Photo Credit: Erin Bloodgood
This is not the race Earnell Lucas was anticipating when he entered the contest for Milwaukee County sheriff last spring. A 25-year veteran of the Milwaukee Police Department, Lucas had expected to challenge the county’s contentious former sheriff, David Clarke, a prominent anti-Black Lives Matter crusader, Fox News regular and the face of the problems at the county jail, where four inmates died in a span of just six months and pregnant women had given birth in shackles. Clarke, however, abruptly resigned last August.
Lucas now faces an opponent with a much lower profile: acting Sheriff Richard Schmidt, who had been the office’s second in command under Clarke. A self-described fiscal conservative, Schmidt is also an evangelist minister who has recorded more than 100 sermons for sermonaudio.com, a website that calls itself “the largest and most trusted library of audio sermons from conservative churches and ministries worldwide.” A third candidate, Deputy Robert Ostrowski, is also on the ballot for the Tuesday, Aug. 14, primary. With no Republican on the Tuesday, Nov. 6, general election ballot, the winner of the primary will be a near lock for the four-year term.
Even with Clarke out of the picture, Lucas argues that the stakes in the race are still high. He has questioned Schmidt’s ability to reform the sheriff’s office, especially given Schmidt’s role overseeing the jail. “I don’t want Milwaukee County to be misled,” Lucas said. “I am the true Democrat in the race who represents the progressive values of the Democratic Party and Milwaukee County.”
Lucas joined the Milwaukee Police Department after graduating from Rufus King High School in 1976. He earned the department’s Heroism Award in 1982 after surviving a gunshot to the face when responding to a call on New Year’s Day. “My head swelled to the size of a pumpkin,” Lucas recalls. “I remember seeing my father walk into the hospital room—seeing a grown man cry who’s looking at his son with a head engorged by bullet powder.” To this day, Lucas still has shotgun pellets embedded above his right temple.
After six months of injury leave, Lucas returned to the force. “It was either stay out on disability or return to duty, and for me, once I was able to overcome my injuries, it wasn’t a difficult choice,” he said. “I wanted to get back out there. My mission was to serve and protect this community; social justice. That was what started me on my way to become a police officer, and so that was what led me back.” Lucas served the force for another 20 years before retiring as a captain in 2002 to take a job as supervisor of security for Major League Baseball, working under then-Commissioner Bud Selig.
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Ahead of the August primary election, Lucas spoke with the Shepherd Express about the state of the race and his plan for reforming the sheriff’s office.
Why are you running for sheriff?
I’m a product of this community. I was born in the Hillside housing project and was a young man who grew up on the West Side of Milwaukee up until the disturbances of 1967; then my family moved into what is now known as the Harambe neighborhood. I’m running because, after I left the police department and enjoyed a wonderful career in baseball, I was seeing and hearing reports of the mismanagement of the jail and the lack of leadership in the sheriff’s department, the loss of resources, the public discourse between the sheriff and many of the people he was supposed to be partnering with but who he was constantly fighting with, and overall the lack of morale and the dwindling level of service being provided by the sheriff’s office.
So, because of my passion and love for Milwaukee and Milwaukee County, I wanted to do good for this community, and I decided I would leave a wonderful opportunity that I enjoyed in Major League Baseball to run for sheriff. I had the courage to join the race a year ago in March, when Sheriff Clarke was still in office. I stepped up to say that Milwaukee County deserves change. It deserves leadership. It’s time to set a new direction for the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office, and I want to be that change.
Obviously when you joined the race it looked very different than it does today. How does David Clarke stepping down change the race?
It took a lot of the focus away from the race. Certainly, he drew a lot of attention to himself and not to the organization, so really when he stepped down, he took a lot of the spotlight with him—which is a good thing. Quite frankly, I think a lot of the job should be done in anonymity. If we’re doing the job well, people shouldn’t be noticing us doing our jobs. We certainly want to be visible in our community, but we don’t want to be the headlines in the newspaper.
So, it changed the dynamic. A lot of people withdrew from the race. You had at one point 10 candidates running for governor and a highly contested senate race here in the state, plus a race that was white hot for a while when the seat held by Paul Ryan was contested, and that all took a lot of focus off the sheriff’s race and placed it elsewhere. So, here we are closing in on the election, and a lot of voters still aren’t dialed in, but I’m confident we can take our message to the voters that we need a fresh new start; we need to restore honor and trust in the sheriff’s office; we need to address the problems in our jail with the staffing issues; and we need to address the problems with our budget and, overall, just to cooperate better with the 19 municipalities in Milwaukee.
I think a lot of casual observers see that Clarke is gone and that the sheriff’s office is mostly out of the headlines now, so they assume that things must have improved there. Is that the case?
It’s not, and it’s unfortunate that that’s the perception. Accountability is about accepting responsibility when things go right, but it’s also about stepping up and accepting responsibility when things go wrong. The acting sheriff, in his capacity as the leader of the jail from 2006-2010, and as the number two in command of the sheriff’s department from 2010 to 2017, when former Sheriff Clarke left, he bears a responsibility for many of the things that transpired in the sheriff’s office.
I don’t know how anybody can be number two in any organization and not responsible for either making decisions, making recommendations or implementing those decisions. So, it’s a bit disingenuous on his part to say that he stepped up on Sept. 1 and began this transformation. You bear the responsibility of everything that happened: the seven deaths over an 18-month period, the $7 million deficit in the budget, the department’s staffing going from, at one time, 800 members to now roughly 270 members. The acting sheriff bears that responsibly.
Can you give a sense of how deep the problems in the sheriff’s office run? Are there just a few bad apples there, or does it need a deeper culture change?
I read that there’s a need for a culture change. The number of deputies that I’ve talked with, both active and retired, have told me that the fear and oppression that the former sheriff and the acting sheriff reigned on the membership at the sheriff’s department was such that they couldn’t perform their jobs. As a result of dwindling resources now, members are being forced to work mandatory overtime. There’s a point where that doesn’t serve the department or the community well because members are working under pressure and stress. They’re not getting the proper rest or enjoying their families, and as a result, they’re going to be prone to making mistakes, and when they do, it seems like the current administration comes down on them hard just for being in these circumstances brought on in the first place by the leadership at the sheriff’s office.
So, there’s a need for an entire culture change, and it starts with leadership. I’ve had the fortune of leading men and women both in the police department and in baseball. I led more than 200 men and women at the Third District during my time in the police department. We bridged cultures. We bridged divides. We were able to bring together people in our community to address issues of violence, recklessness and disorder, and the record bears that out. I think the public will see that I represent the true progressive values of Milwaukee County.
Do you support Black Lives Matter?
I am supportive of any group that wants to improve the lives of everyone in our community. Certainly, if Black Lives Matter reached out to Sheriff Earnell Lucas and wanted to begin a dialogue, the door is open, and I would sit down [with them]. We’ve got to remember that Black Lives Matter was started by some black females who just wanted to call attention to an issue. We can’t disregard their efforts any more than the efforts made by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement of the ’60s. So, if they want to be heard by their elected officials and me as sheriff, I would certainly invite them to the table.
