When I filled in at Newstalk 1130 WISN earlier this week, I read a great article from The Shield of Integrity, a magazine put out by the Police Officer Defense Fund in southeastern Wisconsin.
The article entitled “Milwaukee Chief of Police Application,” was written by former Milwaukee Police Union President Bradley DeBraska. The article is self-explanatory, and as promised, I’m posting.
Due to the announcement of the impending retirement of Chief of Police Nannette Hegerty the jockeying for position has begun. What will get lost in the whirlwind of political correctness is the truth; therefore I’m recommending the application be reduced to a simple question so as to permit all the candidates the opportunity to dispel the myth that corporate and institutional governance has a tendency to screw up. The response to the singular question should be weighted against the answer given by a recent veteran street officer with many years experience. Hopefully, more than one candidate will remember the truth and carry the logic forward to stop feeding social agendas in the Milwaukee Police Department.
QUESTION: “I would like to know how it is possible for Police Officers to continually harass people and get away with it?”
ANSWER: It is not easy. In Milwaukee we average about one cop for every 600 citizens, legal and illegal. About 60% of these cops are on patrol where we do most of the harassing. One-sixth of that 60% is on duty at any given time and is available for harassing people. So, one cop is responsible for harassing about 1000 people daily. When you toss in the festivals, business and tourist attractions that attract people from other jurisdictions, sometimes you have situations where a single cop is responsible for harassing 1500 or more people each day. An eight-hour shift is 28, 800 seconds long. This gives a cop in Milwaukee 19.2 seconds to harass each and every person he’s responsible for on his tour of duty and still find time to have a doughnut and a cup of coffee.
This is not an easy task, most cops are not up to it day in and day out. It’s just too tiring. What we do is utilize some tools that technology has thrust upon us to permit the allotted time for harassment.
The first asset is the phone. People will call us up and point out things that cause us to focus on a person for special harassment. ‘My neighbor is beating his wife’ is a code phrase we use to conceal our real purpose for going to the next door residence of the caller. Another popular code of concealment is, ‘the students next door are having a loud party.’
Then we have these metal things we call squad cars that have special cops assigned to them to harass people that drive. These special cops like to harass the drivers of speeding cars that hit trees and pedestrians, cars with blasting music in the dead of night and cars with expired registration stickers and the like. Its lots of fun when you pick them out of traffic for nothing more than running a red light while on a cell phone. Sometimes you really get to heap on the harassment when you find drugs, guns, or paraphernalia inside the car. And just maybe, the harassment is worth the 19.2 seconds when you find out the driver has an outstanding arrest warrant. Some people take off running at the sight of a cop. Nothing is more satisfying than running the suspect down like a bloodhound risking your life. When you catch them you can harass them for hours.
When an Officer in Milwaukee has nothing better to do, there are books that give ideas to cops on how to harass people. They’re called law books, Criminal, Penal, Vehicle, Health and Safety, Business and Ordinances to name a few. These books spell out all sorts of things for which you can really harass people. After you read the law, you can just patrol until you find someone breaking this new found idea that was legislated as the will of the people, and harass the living crap out of the law violator.
It’s a pretty rigorous system that’s set up and it works well when you have enough cops to harass the thugs and the cops get away with the harassment. Why, you ask? Well, because the good citizens who pay the tab actually like the fact that the Police Officers harass the bad people in an attempt to keep the streets and commerce safe. So, the next time a thug gives me a one finger wave, that’s a signal that he wishes for me to take a little closer look and maybe I’ll find a reason to harass him.
THE VOTE IS NO APRIL 3
