Photo credit: Maggie Vaugn
Earnell Lucas
In November 2018, Earnell Lucas was elected Sheriff of Milwaukee County after almost 16 years of Sheriff David Clarke. Clarke was a rightwing extremist who mismanaged and totally politicized the Sheriff’s Office, causing Milwaukee County to be sued numerous times and costing our taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. As the new sheriff in town, Lucas has brought both competence and tremendous experience to the job.
You’ve been sheriff now for nine months. In your campaign, you talked about restoring honesty and trust to an office that, for the past 16 years, had been pretty tarnished. Tell us what you've done to restore that honesty and trust.
We came in with the approach of restoring the honor, the integrity and trust back to the Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office. First thing is that entails not only that we are going to treat people with dignity and respect, but we had to start and begin the process of treating one another with dignity and respect, because that had been lost. It is important that people know that everybody has a past, but we’re looking forward, we’re not looking back. We told everyone to do their jobs and not worry about what somebody else is doing, and let’s just restore this organization to the proud organization that it once was.
I brought in a team to work with me. That is a team of individuals who are accomplished in their own rights. My number two in command is deputy Denita Ball, 25-year member of the Milwaukee Police Department, Ph.D. in criminology, an instructor at some of the area's criminal justice colleges, highly respected in the law enforcement community. I brought her in as the number two, and I have every confidence in her ability to make good decisions not only in my presence but also in my absence. I brought in, for the first time in the organization, a chief legal and compliance officer, Molly Zillig, who worked in the Corporation Counsel’s office and handled a number of the issues that arose in the Sheriff’s Office. Her responsibility was two things: to ensure that we do the right things and to ensure we do them right.
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Since that time, we have done nothing but look at our organization from top to bottom and address the issues, and I am very confident that the creation of that position has put us at the forefront of being one of the leading law enforcement agencies, not only here in the state but in the country. We needed to address our relationships with the community, and I brought in a professional with a 30-year career in media, Faithe Colas, for whom I have immense respect. Faithe has made many contributions to our community, and I brought her in as our director of public relations and community engagement. She’s done nothing but going out and taking our organization out to the community and introduced us to people and groups that we had no connections to beforehand. Thus far, we've been very pleased [with what we've been doing].
One of the things that you did inherit were a lot of problems with the county jail. You inherited some lawsuits; you inherited the fact that somebody had recently died there in a way that could have easily been prevented. So, what have you done to make changes to the county jail?
It was important that we changed the culture, because the correctional officers and the people who were working in the jail were not treated with respect; they had not had pay increases in almost 18 years, they were being made to work mandatory overtime and couldn’t take days off. While we’re still confronted with the challenges of shortages in correctional officers, I restored the honor in the position to the extent that they know the sheriff supports them.
We have gone to the board and asked for increases and we just accomplished that as of Monday, July 1; about a 6.5% increase was made for correctional staff. We are about to ask for a similar increase in the 2020 budget as well. Also, I felt it was important to make them feel included in the administration; thereby, there is no separation or distinction in a deputy versus a correctional officer. Sheriffs’ offices across the country have both functions, and both functions are dual or equal in term of stature in the organization, and that was not the case here. So, the correctional commanders are now part of the command staff; they sit at the command meetings, and they make decisions in respect to personnel and treatment of inmates. We also had to look at how those persons in our care are being treated. We’ve seen improvements in attitudes, in approaches and outcomes at the jail. We had to get away from the past in which seven individuals lost their lives, for which the county is going to be paying for years and years to come. One thing we got to do is to be able to deliver a level of service with dignity and respect, and where we are not finding ourselves in costly litigation and judgments awarded to families of individuals who lost their lives being treated inhumanely.
I’m confident that, where we are today, we’re much better off than where we were a year or two or three ago.
You mentioned budgets and getting more money for folks working in the county jail, but it looks like there is a proposed budget cut this year. How are you going to handle that?
Right now, our budget is roughly at about $47 million. We were given a number, like every other department in the county, to decrease our budget; in my case, it was about $670,000, so thereby it is reduced by less than a million.
If we are going to restore the honor and integrity of this organization and the high level of service that the people of Milwaukee County truly deserve, then we need to restore the positions back to the Sheriff’s Office. I’ve advocated for more patrols in our parks and our freeways; I’ve advocated for more resources to address our responsibilities in the courts as well as in the jail—two areas that are required by the state for the Sheriff’s Office to provide services to. We find ourselves short in those areas, and I am forced to bring individuals in on overtime just to meet the minimum staffing level.
So, I am going to continue to ask for what I think is needed in order to make Milwaukee County strong and safe. That means you need to increase the number of deputies on our freeways so we can address some of the problems with our reckless driving. The incidents of shots fired is alarming; any one incident is alarming, but we have multiple incidents happening. There is a recklessness out there, and we need to address it from both an enforcement standpoint and an educational standpoint. Right now, I need more resources to do that.
We need to be able to address safety in our parks; there are more than 150 parks in Milwaukee County and, on any given day, there are just not enough men and women out there to address the needs in our parks so seniors can feel safe to go for a walk and where young people can play games. We need adequate resources there to meet that responsibility. We need to address some of the other social issues that we find, like the problem with homelessness that we see is an issue, as well as the opioid addiction problem that we have here. We need to have the ability to address those issues, but quite frankly, with the resources that we currently have, we are challenged at best to meet those demands.
So, I’m committed to asking for more, and I’m saying to the people of Milwaukee County, “Put your trust in me, your elected sheriff, to do what we said we would do, and I will deliver on the promise of restoring the honor, integrity and trust back to the Sheriff’s Office.”
The Trump administration has developed a lot of policies that are getting a lot of pushback by local units of government or sheriff departments across the country. What kind of issues have you experienced here with ICE and the Feds in terms of immigration?
I say we need to be on the right side and do the right things. We research what is going on around the country and then try to implement policies and procedures here within the Sheriff’s Office that are doing the right thing. For years, Milwaukee County was finding itself in a situation where, if we detained an individual beyond the time that he or she satisfies their local charges, we could be violating their constitutional rights and thereby putting Milwaukee County in jeopardy. Our administration simply said that we aren’t going to do that any longer. Skip the politics of it, we just aren’t going to be placing Milwaukee County in a situation where taxpayers would be paying for errors or the misapplication of procedures. Thus, we simply indicated that we aren’t going to hold an individual for any period after he or she satisfies their local charges.
I’m comfortable in that we are keeping our community safe, and that if an individual has committed egregious acts and needs to be turned over, he or she will be turned over; but those individuals who have committed municipal or county ordinance violations and have satisfied them, or those who have been released by a magistrate, to detain that individual for any minute longer would be a violation of his or her rights, and thereby we aren't going to do that anymore.
Next summer, we have the Democratic National Convention coming here. What role is the Sheriff's Office going to play vis-à-vis the Secret Service and all the federal folks coming in?
Since the awarding of the convention to Milwaukee, we have been in dialogue with federal, state and local partners, and we have a great working relationship with many of them, in particular with the Secret Service, which is going to be the lead agency in executing security for the DNC next July. Our agency is going to be a partner and a support agency for the U.S. government, the Secret Service and the U.S. military in developing and executing our plan to ensure everyone's safety here at the DNC.
Conversations have begun in multiple disciplines, work has begun in all parts of our community, and already we're starting to put in place a plan that I feel we’re going to execute successfully. We will learn from experiences of previous cities that have hosted conventions. I have the benefit of having spent 16 years at Major League Baseball, where we put on major events, all-star games and world series alike, with the only exception that we didn't have the full force of the U.S. government behind us in planning those events. In these instance, having that, I am proud to be a part of a group of professionals around the city, around the state and around the country who are going to come here to Milwaukee and help us showcase Milwaukee as a world-class city that can host major conventions and execute a security plan to ensure everyone's safety.
I am excited. I know all of the partners are excited—the Milwaukee Police Department, the other federal, state and local agencies here in the area—and we are looking forward to hosting the convention next year and showcase Milwaukee.
Finally, you have in a short period of time become one of the most popular locally elected officials, and rumor has now started saying that you might be running for county executive next year. What do you have to say about that?
I hope you add to the story that I chuckled when you asked the question! I am humbled by the good will of a number of people in this community. I am humbled by the fact that Milwaukee County residents came out in a way unlike ever before, giving me 30,000 more votes than Tammy Baldwin, 40,000 more votes than Gov. Tony Evers, 50,000 more votes than Attorney General Josh Kaul... On Tuesday, Nov. 6, Milwaukee County gave me 310,000 votes, which was the second-highest total ever in Milwaukee County, except for former president Barack Obama. I am truly humbled by that.
I feel that, right now, I have the best job in county government. I get to walk into boardrooms, offices of CEOs and presidents all around Milwaukee County, saying “I am Sheriff Earnell Lucas. We have problems in our community, I am trying to solve them, can I count on your support?” And, by and large, without fail, I have gotten many to extend a hand and reach out and say, “Sheriff, we were waiting for a partner to work with us; we're looking forward to it.”
I have a job to do right now, one that I take a great deal of pride in. I am humbled by the many well-wishers. I have not placed any thought in consideration of pursuing any other political office at this time, but I truly am humbled by others that have thoughts of me in a higher office.
I don’t know what the future holds. I go to work every day to do something to inspire hope in some young boy or some young girl that they can do anything, and thereby not ruling anything out in their futures. So, I am not ruling out anything in my future, but right now, I have the distinction of being the sheriff of my hometown, the Sheriff of Milwaukee County.
Well I didn’t hear a “No,” so I hope you seriously consider it. I also encourage our readers to let you how they would feel about you running for county executive next year.
