But Dardas remains an elected official with his term set to run through 2021, and District Attorney John T. Adams said the county is seeing if it has a way to change that, calling Dardas’ posts “absolutely racist” and “deplorable.”
“He should not be in the position of constable,” Adams said Tuesday. “We’re looking into our options of having him removed.”
The Facebook page of Dardas, who could not be reached for comment, has public posts encouraging a race war, a reference to putting black people “back in chains,” and support for burning down a black history museum and removing a statue of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Many of those posts from the last few weeks mentioned the civil unrest sparked by the death of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police.
Adams said although the posts don’t seem to have broken the law, he called them hateful rhetoric.
“They are in no way views anyone who is in an elected office should have,” he said.
Adams said it’s comforting to know Dardas never actually performed as a constable in Berks, despite his title.
Constables are elected and work independently, and their duties vary by county. In Berks they can include making summary arrests with a warrant from a district judge, serving subpoenas, keeping peace at the polls to delivering legal papers on behalf of lawyers.
Though Dardas had not received any courtordered work in Berks, his comments concerned President Judge Thomas G. Parisi.
“They were clearly inappropriate in any forum,” Parisi said.
For the court to remove Dardas from office would require someone filing a petition, which would ultimately be decided by the Berks judge, Parisi said.
Dardas ran as a Republican in 2009 and received 71 votes, and in 2015 he won as a write-in candidate receiving 34 votes.
He was certified as a constable from 19992001 and from 2014 to 2017, when his insurance ran out, according to the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.
Parisi said Dardas also does not currently have the required firearms certification to perform court-related work.