CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Reformer

The Police Department was under a strange siege. Public support for the work done on a daily basis by the women and men in blue, their efforts to keep crime at bay, to keep the city safe, had evaporated like a morning chill under a warm sun. A single tragic decision made on the streets, when three cops believed Jeffrey Dahmer’s story about why a Laotian boy was naked and wandering around dazed, had made the difference and turned the department inside out.

The lid was still on. Milwaukee was not burning. But morale within the department had dropped with every new edition of the newspapers and every news broadcast on radio and television. Complaints that they did not dispense justice evenly cut deeply.

But they were in a box. Naturally, the police officers came to the side of their fellow officers who had conducted the investigation on that tragic night. But by doing so, it appeared that they were condoning the decision that led to the murder of an Oriental child by a white man. But they could not, as a group, stand aside and let the three cops who went to apartment 213 be made into scapegoats.

And every day, they had to go out there on the streets again after roll call, and do a dangerous job for a restless population. It was not an easy time for street cops, who reported jeers and taunts from kids on the corners in some neighborhoods.

Police Chief Philip Arreola, on Friday, July 26, had suspended, with pay, the three officers who had handled the controversial call and said whatever action was warranted would be taken. He told a news conference that he didn’t know why or how the situation happened, but that a meticulous investigation would determine the facts. Mayor Norquist was quick to step to the side of his police chief, saying that an investigation was warranted and it would be a thorough one.

When the chief was asked why the officers involved had not made a connection between the case they had investigated and the official notice that the Sinthasomphone boy had been reported missing, he had to say he did not know, but he intended to find out.

On the other side, as developments split the city into angry camps, either for or against the police, was Bradley DeBraska, the head of the Milwaukee Police Association. While sidestepping direct comment on the Dahmer-Sinthasomphone situation, DeBraska said Arreola had caved in to political pressure and tossed the three officers to the wolves, in effect prejudging them in the matter before an investigation was concluded. He said it gave the impression that the men had not performed their duties to the letter, a situation that was intolerable in a system of justice in which even a mass murderer is considered innocent until proven guilty. Arreola, said the police union president, should resign.

And that was just Round One.

At the station houses, in the locker rooms and around the coffee machines, the police said the public was getting a distorted view of what had happened on that night, that what was being printed was not the whole story that led to the cops’ decision. Not the whole story by a long shot. Outsiders, meaning reporters, were dredging up wrong information that questioned the actions of trained officers. After all, the reporters were not there on the scene that night. And that was correct, as far as it went—but the police sources making the arguments of false information were not on the scene that night either. Their actual point should perhaps have been that the three cops who handled Konerak’s situation were not the first people to have let Dahmer slip through their fingers. Why not blame his high school, or his parents, or the army, or the judge who had sentenced him to probation instead of a long sweat of hard jail time?

A particularly painful sting came on Saturday, when the Milwaukee Sentinel ran a cartoon by Stuart Carlson on their editorial page depicting two officers in a squad car late at night, writing up a report. The one with a clipboard says, “Can you believe that last call? Some Laotian kid running naked and bleeding in the street, frantic neighbors. Boy, talk about your alternative life-style, eh?” The driver turns and replies, “Yeah. Good thing that nice, rational white guy was there to sort things out.”

That was it in a nutshell. No matter what was said, the bottom line would remain that Konerak Sinthasomphone was dead and that four other men had later been killed by Jeffrey Dahmer after the cops left the apartment. The officers were by now caught in a vise of their own making. No one actually would deny that something had gone haywire that night. But they could not, and would not, abandon their fellow officers, because it could just as easily have been they handling that terrible late-night squawk on North Twenty-fifth Street two months ago. There but for the grace of God go I. Cops don’t hang other cops out to dry.

But there was something else at work, something more insidious that began to ooze out when the scab was scratched open. The Police Department had been run for years by Harold A. Breier, a tough, no-nonsense cop who was police chief for twenty years before retiring in 1984 as head of a force of 2,040 officers. Breier had been around a long time and knew everyone, and everyone knew him. The force, however, had been getting steady complaints that it was not being fair to minorities, and in 1975, a court order came down that the Milwaukee police would henceforth hire more women and more minorities. But when Breier stepped down, Milwaukee had a reputation as a law-and-order city.

By 1991, the force had 2,414 authorized positions, but only 1,883 cops, and 80.4 percent of those were white. The reality of politics and budget constraints had squeezed the number of officers assigned to street work even while violent crime increased. Guarding the city of Milwaukee were 1,373 white men and 139 white women; 204 black male cops and 37 black female officers; 93 men and 8 women who were Hispanic, and 25 American Indian men and 2 American Indian women. Despite the catcalls of racism, all of them wore the same color blue uniforms and bright silver badges that made them members of the club.

So it came as a shock when the latest chief took over eighteen months before Dahmer’s arrest, arriving from far outside the loop of old-timers within the Milwaukee Police Department. Philip Arreola was not only a Mexican American, but he was from Detroit! He certainly didn’t have to study German in the primary school grades as many Milwaukeeans of his age had been required to do. Having a minority member as chief of police in Milwaukee meant that the members of the club would soon be reading some new rules. When minorities had a complaint, there was someone in the administration building who would listen. Things like racism and homophobia were suddenly on the front burner.

Now a crisis had erupted and he had jumped too quickly, said DeBraska, claiming that the chief had erred in not backing up his street cops. The president of the police union decided that the rank and file would soon cast ballots on whether they had confidence in their chief. And he hinted at a job action to protest the Arreola suspensions. “Job action” could mean anything from an outright work stoppage to a mild case of blue flu, with a handful of officers calling in sick.

The ballots on the no-confidence vote began going out immediately, even as cops in the city’s seven districts were angrily learning that the three suspended policemen had learned their fate from broadcast news reports instead of in face-to-face sessions with their supervisors.

Things became even more tense the next day, when it was learned that the three policemen had not only intervened to return Konerak to Dahmer, but had actually gone into the apartment. The community ceased to mutter and started to scream, and there was little the cops could do but stand there and take it and insist that the chief had not followed proper procedures in administering discipline. Morale sagged even lower.

It seemed that people had stopped being mad at Jeffrey Dahmer, who was, after all, now in jail. He was reduced to the status of curiosity, while the real anger surfaced in the central city areas and was mainly directed against police, who ricocheted it off onto their chief.

Milwaukee was in a spin, with the national media on hand to chronicle the whole miserable thing. The reporters normally would have pulled out after a few days of blood-and-guts stories, but the political dimension that the story was developing was too good to walk away from.

And there was the unwanted link back to the vicious beating of motorist Rodney King, a black man, by a bunch of white cops in Los Angeles. That abuse of police power had been captured on videotape and shocked the nation because of its obvious racism. Now Milwaukee was pushing the City of Angels off the front pages as far as police racism charges were concerned. Los Angeles, at least, was glad that news spotlights only rest in one place for a short period of time.

Mayor Norquist, in a network television appearance on Thursday, August 1, admitted nation-wide that Dahmer might have been treated differently had he been black. “From the facts of this case, there’s really no other conclusion that you can come to but that,” he told NBC News. Meanwhile, Arreola had refined his own stance, saying that the officers had been suspended because they had not followed basic law enforcement practices, and he filed administrative charges against them.

Norquist and Arreola’s surprise forum for making new declarations was the graduation ceremony for forty-nine police recruits, who felt suddenly that they were caught in the middle of something they didn’t understand. Commencement addresses are supposed to be boring. But the chief and the mayor were standing before them, laying down the law. Norquist laid it out straight. Don’t get so cynical that you forget that you are out there to protect the public, and that means everybody. Then they handed out diplomas to the astonished cadets, turning them officially into cops.

Then the state stepped up to bat. The Wisconsin Department of Justice announced it would consider a criminal investigation of the three officers who had been suspended, although State Attorney General James E. Doyle stated that commencing the investigation did not mean that criminal wrongdoing was suspected. District Attorney McCann said the state probe was needed to help restore confidence in the Police Department and for legal reasons. A local investigation might bog the trial down in conflicts of interest if McCann had to call as witnesses three policemen that his department was investigating.

At the end of August, the three officers were cleared of any criminal wrongdoing.

At the same time as the probe was announced, the Milwaukee Journal published a poll of how Milwaukee residents felt about their police. Asked whether police discriminated against blacks, some 69 percent of the respondents who were black agreed with that statement, as did 39 percent of the white people interviewed within the city and 39 percent of the respondents who lived in the suburbs. Asked if police were doing a good job, 90 percent of the suburbanites said yes, compared with 70 percent of the white respondents within the city and only 41 percent of the blacks who were interviewed.

Exploring the touchiest part of the situation, the polltakers asked if the three officers who had investigated the May 27 incident involving Konerak had done their jobs correctly. No, stated 93 percent of the blacks interviewed. No, echoed a full 80 percent of everyone interviewed within the four-county area. And 63 percent said Chief Arreola was doing a good job.

Two days later, the Journal ran a copyrighted story that disclosed the names and records of the three policemen involved.

Norquist, about the same time, reached into the politicians’ bag of gimmicks and came up with a tool that has proven useful in recent years when any political figure, national or local, runs into a problem. He appointed a nine-member blue-ribbon commission to study relations between the community and the police. Marquette University President Albert J. DiUlio was chosen to head the special team. It immediately drew fire from unhappy inner-city residents who claimed that there wasn’t enough minority membership, and gay community representatives were left wondering whether any of the nine could represent homosexual concerns. Police didn’t like the idea of outsiders looking over their shoulders. Instead of healing the community, all it did was drive the wedge in a bit farther.

Then the union vote came back on the no-confidence balloting and, to absolutely no one’s surprise, the Milwaukee Police Association determined that 94 percent of its membership did not have confidence in Arreola. Union officials said that proved Arreola should resign.

In the middle of the uproar, Arreola went to City Hall to argue for more money for his department and to defend his proposed 1992 budget of $129.8 million. Using statistics to underline his points, the chief argued that his troops—the ones who had just said they had no confidence in him—were overworked and tied up with too many conflicting duties. He wanted to put more uniformed cops on the street, particularly in residential neighborhoods. He wanted the city to hire more policemen.

Arreola ignored the vote. He was holding the best cards at the table, and support was growing by the day. Jesse Jackson, in his brief visit to Milwaukee, applauded the chief’s actions, as did other leaders of various minority communities, the editorial pages of the two local newspapers, and the statewide association of police chiefs.

The union vote had backfired. Despite the careful wording that claimed it was a referendum on whether the rank and file had confidence in its leadership, the public saw it differently. Noncops viewed the vote as showing police felt they should not be held accountable when something goes catastrophically wrong. Racial distrust was involved, and the overwhelming vote against the chief was read by minorities as proof of what they had said all along, that the cops had a double standard when it came to dealing with blacks. Supporters of police officers held a demonstration and passed out buttons and thin blue ribbons to raise public consciousness in behalf of the cops, but it was too little, too late. The union had rolled the dice and lost. Arreola, the reformer, was still in office, stronger than ever.

And every day the officers got back into their uniforms, convinced that something was wrong with their world. It wasn’t very hard to figure out, in hindsight. Milwaukee had changed. It was no longer the lily-white, European immigrant community that it had been for most of the century. People of every color lived in the city by the big lake, and they wanted a police force that worked for all of them, not just for the power elite. By getting behind the chief in the political struggle that had started with a bad decision on a night in May, a decision that had consigned a little boy to death, the residents of Milwaukee were saying that it was time for the cops to change, too.