There is something very odd about the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s coverage of Chief Ed Flynn (at left). It seems curiously slanted.
I am not talking about the paper’s Sunday “Watchdog” report on how police who break the law are themselves policed. This was an excellent story – which took great tenacity to report – exposing what appears to be a systematic problem of going easy on officers who violate the law. They get special treatment from the police and district attorneys they work with.
My guess is you might find the same situation in most cities. As Flynn has noted, police have a disproportionately high rate of alcohol abuse, divorce and suicide, probably because of the stress of their job. So their fellow officers and DAs tend to cut them slack when they go wrong. But whatever the reasons, when insiders get preferential treatment, that corrupts the system. This is just the sort of situation a newspaper should investigate and expose. Bravo to reporter Gina Barton and the JS.
But in doing the story, the newspaper encountered considerable resistance from the police department. After negotiations between the JS and city attorneys, the department “released the rest of the summaries to the newspaper in batches of between 10 and 20 per month over 11 months,” the story notes. “All told, the Journal Sentinel paid more than $7,500 for access to public police records, which the department took 19 months to provide.”
Wow. A 19-month period of dribbling out records at a cost of $7,500? I can tell you, this is just the sort of thing that would outrage JS editors. These are public records, after all, and as far as the media is concerned they have a perfect right to get them – and without delay, damn it. Nothing unites the paper’s editors and reporters more than when any institution dares oppose their power. So you can imagine how this might color how they cover Flynn.
It was while this agonizingly slow release of records was going on that the newspaper published a Watchdog story on police response time. As I noted in a prior column, the story ignored all kinds of national research – which Flynn was happy to provide – showing police response time to calls was largely irrelevant in solving crimes. Flynn has arguably proven this, by cutting crime in Milwaukee while also slashing overtime costs, through the use of a proactive approach to policing. At best this situation might have justified what reporters call a “thumbsucker” piece analyzing the pros and cons of Flynn’s approach, rather than the paper’s half-baked exposé.
But last week the paper added insult to injury, publishing a front-page, top-of-the-fold story once again showing police response time to phone calls about crimes have declined slightly under Flynn. There was almost nothing new here that wasn’t already reported in the story that ran less than three months ago. It feels like a calculated slap down.
Certainly, that seems to be Flynn’s attitude. His department issued a sarcastic press release to “yet another ‘news story’” on police response time, deriding this “supposed investigation.” In short, we appear to have a peeing match between the police chief and the newspaper. Juicy stuff, but not good for the community.
Meanwhile JS columnist Eugene Kane did a Sunday column on Flynn that seems to damn him with faint praise, wondering how the police chief managed to get his contract renewed by the Fire and Police Commission. Kane also wonders how Flynn would have survived the scandal of his affair with “a local female journalist.” (Full disclosure, writer Jessica McBride had an affair with Flynn after writing a profile on him for Milwaukee Magazine). Kane then quotes former police officer Lenard Wells, who says “That wouldn’t have been accepted in any other city.” I don’t know if Wells was referring just to the top 50 cities Milwaukee is routinely compared to, but what exactly is his proof for this statement? We’re supposed to believe that a socially conservative town like Milwaukee is more forgiving of sexual affairs than other cities? The fact that Kane would include such a silly quotation, and that no editor would challenge this, speaks volumes about the paper’s attitude toward the chief, and how that may be distorting coverage of him.
UW’s Incredible Shrinking State Funding
Last week came the news that Gov. Scott Walker’s (at left) administration is asking state agencies to plan for another $300 million in cuts over the next two years, and that the UW System would get hit the hardest. Meanwhile, Walker is asking for no cuts from a number of other program categories, including the state’s technical colleges.
Since the 1980s, funding for the UW System has been slashed. State aid paid for about 46 percent of the UW System in 1980 and dropped to 24 percent by 2010, according to the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance. Technical colleges are a much smaller part of the state budget, but I suspect their funding from the state has dropped similarly during this period of time. The key difference is that technical colleges can turn to the property tax to help compensate for losses in state funding: Milwaukee Area Technical College has steadily increased its property tax levy since the 1980s. UW has only one recourse: jacking up student tuition, which has skyrocketed since the 1980s.
Walker offered no reason why he was asking for more sacrifice from UW and none from the technical colleges, but one guess is that he sees the technical colleges as likely to provide more potential employees for manufacturing companies, some of which have said they are having trouble finding skilled workers.
But surely the UW System does as much to drive the economy as the state’s technical colleges. The unaddressed issue, as Walker and past governors have made successive cuts in UW funding, has been the question of programmatic efficiency. To take just one example, there is abundant evidence that the pay of MATC instructors is out of whack (the average exceeds that of professors nearly every UW institution), while UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee professors are paid less than those at peer institutions, according to the WisTax study.
There is a big policy question here that is not being addressed: how the technical colleges and UW institutions overlap and relate to each other, and how to maximize their efficiency and impact. This is a hugely complex puzzle that would not be easy to solve, but until state policymakers take it on, they will continue to slash away the funding for UW without any sense of whether it’s the best thing for Wisconsin and its economy.
The Buzz
-A new ad for Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain is causing a buzz. It barely features Cain, but is mostly the ruminations of his campaign manager Mark Block, a longtime Wisconsin-based politico who got his start in Milwaukee and worked on the campaigns of Gov. Tommy Thompson and others. The ad is a gritty close-up of Block praising his own campaign and candidate and ending with Block taking a drag on a cigarette just before an image of a smiling Cain comes on. Weird.
