Photo credit: Michael Carriere
A crowd gathered Thursday afternoon at 27th and Center
There is a crucial point regarding the current protests against police misconduct in Milwaukee that both the city’s leaders and its media outlets are overlooking: the impact of local events, both recent and historical, on the attitudes of protesters. Officials like Milwaukee Police Chief Alphonso Morales and news organizations like Fox 6 have attributed the protests in Milwaukee, in the words of a June 4, 2020 story published by Fox 6, to “the officer-involved death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.” Just a day earlier, TMJ4 had run a story with the headline “George Floyd protests in Milwaukee enter sixth day.”
There is little doubt that protesters in Milwaukee are motivated by the death of Floyd. Yet those taking to the city’s streets are also drawing attention to the case of Joel Acevedo, the Milwaukee man killed by Milwaukee police officer Michael Mattioli at a house party on April 19, 2020. Mattioli, who is currently suspended with pay (and, according to public records, he made $109,066 in 2018), seemed to have little remorse for his actions. In fact, after the incident he asked an investigator from the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office, “Is this (expletive) dead?”
Speakers at recent protests have also mentioned the cases of individuals like Dontre Hamilton and Derek Williams. The African American Hamilton was shot and killed by white police officer Christopher Manney in 2014; Manney was fired from the police force but both local and federal law enforcement officials neglected to prosecute the officer.
Photo credit: Michael Carriere
A march enters Tosa on Thursday evening
Similar Outcomes
A similar outcome can be seen in the 2011 case of Derek Williams. Williams, an African American man, died in the back of a police cruiser after he struggled to breathe for seven minutes, 45 seconds. Before losing consciousness, Williams repeatedly told officers he could not breathe and that he was going to die. He did die, as officers did nothing to help.
Special prosecutor John Franke declined to issue charges against three officers—Jeffrey Cline, Richard Ticcioni, and Jason Bleichwehl—even though an inquest jury recommended state misdemeanor charges be brought against them. As of 2018, Cline (making $93,128 as recently as 2018) and Ticcioni (who earned $104,760 that same year) remained with the Milwaukee Police Department. And they seemed to suffer no ramifications for their involvement in Williams’ death. In fact, Ticcioni was promoted to detective in 2016.
|
|
One may think such episodes are ancient history, but they remain remarkably alive for those who had to live through such trauma. A speaker at a rally on June 4, 2020 told the crowd about an uncle who was the victim of police misconduct in 1974. The pain in her voice was immediate and palpable; she could have easily been describing something that happened last week.
Photo credit: Michael Carriere
A march down 35th St on Thursday afternoon
Working to Reform
There is an obvious desire among city leaders and law enforcement officials to move beyond such difficult episodes. For current Police Chief Morales, such moments came before his tenure – and he has been working to reform the department. The current protests, Morales recently told CBS58, “should not take away from other cities like Milwaukee where we, for the last two years, were working with an ACLU lawsuit that focuses on things like that.”
The “things like that” that Morales was referring to include a race-based stop-and-frisk policy that MPD employed before the ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit against the department in 2017. Yet such polices still seem to inform MPD practice. An independent audit of documented police encounters found that between January 1 to Jun 20, 2019 38 percent of such encounters were not properly documented—and over half of the individuals involved in such encounters were African American. There is little doubt that many participating in protest marches are among those recently pulled over by the MPD.
Such statistics drive home another point that both city leaders and media voices also overlook: police reform doesn’t really work. As sociologist Alex Vitale has recently pointed out, the Minneapolis Police Department spent the last five years implementing a wide array of such reforms, culminating in a report, “Focusing on Procedural Justice Internally and Externally,” that the department authored in 2018. Such reform, though, didn’t seem to trickle down to the four officers who took the life of George Floyd.
Such training does, however, increase the budgets of such police departments. In Minneapolis, the police department currently uses up to 30 percent of the entire city budget. Here in Milwaukee, the budget for the Police Department now exceeds the entire property tax levy for the City of Milwaukee. This is why many protesters and their allies are calling for the defunding of police departments. In light of current events, it is now time to begin that conversation.
For more of our coverage of the protests occurring across Milwaukee, click here.
