Ten years ago, when Edward Flynn became Milwaukee’s 17th Chief of Police, our city’s largest department needed a leader who would bring our data systems into the computer age and who would put some real dents in the rank and file’s thin blue line, which protected the jobs of colleagues more than the health and civil rights of citizens like Frank Jude Jr.
On those two fronts, Chief Flynn made progress. He replaced pushpins with spreadsheets and had monthly meetings where captains were forced to defend the details of deployment strategies on a district-by-district basis. As soon as it became clear (in 2012) that officers had once again violated the civil rights of our fellow citizens, he put out a loud call asking the public to come forward with more strip-search complaints. Then, in 2014, he fired an officer for fatally violating Dontre Hamilton’s civil rights.
Now that we are at the end of Flynn’s tenure, we should ask our next chief to continue his data-driven deployment philosophy and to keep holding our employees accountable when they violate the civil rights of our neighbors. But we should also be asking for so much more.
In 2018, both inside and outside City Hall, the department’s leadership has lost credibility. On the streets, everyone knows why. After a police officer fatally shot Sylville Smith in 2016, the chief told this city and the world that he had seen the body cam footage, and all we needed to know was Smith had a gun in his hand when shot. What he didn’t tell us was Smith was holding the gun by the barrel, not the trigger, for the first shot and had thrown it away for the second shot.
The chief has been no more forthcoming with his fellow city leaders. When the Common Council and the mayor attempted to establish independent oversight of the 911 system, he kicked a fellow city employee out of the building until we crafted specific legislation authorizing her presence. When the Fire and Police Commission gave him a direct order to change the MPD’s pursuit policy, he lawyered up before finally, reluctantly, obeying it.
Worst of all, when the Common Council asked to see a draft report from the U.S. Department of Justice about necessary reforms in Milwaukee, he refused. If a member of his own leadership team had not leaked that report to journalists, the public still would not know which changes the Barack Obama administration was recommending before Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions took over and attempted to cancel all such reform efforts.
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At a minimum, our next chief needs to not play such games with the public and its elected leadership. But many of those deceitful games are symptomatic of a larger vein of American denial; one that is not unique to Milwaukee. The chief didn’t want to publicly confront the facts of the 2016 Sherman Park shooting, and that fit his own pattern in the wake of the 2014 shooting of Dontre Hamilton across the street from City Hall. He sat down for an interview with The Blood Is at the Doorstep director Erik Ljung about Dontre’s death and insisted it had nothing to do with race and everything to do with mental illness.
He said this despite knowing that his officer knew Dontre was black when he shot him and couldn’t have known Dontre was schizophrenic until hours later. As the award-winning documentary reveals, the department only discovered Dontre’s history of mental illness from his mother, while detaining her in a police car without revealing that her son was dead. In the days after the shooting, our police spread disinformation claiming Dontre had a criminal past. This was not true.
This deliberate and posthumous demonization of Dontre—a napping, black man who was awakened and shot dead by a white Milwaukee police officer—repeats a familiar pattern in the horrific history of our country’s racial violence.
Before any other qualification, our next police chief must acknowledge our common history of state-sanctioned racial violence. First the kidnapping, rape and torture that was routine from 1619 until 1865. Then sharecropping, segregation and lynching throughout the next century. Most recently, the so-called “drug war” and the mandatory minimum prison sentences associated with it have given Wisconsin the highest rate of black incarceration in the country—higher even than all the states of the Deep South.
When I privately confronted the chief about such disparities past and current he brushed me off and mocked the critique. His response: “Do you want us to start arresting white people even if the suspect description is black?” In a city inside our nation’s most racially segregated metropolitan region, our next police chief must know these facts, admit these facts and commit to working with all stakeholders to change them.
Alderman Nik Kovac represents the Third District on Milwaukee’s Common Council.
