Justice Department Halts Review of Milwaukee Police

Sept. 19, 2017
A federal review of the Milwaukee Police Department has been halted with the retooling of a program once focused on improving trust between police and communities.

MILWAUKEE -- A federal review of the Milwaukee Police Department has been halted with the retooling of a program once focused on improving trust between police and communities.

The move effectively ends the U.S. Department of Justice's collaborative reform initiative as it has existed since 2011. The program's focus has been shifted to providing training on active shooters, dismantling gangs and other criminal investigations.

Cities such as Milwaukee, which are currently under review, will be moved into the new version of the program, a department spokeswoman said Saturday.

As a result, those agencies will not get federal help to boost accountability or to implement reforms, as they would have under the old version of the program.

Instead, they will receive assistance with policing tactics to reduce crime.

As the collaborative reform process — requested by Chief Edward Flynn in the wake of a fatal police shooting — lingered in limbo with the change of the presidential administration, Milwaukee officials expected as much. They made that clear Thursday while discussing a draft of the federal review obtained and published by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in August.

"We have what we have, and what we have is the draft," Ald. Milele Coggs said at Thursday's meeting of the Common Council's Steering and Rules Committee.

She emphasized a focus on the draft's recommendations, "since for reasons that are beyond all of our control in this room, that final report will not be there."

Flynn confirmed there is no final version of the report when he appeared at the meeting.

Common Council President Ashanti Hamilton said a task force of community leaders will take up the recommendations in the draft report.

"We want to put that into the hands of some community leaders let them chew on it ... and then let's talk about what needs to be implemented and when and where and how," Hamilton said.

Flynn had requested the collaborative reform review in November 2015 amid public outcry after federal prosecutors declined to charge a now-fired officer in the on-duty fatal shooting of Dontre Hamilton in Red Arrow Park.

The collaborative reform initiative started out as a voluntary, nonadversarial process aimed at improving the community's trust in the Police Department.

A background document provided by the Justice Department suggests the program had evolved to include significant recommendations, which led to an "unintended consequence of a more adversarial relationship."

The changes to collaborative reform are in keeping with a memo issued by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in March. In it, he directed the Justice Department to review its programs to make sure they aligned with the goals of promoting “officer safety, officer morale, and public respect for their work.” Another goal was to ensure that public safety remains under “local control and local accountability,” according to the background document.

Even after the memo was released, teams within the Milwaukee Police Department continued working to gather information for the review despite little communication from the Justice Department, said Leslie Silletti, director of the Office of Management, Analysis and Planning.

At the beginning of summer, police officials considered how to move forward "in this gray space," she said at the meeting.

The Justice Department explicitly prohibited the Police Department from releasing any draft reports or other materials from the collaborative process. Flynn said he went to the city attorney's office to ask if there was a way to share broad recommendations with the Common Council and the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission.

He said he was told he could discuss those topics in closed sessions. That changed when the draft report was posted online by the Journal Sentinel.

Flynn also said he did not dispute many of the recommendations contained in the draft report. However, he maintained it was riddled with factual errors and lack of context.

Regarding recommendations about community policing, for example, Flynn acknowledged there is no written departmentwide strategy on the topic. He said he had made a decision to decentralize those efforts and base them within police districts. Still, he agreed there should be a written policy.

Another finding in the draft was that the department does not hold all members accountable for engaging in community policing.

"Well, it's true," Flynn said. "We have people that are specialists who do a lot of the problem-oriented policing ... but every single sector car that's running from job to job every night doesn't have the same level of training and expertise."

"We do training for everybody," he said. "We could do more."

Another recommendation: Having an independent community advisory board that meets regularly with the chief.

"I don't disagree with that," Flynn said.

The department has "pieces" of updates to the original draft report, which correct factual errors and provide more details on the department's ongoing efforts in those areas, Silletti said.

Ald. Nik Kovac and Hamilton, the council president, pressed Flynn to release that material.

"This issue of correcting factual errors is distracting from what should be a healthy subjective discussion about where to go," Kovac said.

Flynn again referenced the Justice Department's ban on releasing it.

"I'm going to deal with what is now in the public domain however it got there, but I'm not now going to unilaterally violate their directive," he said.

Copyright 2017 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Tribune News Service

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