He actually ends by walking out while people are still talking to him. He says it was a listening session. . . but he’s not very good a ACTUALLY listening . . . and he’s so defensive and condescending, and interrupts anyone he disagrees with. I think he makes things worse by doing these sessions. He needs to learn to shut his mouth. I’m quite horrified by how he acted as a public representative of the City of Madison. I have 2 hours of video, but its not great, so there are, or will be, some excerpts (when my poor 2009 computer finishing crunching the high def video) Full Audio at the end.
First, he talks for the first 10 minutes. Not sure what his point was.
Then, Richard Friehoefer from the Tenney Laphap Neighborhood gets up and says that he thinks the police are doing a great job and if other neighborhoods don’t want the police, he’ll take them.
Next Maria Milstad thanks the chief, says he’s the first one to ever admit there is a gang problem in Madison (what?! that’s simply not true, there have been gang task forces and trainings for neighborhood associations an all kinds of issues around gangs in Madison.) She says they are living it right on State St. She says he shouldn’t appease the protesters.
So, the chief then chooses to respond about the protestors and why he is going to start ticketing them. For 12 minutes . . .
Then he talks about gangs and somehow when he is done with the fear mongering starts talking about race and disparities issues. Interesting how he tied the two together. And then he drifts off into why he wrote the blog about removing police from the neighborhoods. I’m unclear how the gang issue got us to this point. It was a weird tangential rant about these “damn neighborhoods” which drifted into talking about poverty in the schools and how he lobbied to get more neighborhood officers. This went on for another 12 minutes, until someone finally interrupts him.
He gets into an argument with one of the few people of color in the room about the neighborhood not being able to handle a domestic violence incident without the police. The gentleman has to keep interrupting to be able to say anything, cuz the chief keeps interrupting and talking over the top of him.
A homeless man talks about another homeless person getting peed on by college students and the police being right there and not doing anything about it – Chief Koval says that police officers are given discretion. They argue some more. He doesn’t let them speak. A person asks the chief if officer discretion can lead to two different justice system, chief says yes and that is why they put discretion in their policy manual.
A person asks about who this “group” is that the chief is talking about. Chief says he doesn’t want to use their name, which they are very proud of, and marginalize the group. (Bullshit, that’s exactly what he is trying to do.) And he says the group is called young gifted and black. He gets back into an argument with the gentleman. He says that college students drink and they don’t get a ticket but when they do, they get followed and ticketed. Chief then talks about panhandling. Another strange and uncomfortable leap on his part.
Someone asks why there was a delay in holding the officer accountable in the Pauly Heenan shooting. He says that it is still being litigated and cuts off the topic.
A woman speaks and points out that he interrupted the gentleman first when he was trying to speak. She says that he is misrepresenting what the Young Gifted and Black coalition has said after they have clarified it many times. They just want to be policed like white neighborhoods in a reactive manner in the same way. Discretion is being applied in a systemic way and that is why the racial disparities exist. He should listen to the voices no matter how they say things, because what people have to say matters and what they are experiencing matters. Don’t shut things out because of how they are said. Police all neighborhoods the same.
Another weird rant about how they should have said what they meant and says where the top calls for services are and its not in the neighborhoods.
Person talks about how after football games people are treated differently then the people who are downtown the rest of the time.
Ed Kuharski talks about how they handled the Young Gifted and Black situation and points out that if you are thrown in jail today, its a lot different than it was years ago, now you get thrown in jail and you can’t have a life afterwards, there are different consequences (with schools, employers, landlords). He applauds the chief for not issuing citations.
He says that there are a lot of things that he would change about the system and he has common ground with Young Gifted and Black and he wants people to help him on legislative initiatives.
Speaker asks where the black people are in the department, everyone is white. That they focus too much on the homeless community and blow things out of the homeless community. He asks where the police were when his family was murdered in Chicago by someone who drove from Madison. It’s too late now. An audience members interrupts, another audience member interrupts. It’s kind of chaos. Woman says that the guy is staying two different things, that he doesn’t want the police, but where were they when they needed them. Other speaker clarifies this was an issue with mental illness and the incident happened in Chicago. They discuss back and forth. Everyone is talking all at once. Koval talks about mental health officers. The guys get up and leave, a police officer follows them out.
Another gentleman talks about an incident in 1995 where he was arrested and went to prison for something that he didn’t do and that the police didn’t talk to witnesses and now his life has never been the same. If the officers hadn’t assumed the woman was telling the truth. He says that recently he was arrested for not paying a fine that he paid and he sat 8 days in Dane County jail waiting to go back to Milwaukee jail and until someone looked and figured out he had paid the fine. He sat 8 days in jail for nothing. He says they took everything from him. He gets up and leaves. Chief says he is sorry, the guy tells him to go to hell.
Amelia Royko Mauer says that that is precisely why traffic is held up, right there. It starts at some level with the police. Protest isn’t supposed to be convenient. For the three minutes people were held up in traffic, good. Young Gifted and Black has clarified and going any further on the words they originally used sounds like you have an ax to grind chief. You found some areas you can agree on and got to the 5 yard line and punted it into the stands. You are the most powerful person in the city. Protest is the speech of the unheard. You have the power to invite them in. Police don’t hang out in my neighborhood like they do in other neighborhoods. You could make lots of money on people driving drunk if you hang outside Nakoma or Maple Bluff Country Club. There are a lot of “haves” braking the law, white people with money. The tactics are different. Do you approach a group of people hanging out on the sidewalk in Brentwood the same way you would in Maple Bluff, you’d probably never approach them. She asks for statistics on what arrests are made due to calls and what arrests are made due to being there, can you separate them? Chief says that the vast majority are from 911 calls. You are doing a lot of great things, you are making some great choices, but she wants more opportunities to sit down in a solutions based discussion with people who disagree with you. She wants statistics on the failures in the department, sensitivity training, early warning system for officers, she wants a real approach to mental imbalance that can be created by all the ugliness. She knows its inconvenient when traffic gets held up. What gets written is what matters and she knows that an officer can write down something you didn’t say from personal experience, she says the police wrote down that her friend Paul Heenan went out drinking, she didn’t say that, but it sure was convenient for them to write that down, she never said that, so she wants cameras as a temporary solution, not for all neighborhoods, if the south side doesn’t want them, then they don’t need to have them, but she wants them in her neighborhood. She doesn’t want domestic violence situations filmed, there needs to be a law to protect them.
Koval says that body cameras are a $30,000 study, the driver is the common council, they only have one voice on the committee for technical insight, that will be the basis of what they do in 2016. If the independent body, after working with the community, their report says they want the body cameras, he will do it, but the council has to come up with the money. A lot of people when looking at the “eye-popping” figures want the money spent in a different way. Amelia asks how many cameras that is, chief says 335. She asks how many are on patrol at any time, he says 200 are assigned to patrol, she wants to know how many are out on a shift, he says about 40, she asks why they need more than 40, he says that it is best practices so the officers have no one to blame when the technology fails. He says they need to do more for their officers, he has worked with the city EAP office for difficult situations, there is a peer support group in effect, he can order people to be evaluated for fitness for service, they are working on it. He says regarding rights, he things that he could agree with the nobility of the right of some vs. those that are inconvenienced, going back in time those that had the courage to be civilly disobedient took risks and there is a better and more just society, but he doesn’t want to be put in the position to decide that one persons rights are noble and the other is just inconvenienced, everyone has rights and he has balance that and he won’t say one cause is more worthy of the police (seriously, constitutional rights and inconvenience are equal?). Amelia says that when we have the right to let kids live in poverty, people be incarcerated disproportionately, the education system to fail children and have the right to ignore it all, then we have to look at the latitude our positions afford us, to tip the scale back to zero. He says he is trying to do the best he can.
Ed Kuharski talks about the interruptions and inconveniences when people do a development project, or there is a football game, there are lots of interruptions to the orderly flow of traffic. Koval interrupts and says all those have obtained a permit to disrupt the orderly flow of traffic. He says there is a system to get permission. Kuharski says that “reasonable” is not a consideration. Koval says what he can do on Saturday at 6am is different than what he can do on Friday evening.
A person asks what services a mental health officer will provide. Koval says that all 455 officers have been through crisis intervention training and they have ongoing trainings and they work with Journey and NAMI to keep them at the top of the game. He says that some officers even have additional training, but if you call the Madison police, you won’t get basic cable service, you will get premium service, those officers won’t be constrained by time. There hasn’t been a single forum where someone has raised issues and asked who to contract. He says that he has 18 officers that are an auxiliary officers that respond when there are mental health issues, but he wants to see that expanded. He talks about an incident in 1988 when he had an issue with Laurie Dan who he went to check on, he went in with a pass key from the landlord, probably violated the 4th amendment under the rubric of community caretaker, wen tin and evaluated her and was told by a private mental health professional that she was ok and he left and 5 days later she killed a child and herself. On his 3rd day as chief a mentally disturbed person is having a break down and stabs 3 people killing 2 of them. He challenges his officers and they have to take his life. He talks about talking to Paul Ashe at ST. Vincents and he asks if its just him that there are more calls, Ashe says that people are coming in sicker. There is no respite, no help coming from state or county. So he’s going to try something. There has been incredible pushback, they are not social workers, that is not what officers should be paid for. He has put in political capital and its going to happen. Not everyone in his department agrees, but he thinks it is the role of the police. It is going to happen.
Eric Upchurch asks what is “it” that is going to happen. He says the police will do more to connect people to services. Upchurch says that a trained professional gave an assessment in his example, but he asks how his officers will substitute their judgement for some who is licensed and deals with people all the time. Koval says they are not in a superior position, but the credentialed people are not there 24/7 to deal with the crisis in the moment, they are there in the moment.
Upchurch asks what the purpose of the community forum is. Koval says that he made a commitment to have these be accessible, sometimes people want to grill the chief and he said he would do that on a quarterly basis and this is the 3rd round of these forums. Upchurch asks what people can hope to achieve by grilling the chief. Koval says that in some instances it is to vent. Or to discuss particular needs in a district, he brings experts from the district to explain what they have done. He says it informs him about issues that are trending, outside of the electronic world we live in. He says he comes with no agenda or pretense other than to be available. Upchurch asks what he does with what he hears from the community? Koval says he tries to process it at a level that is reasonable for him a chief of police, he can’t over promise something he can’t deliver. He has been chagrined over the fact that his heart might be with the people incarcerated in the Dane County Jail, he statutorily can’t do what only the sheriff can do. There is sometimes a blurring of the jurisdictional lines of what he can do reasonably or legally. He does think it is important that when he hears someone’s life is changed unalterably that is tough to listen to, but he has to hear it. He tried to apologize, that was a sad commentary on a system that didn’t work, it was a miscarriage, based on his version of the events. Upchurch says he gets it was tough to listen to, but right now we will all go home and go to sleep, but that man was homeless. So were the two other men that were here. To try to say that you are sorry, you can see how much that meant to him, (he left), trying to be sorry doesn’t help the situation, he’s still living it. You can’t change that mans life or those that have gone through worse things at the hands of the people that you are in charge of. So while you don’t have the jurisdiction to let people out, there is still an accountability and responsibility to these people. Koval agrees.
Upchurch says that we have been hearing from the community and some people want more police, from the majority of people he hears from they have a different view, that the police are there to serve. It hard for anyone to predict systems that work when you come from a different background. We live in a city with 6% black population but the 50% are incarcerated and 75% of children live in poverty. This is your city. Koval interrupts and says it is our city, we all have a role to play in solutions as well as identifying problems. Upchurch says that he gets that no one wants to say that they are part of the system, part of the disparities but people are, systems are. You just mentioned a systemic problem. Koval says he doesn’t think the Madison police have ever denied it. At least he has not as the police, they are accountable for what they have an ownership stake. Upchurch says that we all play a role in perpetuating this, when it comes to your policing efforts and top of the line training, the training that you have also plays a role. To say that the police play a role but the training does not, doesn’t make sense. When you are cracking solutions to address disparities. Any solution you come up with, there needs to be representation of people affected and expertise. He asks when you attempt to address a disparity, what do you do differently and what role does the Madison police department play in those disparities.
Koval says he started out by lauding the backbone and character of the people they select and the caliber in which they come, he doesn’t apologize for the selection process, it is inclusive and thorough. The vetting process is far beyond the academy that addresses biases and cultural competencies. They talk a lot about social sciences that lead to the root causes of the disparities. But at the end of the day, there is nothing in and of itself that they can point to and fix overnight, they are trying to elicit input from community stakeholders about what needs to improve, that is one of the reasons he is here. He says one of the problems is how the dialog has gone on because while some have said they are concerned about how African American men are profiled in the neighborhood, he is also concerned about how 32% of African Americans are victims. We are always concentrating on offenders but he wants to concentrate on those that are victimized and why and how we can help them better too.
Upchurch says he doesn’t have a problem with that. He assumes there are processes that might need to be looked at the might play a role in disparities, he just says that they are attempting to address the disparities and he is not hearing how the chief feels that they play a role, you said there is a role, he wants to hear the chief’s view. Koval says that he expressed his views in the sense that he will work on legislative changes, he is looking at the big picture, he can’t look at everything all at once, he has to look at the things he has control over (the state legislature? that’s what he thinks he has control over? nice deflection.) He says the bottom line is that he will never meet people’s expectations, but he can only try.
Cristina Lor says that she works for 2 nonprofits on Willy St. and this is the first time she heard of a forum and less than 10% of people here are people of color, what are you doing to get people out to the forums to have an open dialogue. She feels that the two men that were here, you were being very dismissive to them. When someone in a minority speaks up and you are dismissive of them it shows everyone else they don’t want to talk to you because you be that way to them too. When the woman raised the issue of you dismissing YGB because they used swear words . . . Koval (oh so ironically) interrupts (and dismisses) again and says he was talking about the swearing in terms of protected speech. Lor says “so then you dismiss their message?” He says that he can’t disregard dropping f-bombs in a private mall is protected speech. Lor says that throughout the entire conversation she didn’t hear anything about what UGBs message was until Eric showed up, it was only about their action was wrong, not their message. She says that she doesn’t see the people she works with on a daily basis that are impacted by the police and when they do show up and are dismissed I don’t blame them for not coming here. Chief says that because they had limited time and they had vented and were going into personal anedotes he tried to cut them a little slack. She has to interrupt him to say that you just said that a part of the reason for the forum was for people to vent, for you to listen. Koval says that was very clear, he got that message loud and clear. (Hmmm, he was the one who said it, who’s he getting the message from?) She says the the chief was more civil to Eric. The chief says that is your perception and your opinion. Lor says that she is one of his constituents and to dismiss her because she is one person who is speaking up, when you do that no one else is going to line up behind her to speak up because of the way you do talk to people, its very condescending. Koval says he is sorry that is the impression he gave and he did not intent that. He was just trying to create decorum so more people could contribute, and if that was an unintended by-product then he apologized to her and to them. That was not his intent. She tries to speak again and the chief says he is not polished and he is likely to be contentious, that is a part of him, he doesn’t mean for it to be disrespectful, but he is determined in his resolve to do what he thinks he needs to do for the city and that means representing everyone (oh, yeah, the poor privileged white man needs representing too) and to the extent that the neighborhoods keep coming up in the issue bin, whether people like me or hate me is really inconsequential at the end of the day, that is not the legacy he is going to leave, the legacy that he is going to leave is that all of our people, as a matter of constitutional rights, have the fullest understanding and appreciation for equal protection of the laws, which means the police will be in all the neighborhoods. She says she is not saying to get out, she doesn’t think that you should appease people like the first lady said, she thinks he should listen and then take some concrete steps, she wants to see him try to solve the problem. This forum is just propaganda to have people say you are a good person, to make people like you, but you’re not actually doing anything on the group that helps the people, that helps the victims. She has been a victim, she got run over by a car, and you know what the police officer told her, she needed to up and move out of the neighborhood, it was Carling, next to Allied Drive, she was fortunate to get out, some people don’t have that luxury. The police department is part of the problem, and she wants to see something change, not hear that you agree with me. Koval says that he needs to agree to disagree, he is serving the community by upping the ante by having officers that serve those neighborhoods be a social worker with a badge, that is how they are at their best, relationally, he’s sorry she doesn’t agree with that tactic and that is what they are going to do moving forward. Upchurch says that they are not social workers. Koval says no, they are not and then leaves the room while people are still talking to him. He puts on his jacket and says all he can say is that he has heard from a lot of constituents and he feels welcome.
That’s two hours of my life I want back. I’m really sad that the chief thinks that his style and behavior are acceptable, I don’t know how we move forward with that kind of attitude – I now understand better why YGB thinks their only option is to take it to the streets, cuz there isn’t really any talking to this guy.
Audio
This was a dumb way to do this . . . but it works for now.
