It was 50 years ago now that Bob Dylan warned everybody the battle raging outside would “soon shake your windows and rattle your walls for the times they are a-changin’.”
For the Milwaukee Police Department, one of the most fiercely change-resistant departments in America, change may have taken half a century, but the walls are definitely rattling.
Police Chief Edward Flynn, who once worked for Mitt Romney in Massachusetts, may seem like an unlikely revolutionary figure, but sometimes you either have to change or get out of the way.
When Flynn arrived in 2008, he already was talking like a progressive agent of change. What frustrated those who welcomed it was that he didn’t always act like it.
Flynn was brought in after one of the worst incidents of police brutality and torture within the department, leading to nine firings, three suspensions and sending three officers to federal prison with long sentences.
Drunken, off-duty police officers beat, kicked and tortured Frank Jude, a biracial man, outside an a Bay View house party after Jude and a black friend made the mistake of showing up with two white women. Jude ultimately received a $2 million financial settlement from the city.
Flynn always talked like a reformer, but he also tried to defend his officers at times against outside criticism for actions that frankly were indefensible.
That included a series of illegal and sexually humiliating anal searches after traffic stops police conducted in black neighborhoods, often in daylight hours in full view of neighbors and other witnesses. Flynn suggested the officers were simply “overzealous.” No white traffic offender underwent any of these searches.
The jury in the first federal lawsuit over the searches awarded more than a half million dollars to the victim.
Cops Finally Forced to Value Black and Brown Lives
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Police departments used to get away with doing whatever they wanted, including shooting unarmed black and brown citizens in the streets, as long as they never did it to any white ones.
That’s no longer true, from Ferguson, Mo., to Milwaukee. And Flynn has now outraged his own department by firing an officer who fatally shot an unarmed, homeless, black man in Red Arrow Park across from City Hall.
Without revealing how many officers voted, the Milwaukee Police Association announced 99% expressed “no confidence” in Flynn as chief for firing Christopher Manney, who claimed Dontre Hamilton attacked him with his own nightstick.
Flynn, who can be extremely articulate when he wants to be, confused some in the public when he specifically said he hadn’t dismissed Manney for shooting Hamilton 14 times, but for failing to follow department rules for dealing with the mentally ill in actions leading up to the shooting.
The public really has no clear understanding of police training, but I once went through an intensive media training course at the Milwaukee Police Academy and I think I do.
Many people are upset the officer fired 14 shots, killing an unarmed man. Why not just wound him or something? But the officer’s deadly mistakes dealing with Hamilton came before that.
Hamilton, a paranoid schizophrenic, became extremely upset when Manney physically searched him for weapons and used a nightstick to try to roust him from the park. That’s when Manney said Hamilton took the stick and attacked him.
One of our academy instructors said: “If a police officer learns to use his mouth, he might never have to use his gun.”
Police often encounter people in highly emotional, highly stressed states. That’s multiplied many times over with the mentally ill. The police officer’s first job is to talk people down.
Instead, everything Manney did made Hamilton feel physically threatened and in danger, prompting him to fight back. That’s when Manney drew his weapon.
That was the fatal decision. Because an officer is taught not to draw his weapon unless he feels his life is in danger and intends to use it. And when he starts firing, not to stop until the threat is gone.
Everyone in this city and every other city knows how these stories have always ended. Some initial community protests, a lengthy investigation and the official conclusion that whatever police do is “justified.”
So the police are right. They are now required to live under different rules and police are usually not fired for killing black people. Police are suddenly being required to value black lives and brown lives just as highly as they’ve always valued white lives and property.
Times have changed. Albuquerque just became the 15th urban police department in America to reach an agreement with the U.S. Justice Department to implement sweeping reforms requiring them to start treating citizens equally, regardless of race, including in the use of deadly force.
It turns out Dylan was right after all. So was Sam Cooke when he said: “It’s been a long, long time coming.”
