photos by Dan Bishop
Even before Ed Flynn came to town, anonymous attacks against him began arriving in the mailboxes of Milwaukee Aldermen and reporters.
One “manifesto,” as it was called, was full of anti-Flynn material, mostly accusing the candidate for Milwaukee police chief of incompetence.
Flynn already had critics murmuring about his head-spinning resumé of jobs, most lasting four to six years. He’d only been police commissioner in Springfield for 18 months and was already wangling for a bigger job, provoking anger among political leaders in the Massachusetts city.
Now, Flynn was scheduled to meet Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Barrett was almost sold. The Fire and Police Commission had reopened its search at the last minute to bring in Flynn as a candidate, all with Barrett’s blessing. It was widely assumed he was the mayor’s choice.
And why not? The two men were both Irish-Americans, products of Catholic schools, from about the same generation. But beyond these similarities, they are two very different people: Flynn is edgy, with a Jersey cop’s humor, who calls criminals knuckleheads and nitwits; Barrett is a mild-mannered liberal who pulls his punches. Flynn gets out front on issues and takes the flak; the ever-modulated Barrett waits for consensus to build. Flynn has grabbed job after job in city after city; Barrett lives with his wife and passel of red-haired kids just blocks from where he grew up.
All of which left the mayor a little worried. “I knew I was going to live or die by this decision,” Barrett confesses. His predecessor, Mayor John Norquist, had twice chosen police chiefs he later regretted. Barrett needed to be seen as taking bold action, given a growing public perception that crime was out of control, and the police department needed cleaning up after the Frank Jude corruption case.
Flynn certainly seemed a bold choice. He stood out at the finalist interviews of the Fire and Police Commission, wowing its members with his intellect, national connections and communication skills. “Ed Flynn has the ability to talk a dog off a meat wagon,” says Mike Tobin, the Fire and Police Commission’s executive director and a former Milwaukee cop.
Flynn is also a compelling physical presence: tall, iron-haired, fit (he once rode a bicycle 233 miles) and energetic. He has what one observer calls “command bearing.”
But was he too good to be true? The next day, as Flynn sat before the mayor in his City Hall office, Barrett tried to take the man’s measure. He couldn’t help remembering the old movie musical about a traveling con man who hoodwinked Midwestern towns selling instruments for a boys’ band.
“How do I know you’re not the Music Man?” Barrett asked.
The question might have thrown some candidates, but Flynn loves that sort of fencing. He once got a police chief’s job in part by quoting Shakespeare and Disraeli. He has been known to recite Cyrano de Bergerac and shift seamlessly into detailed discussions of the Balkans.
“Ah, Professor Hill. I love Professor Hill,” Flynn said with a smile. “But, you know, at the end of the movie, Professor Hill did have a band.”
The mayor was charmed. The vote by Barrett’s Fire and Police Commission appointees was unanimous. And within a few months of taking the job, Flynn had won over even aldermen who opposed his appointment, like Bob Donovan and Bob Bauman. “He’s very polished, very articulate, very sharp,” Bauman marvels. “I’m very high on him,” Donovan gushes.
Almost everyone seems to be. The police union. The head of the local NAACP. Community activists. Conservative talk show hosts. Groups that normally agree on nothing have all embraced the new chief.
In Flynn’s first year, homicides plummeted to their lowest number since 1985. Nonfatal shootings and other crimes declined. Meanwhile, morale is up in the department, says police union President John Balcerzak. The union has a history of tormenting police chiefs. Flynn? “It’s really strange, but I agree with almost everything he’s done,” laughs Balcerzak.
In their rush to canonize Flynn, are Milwaukeeans missing some darker side? “Even the Greek gods had human foibles,” the chief can’t help noting.
Questions still linger about Flynn’s past. And his commitment to Milwaukee. The Music Man always left town – until he fell in love. More than one year after taking the job, Flynn’s wife still lives in Virginia, while he lives alone in a Downtown condo. Could he finally settle down here?
Milwaukee Lieutenant of Detectives John Hagen loves the new chief, but has no doubt Flynn’s star shines too brightly for a long marriage to Milwaukee. “It’s like Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie,” Hagen says. “Eventually, she leaves him, and is anyone really surprised? I mean, she’s Angelina Jolie and he’s Billy Bob Thornton.”
Childhood Tragedy
Edward A. Flynn III was born in Newark, N.J., into an educated family that saw public service as a calling. When a Milwaukee radio station asked Flynn to be a guest DJ over the holidays, he read a Christmas story his grandfather wrote about public service being “rooted in the Christian tradition.”
Flynn calls his family legacy the “Irish story in reverse” because his grandfather was a doctor, but he became a cop. At this rate, his son should be carrying sod back in Ireland, he jokes.
His family was “lace curtain,” not “shanty” Irish, Flynn notes, but central to his upbringing was the tragedy of his father. “My father was the crown prince of his family – an all-star athlete, a paratrooper, three purple hearts … and a paraplegic, who developed a terrible problem with alcohol,” he says.
His father was wounded three times fighting in Normandy. He read Rudyard Kipling to his son and encouraged him to memorize facts about the Battle of Hastings. Flynn was just 12 when his father died of a stroke while studying for his master’s degree in English lit. “Alcohol ruined his promise,” says the son.
The family survived largely on disability checks. “We still came up with enough money to send me to the best high school in the region,” Flynn recalls.
Years later, at the FBI Academy, Flynn realized almost every agent and cop had an alcoholic parent. Such kids often turn out “super responsible,” he says. “I certainly felt somehow that I was in a universe where I had to be responsible.”
He was also the only child, and worried about his parents. “I think he saw himself as the caretaker,” says his daughter, Courtney Holcombe, a 28-year-old English teacher.
“When you’re a kid,” Flynn recalls, “and your dad has to count on you to get from place to place by pushing his wheelchair, and you’re asked to push him into a tavern, and you know it’s not a good idea because your mom will be mad at you, and you push him in, you’re grappling with the reality of your heroes.”
That prepared him to be a cop and deal with a city’s dark side, Flynn believes. “I had the tragic sense sooner than most,” he observes.
Flynn’s wife, Susan, says he drifted academically after his father died. His mother remarried and had four more children. She ran a mail-order business selling mustard and ham; the stepfather, a Latvian immigrant, worked for the New Jersey welfare department, where Flynn also took his first job (he doesn’t bring up his stepfather much). A brother interested him in high school forensics.
“He blossomed in that,” Susan says.
Catholic education also shaped his values, Susan says. It was an austere pre-Vatican II environment, a world of priests and disciplinarian nuns, moral absolutes and expectations of service. “He does everything in threes,” jokes Anne Schwartz, Flynn’s public information officer. A few minutes later, he refers to “crime, fear and disorder,” his signature catchphrase.
Flynn references Catholicism in explaining his management style. “It’s rigid, but there are exceptions. It’s all about intent,” he says. Though Flynn overruled a Milwaukee district captain who dismissed a traffic ticket received by state Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee) this winter, he spared the captain punishment. She was the one who told commanders about it. That, he told the media, made the difference.
Susan was a middle school guidance counselor who met Flynn in 1969 when both worked in a Jersey Shore hotel. He was studying history in college. She thought he would be a lawyer. “I knew he was ambitious and smart,” she says.
Instead, Flynn took a policing job in a Newark suburb, then moved with his new bride (they married in 1973) to Jersey City.
“Growing up, he always presented law enforcement as a noble profession,” recalls his son, Patrick, a Washington, D.C., police officer. “Something you do to serve something larger than yourself.”
“It is a purpose-driven life,” Flynn observes of himself. “I am an idealist … and I am ambitious. The gap between the two gets filled with guilt,” he once explained to a Massachusetts reporter.
He spent 15 years in Jersey City. One newspaper profile described him as a “straight-shooter” and college guy who came home while other cops hit bars. Flynn would leave his shoes and gun near the door, Susan recalls, in case something happened in the neighborhood. He once ran out wearing his boxer shorts to chase a thief.
“He was of good character, physical condition and high ethical standards,” says Paul Wolleon, Flynn’s partner in a high-crime precinct. “When the situation gets worse, he gets calmer.”
He was always first on civil service tests. He obtained a master’s degree, worked toward his doctorate (he remains a dissertation short) and was promoted every couple of years. But he came to realize the changes he felt were needed in the department would never happen. Frustrated, he decided he wanted to run things himself.
His first job as chief, in small-town Braintree, Mass., came in 1988. A few years later, he took the same post in Chelsea, Mass., then Arlington, Va. Then came a job as public safety secretary for Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts, followed by Springfield, and now Milwaukee.
Yet for all those moves, Flynn’s wife of more than 35 years and his two children say his family life remained stable. He presided over Sunday dinners, made pinewood derby cars, taught catechism, coached softball, and he now hangs out with the grandkids.
Courtney was only 8 when the family moved to Braintree. In her teens, boys called the house who “were a bit too old, and my father would pick up the phone, and I’d never hear from the boy again.”
“He’s always been a strong man who respects his family and community,” says Patrick, who as a boy looked up in awe to his uniformed father.
“He separates work and personal, and doesn’t close himself off to us,” Courtney says. “He really modeled for me how a man should be.”
Yet his intense dedication to the job created strains. Patrick remembers his father coming home for dinner, only to leave again to check out what was happening on a routine patrol.
Susan stopped moving with him after Arlington. Her children, friends and job (she’s near her pension) were all there. “The last few moves I didn’t make,” Susan says. “I said, ‘I’ll hold down the fort here (in Virginia) while you follow your dreams.’ It’s not ideal, but we’ve made the best of it.”
Besides, she says, noting the 12-hour days he keeps, “I’d just get mad at him anyway.” On some weekends when she comes to Milwaukee to visit, her husband ends up going into work part of the time.
It almost seems like Flynn isn’t living here yet. He stays in a Downtown condo by himself, eats takeout from Metro Market and flies home to Virginia for holidays. Asked what he does for fun, Flynn mentions solitary pursuits: watching TV, reading, going to movies, working out. He likes Brewers games and sometimes goes alone.
“His job consumes him,” says Courtney. “A big reason he can go and challenge himself is because my mom is in the background supporting him. She’s always been the person he can depend on and trust.”
Flynn jokes about “all the houses” they own. They still have a Springfield condo that’s up for sale, a Boston home that’s rented out, and the Virginia house where Susan lives. “Every dream has its price,” he says.
“I said to him, ‘You’re a guy renting an apartment alone in Downtown Milwaukee, let’s hang out and have dinner,’ ” says Bauman. “And he said, ‘Oh, this and that and the other, I have a tight schedule.’ ”
Asked to name a friend outside police work, Flynn comes up with Brent Larrabee, who’s known Flynn for 20 years, but is a Connecticut police chief. Says Larrabee, “Ed thinks about policing all the time.”
“I don’t think he can stay anywhere too long,” says John Polio, who grew up in Braintree, served as its police chief before Flynn did, and still lives there. “He goes in, makes a name for himself, and then disappears. I’d have to be a psychoanalyst in order to understand it. Ed, in my opinion, is restless. He’s an itinerant chief.”
Street Smarts
One book was decisivein turning Ed Flynn into a cop. It was during his college years in Philadelphia, which he recalls as part of the “whole Peace Corps soup of the late ’60s. ‘What you can do for your country’ and all that.’”
One day, he happened upon The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, the watershed 1967 report by President Lyndon Johnson’s Crime Commission that stresses rehabilitation. “It was idealistic,” Flynn says. It captured his imagination.
Soon after, he attended a campus lecture by New York cop David Durk, who exposed police corruption alongside Frank Serpico. A Washington Monthly article says Durk “traveled to bitterly anti-war, anti-police college campuses trying to recruit students to become police officers.”
“He made me realize police work was more than people breaking heads,” Flynn recalls. He would gradually come to believe the solutions to crime could be found in the brain – and academic research.
Jim Burack, a Colorado chief who’s served with Flynn on panels, has said that Flynn, while in Jersey City patrolling high-crime precincts, decided “the mouth” was a police weapon that could defuse situations. Flynn once confronted a suspect when he had no way to call for backup. “His salvation was the gathering behind him of a few local residents he’d befriended,” Burack explained.
In 1982, Flynn happened upon a magazine article that changed his career and American policing. Two criminologists, including the Milwaukee-born George Kelling, had developed a “Broken Windows” theory. For years, cops were reactionary, consigned to squads, responding to calls. Broken Windows got them out of cars and made them proactive, restoring neighborhood disorder by taking smaller offenses seriously. The philosophy – wedded with targeted crime data – helped reduce crime dramatically in New York.
Community policing, Flynn contends, resembles the U.S. Army’s Special Forces. “They can’t ‘invade’ and leave” a neighborhood, he notes. “Well they can, but gains evaporate,” he says. “Police need to be a stable, trusted presence.”
Such intellectualism won him his first job as Braintree’s chief. “After his first interview, everyone was awestruck,” says Peter Morin, who was on the personnel board. “Everyone was like, ‘Wow, you should have seen this guy. He was trading Shakespeare quotes.’ ”
“The capacity of his brain for random knowledge is shocking,” laughs his daughter, who says her father requested only historical biographies for Christmas and got six. Once, after listening to his father give a lengthy, dazzling speech, Patrick Flynn peeked at his dad’s note cards. They contained only a few lines.
“Ed brought Braintree police into the next century,” says Jim Casey, a city politician. Car thefts were the biggest problem; they dropped 40 percent. “Every place he’s gone, he’s left it better than he found it,” says Larrabee.
In Chelsea, the chief’s office was in a nearly 100-year-old tenement. An ethnically diverse urban suburb of Boston, Chelsea was racked with socio-economic ills, Mafia hoods, and police and political corruption. Flynn put officers on foot, empowered captains, improved technology and tightened professional standards – the template he would later follow in Milwaukee. Crime in Chelsea dropped 28 percent. “He was ahead of his time,” says current Chelsea Chief Brian Kyes.
Flynn came to the attention of Kelling at conferences. Soon, he was serving on national policing boards and would no longer have to hunt for jobs.
In Arlington, Flynn commanded 330 officers in a community six times the size of Chelsea, across the Potomac from D.C. Serious crime dropped 16 percent. On Sept. 11, 2001, his officers were first responders to the attack on the Pentagon.
His growing reputation attracted the attention of Romney. As his public safety director, Flynn was in charge of Homeland Security and oversaw a $1 billion budget and 10,000 employees. But the job ended after Romney decided to run for president. Even in Springfield, crime dropped in most categories (except homicide) during Flynn’s 18 months there. But it’s in Milwaukee, with the city’s concentrated violent crime, that Flynn’s strategies will truly be tested.
The department here was so technologically inept that it couldn’t routinely pull up basic crime data, despite its new communication center running $40 million over budget. Flynn reached out to business leaders for funding to help upgrade the technology. He also created a “Neighborhood Task Force” that uses the data to target high-crime areas. “We are keeping criminals off balance,” says Steve Basting, the commander who oversees the task force.
Most past chiefs had roving units – sort of an extra district – that targeted crime hot spots, but they lacked detailed crime data. During the long tenure of Chief Harold Breier, cops used pin maps and had telephone operators. “It was like ‘Petticoat Junction,’ ” laughs Balcerzak. Breier used a “carpet-bombing approach,” says Glenn Frankovis, a retired commander. “That turned everyone into our enemies.”
Chief Arthur Jones held CompStat meetings, but officers say the data was sometimes a week old, and the chief ended up playing “yell at cops.” Chief Nan Hegerty held such meetings infrequently. “It was the dark ages,” Hagen says. “There was no data.”
Under Flynn, the Wednesday CompStat meeting in the Downtown administration building is where the police drill down the data. Captains and lieutenants pack the conference room. Flynn sits up front, flanked by assistant chiefs. He’s promoted James Harpole, the most highly regarded internal candidate for chief. Timely, detailed crime maps flash on a screen.
“We were using candles, and then incandescent lights, but now, under this chief, we’re using floodlights,” says Hagen.
Dodge Caravans are being stolen. In District 6, a robber is hitting RadioShacks and GameStops every two to three days. Catalytic converter thefts are a problem. There’s a problem with some Hot Boy gang members who were acquitted in jury trials. Robberies are increasing at bus stops where people congregate because of the cold.
Flynn probes and banters. How many Caravans did the officers stop yesterday? How many “park-and-walks” are they doing? They drill down into overtime, sick leave and citizen complaints. Bar charts for every shift pop up. Every week, one captain stands at the podium and is pressed more. There are daily CompStat meetings, too, through video conferencing.
Flynn’s method combines sophisticated data analysis that targets bad guys combined with softer, community policing ethos. “We can create an environment in which people have a chance to improve their lot because they are no longer afraid to try,” Flynn says.
Hegerty created her task force by pulling officers from districts and backfilling positions with overtime. Flynn’s unit is permanent. Meanwhile, he’s slashed OT costs.
While Flynn works to exactly map the city’s crime patterns, he still lives like a visitor to town. When talking about social cohesion at a community meeting, Flynn is asked to name which streets lack this. “The names of neighborhoods don’t roll off my tongue,” Flynn admits. “I’m geographically challenged.” No one remarks on the irony of a chief who can probably rattle off up-to-the-minute crime statistics, yet can’t name a city street.
Flynn’s changes also include empowering district captains, decentralizing the department and dismantling a caste system that, since Breier, featured an elite detective bureau. This has ruffled a few feathers in the bureau. But the idea is to make the department more responsive to the citizenry, “to empower the guy on the street,” says Stan Stojkovic, dean of the school of social welfare at UW-Milwaukee.
Flynn has made beat cops more visible, holding open-air roll calls and requiring cops to do the “park-and-walks” that put them regularly on foot. “You see a lot of officers in the community walking,” says Mac Weddle, who runs Northcott Neighborhood House.
At one outside roll call, recalls Victor Huyke, editor of El Conquistador newspaper, people applauded the officers along Cesar Chavez Drive. “I like the idea he got the officers out of the car,” Huyke says. “It’s no longer us and them.”
“He’s brilliant,” says Hagen. “But he talks like a cop.”
Flynn calls criminals the “local nitwit clientele” and “the local jerks” and refers to the “lads and lasses” on his police force. Then, without skipping a beat, he’ll note “longitudinal social research studies” on crime. He can sound like a street cop and a Harvard professor in the same sentence.
Tobin offers one telling anecdote. It was August. Tobin and Flynn were headed to a meeting in Tobin’s car. As always, Flynn was in uniform (other Milwaukee chiefs sometimes wore suits). They turned the corner at Seventh and Wisconsin. “Mike, pull over here,” Flynn said.
A homeless man was illegally drinking a 40-ounce beer. “He goes up to the guy and makes him empty out the beer and tells the guy this is not the appearance we want to give to our city and tells him to move on.”
“He’s not just an academic or theorist,” insists Tobin. “He puts ideas into action.”
The Charm Offensive
It’s 5p.m. on a midweek dayand the police chief is still moving fast. His next stop is a meeting of the faith-based African-American Health Network. The small storefront building stands along a desolate block of Vliet Street in Milwaukee’s inner city. The frigid winter day has turned into night. It’s not Flynn’s last stop.
Inside, a group of about 20 concerned citizens – mostly middle-aged to older African-Americans – cluster around small tables in a modest cafeteria. Food is being served. Some have children in tow.
The group meets regularly to talk about different issues. This time, it’s terrorism. What would happen if people refuse to evacuate during a terrorist attack, asks one woman. “Then, they’re going to die,” Flynn blithely replies. He’s relaxed, maybe too relaxed. He throws in a joke about letting the food server at the buffet table join the discussion.
A man wonders why suspicious packages aren’t discovered as quickly in disadvantaged neighborhoods. They lack social cohesion, Flynn says. The neighborhood where a multiple murder recently occurred was “a land of vampires when the sun went down,” he comments.
This edgy humor can be misinterpreted. The chief praised for his communication skills sometimes finds himself creating controversies with his style. But Curtis Marshall, a public health educator who attended the meeting, says later he wasn’t bothered by the off-the-cuff sarcasm. “I just care what’s happening in the neighborhoods. Give me facts, not fluff,” he emphasizes.
Flynn once tested as an introvert on a personality test. His constant jokes are “a way of keeping a distance,” he admits. “They can be bad.”
“Dad’s sense of humor makes me laugh and cringe at the same time,” says his daughter.
Flynn can be blunt, yet charming; winningly persuasive, yet difficult to get to know. In Braintree, “he was aloof,” says Polio. “A hard-to-read person,” says Virginia White, a community activist in Springfield. His daughter notes that Flynn “keeps going into situations as an outsider, so that makes him hesitant sometimes to open up.”
Yet he always seems to charm the media. “There’s a puff piece everywhere he went,” Polio sniffs.
In city after city, he was an agent of change. In Braintree, “He came in like a bull in a china closet,” says Polio. Flynn fired two officers there, sparking union tensions. After five years there, he was offered an insulting one-year contract. He left for Chelsea, where his rapid-fire changes triggered a police union vote of no confidence.
In Springfield, some were upset when Flynn redrew district boundaries. “If you challenge him, he gets sarcastic,” White contends.
As the Massachusetts public safety director, Flynn encountered a Boston Globe crusade against racial profiling. Flynn created a commission to study causes of racial disparities, but didn’t admit racial profiling existed or order departments to document stops, saying such actions could hinder effective policing. It was the sort of tricky two-step – appease community pressure without tossing officers under the bus – that someone like former Milwaukee Chief Philip Arreola never mastered here.
In Milwaukee, Flynn’s first such test was an officer’s altercation with a Hmong motorist, which drew protests from the Hmong community. Armed with eyewitness accounts that exonerated the officer, Flynn jumped to his defense, declaring the police would not “be a punching bag for a group of people looking to develop a constituency at the cost of a police officer.”
Hmong leaders protested and demanded an apology. But Flynn wouldn’t budge. “It set the tone,” says Donovan. Cops saw their chief standing up for them, but some saw it as “insensitive to minorities,” says Jerry Ann Hamilton, head of the local branch of the NAACP. Yet Hamilton herself would soon be won over by Flynn’s charm offensive.
After violence broke out at Riverside High School, Hamilton announced on a black-oriented talk radio show that she wanted to meet parents and students there to discuss the situation. “He (Flynn) called a half-hour later and said, ‘I will meet you there,’ ” gushes Hamilton. “I thought that was so cute.”
Charles Walton, who runs Career Youth Development, says his mother, activist Jeannetta Robinson, also had “a special relationship” with Flynn. The day after Robinson passed away, Walton walked into CYD to find Flynn there to offer condolences.
“We see concrete change,” Walton says. “The removal of drug dealers and dope houses.” Hamilton agrees, saying “Flynn initiates.”
Flynn is just as adroit with the media. For years, the police department was a secretive, insular bunker. After the Jude controversy, Hegerty grew a deep dislike for certain reporters, observers say. Arthur Jones, her autocratic predecessor, basically shut down his public information office. In retaliation, the Common Council cut funding for the public officer position.
Flynn is remarkably open to the media. On occasion, he’s allowed subordinates to speak to the media unsupervised. Past chiefs strictly forbade this. They kept the department locked down, funneling all communication through the public information office.
Flynn has also worked to win over the officers. He wears a plain-blue patrolman’s uniform to the weekday roll call, not the white commander’s shirt favored by other chiefs. He seems most comfortable hanging out with regular cops.
“The day before Thanksgiving, at a 4 p.m. briefing on a search warrant, he walks in and says, ‘Hey, can I come along?’ ” recalls Basting. “I’ve never had a chief do that.”
The chief also attended the union’s Christmas party last year. Flynn, says Barrett, was undoubtedly the first chief to attend in 40 years, and perhaps the first to ever do so. “That’s a triumph in and of itself,” says Bauman, noting the long-standing feuds between the union and past chiefs.
Flynn’s blunt humanity was never more apparent than at a public meeting with residents of a North Side neighborhood where tensions arose because most officers were white. Flynn stepped forward to answer a thorny question posed to a captain. “A bullet has no color on it,” said Flynn, immediately disarming the questioner.
“For him to step up and challenge perception and to do so boldly – it was striking,” says Common Council President Willie Hines. “Yet, he had a manner that put everyone at ease.”
A New Era
Tom Barrett was meeting with Bradley Foundation President Mike Grebe in 2007 when Grebe asked if Barrett would be interested in having George Kelling “help with the police department.” Yes, Barrett said. Soon after this, Hegerty informed Barrett she was retiring. The mayor claims they were unrelated.
Crime was so bad that some people would only mow their lawns if police were nearby, Basting says. Roving groups of “thugs” sat on porches that weren’t theirs. Homicides plummeted, then climbed back, and overtime hours jumped. The department’s technology was so screwed up that Hegerty’s June 2007 crime numbers were actually released by Flynn in 2008. Barrett concedes he felt some frustration with Hegerty.
The Bradley Foundation provided funding to bring in Kelling and his partner, Robert Wasserman, to advise the city on how to improve its policing. Kelling says Hegerty never met with him, which he considered odd. He found a department stuck in a “1950s strategy of policing – wait until something happens, and then respond.”
Some aldermen say they still aren’t clear what Kelling did. Schwartz ticks off a list of items. They are basically Flynn’s agenda: the neighborhood task force, the improvements in crime data.
Kelling also got involved in the search for a new chief. He thought the search seemed reactive, too – put out an ad and wait. Most finalists were younger insiders. Kelling suggested Flynn instead. “I think he is one of the brightest chiefs in the country, along with (Los Angeles’ William) Bratton.”
So here was Milwaukee native Kelling calling Flynn to see if he might be interested. “This wasn’t just anybody,” Flynn says. “It was a guy who is revered in the business.”
Flynn jumped at the chance. But the news of his Milwaukee candidacy sparked a feeding frenzy of negativity in Springfield, where Flynn was already battling opponents. “He was a carpetbagger,” charges Tom Scanlon, police union president. “We made it clear from the beginning we would fight him tooth and nail.”
It was the toughest situation Flynn had ever walked into. “The vituperation and hatred were there at the doorstep,” he says. “I still bear the scars.”
Deeply stung by the criticism for pursuing the Milwaukee job, Flynn called his wife and said he was thinking of withdrawing his name. “I just can’t do it,” he said.
“You don’t owe anyone your dreams,” she responded. She urged him not to drop out.
Springfield remains the low point in Flynn’s hyperactive career. Scanlon accuses Flynn of pressuring commanders to reclassify crimes to lower the numbers, which Flynn adamantly denies. “When you attack someone, you attack their perceived strength,” he says.
Scanlon insists: “The biggest one was auto theft. Violent crimes – there was continuous pressure to downgrade those.” He adds: “There is a sheen to the package, but no substance.”
Balcerzak says there’s no hint of anything similar here. Milwaukee Magazine could find no experts – in or outside the department – who believed the figures were being manipulated.
Flynn, meanwhile, requested the Bradley Foundation extend Kelling’s contract through this fall. That leaves Milwaukee with two of the nation’s top-rated police theoreticians overseeing a new era.
Bratton calls Flynn a “leading light in American policing. He’s part of a new generation of younger guys who think outside of the box.” Of course, Flynn is 60. “Well, he looks like he’s in his mid-40s,” Bratton says.
Tobin, who has worked with six Milwaukee chiefs, has never seen anything like the current one. “Ed Flynn has started more initiatives in the department in one year than I’ve seen in all of the six,” he says.
“He’s re-energized the MPD,” Barrett says. “We are changing the culture,” says Flynn.
If Flynn can sustain the decreases in crime, some say, forget what Boston has accomplished. They might start talking about the Milwaukee Miracle.
But will that be enough to keep him here? “I want to be wanted back,” Flynn says. “I’ve been looking my whole life for a challenge of this magnitude. The stars all aligned here.”
Of course, homicides jumped last year in Chicago, not to mention several other cities in bigger media markets than Milwaukee. Could that tempt Flynn to make just one more move?
“He’s getting noticed,” muses Bratton. “Like most major chiefs, you don’t close any doors.”
“Don’t use that quote,” Flynn says.
He’s joking. Maybe.
Jessica McBride is a UW-Milwaukee journalism lecturer. Write to her at letters@milwaukeemagazine.com.
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Sidebar: The Flynn/McBride Affair
The Journal Sentinel reveals writer Jessica McBride’s affair with Flynn. McBride explains that affair started long after she wrote the story. Milwaukee Magazine editor Bruce Murphy offers the magazine’s take on the controversy.
And in light of criticisms that writer McBride wrote a “glowing” article on Chief Flynn because of their later affair, we’ve taken the unusual step of publishing all the major cuts made in editing the story by editor Bruce Murphy. McBride turned in a 7,600 word story which was cut to about 5,400 words, partly through reorganization to reduce repetition, partly through compression of language and also by simply cutting items. These are the major cuts (as they were cut, they have not been copy edited):
-Did it matter if Flynn was a “mobile chief” if Milwaukee benefited from his talents? Many urban chiefs are these days, like school superintendents. Anyway, Flynn also had another career pattern: He reduced crime.
-Down in Illinois, former Mayor Norquist seems jealous. “He sounds like a great chief,” Norquist says. “My hats off to Barrett for finding him. Wish we had…”
-Retired Milwaukee police commander William Fadrowski says police chiefs are like football quarterbacks. They get too much blame – and credit – for numbers. “But the numbers are where the rubber meets the road,” he says.
-Isn’t there anything negative about Flynn? Flynn talks too much, says famed New York and Los Angeles police chief William Bratton, who manages to talk 20 minutes straight himself with barely any questions.
-Flynn periodically scoffs at “psychoanalysis”. He doesn’t give off an Oprah couch vibe even as he discusses his childhood with startling rawness in front of his media spokesperson, a reporter, and two other cops.
-(On his father’s alcoholism): It prepared him to be a cop. He believes police officers go through phases. First, it’s an adventure. Then, they end up on a “diet of unremitting social dysfunction.” Finally, they realize that “this is just the human condition.”
-Catholic references constantly seep into his day. Limited-duty officers who suddenly heal after being made to do police work are “coming to Lourdes.” He jokes at another point, “The Sisters taught me – a woman in uniform, you do whatever they say.”
-Says Paul Wolleon, Flynn’s partner in a high-crime precinct. “When he walks, he looks like a leader.
-The Springfield (Massachusetts) negativity bothered Courtney so much that Flynn had to tell her to stop reading hateful comments no blogs. “It made me protective of him,” she says. “It really bothers me when people misconstrue his actions. He intended to stay there – he bought a place there that he’s stuck with now.
-It used to embarrass her when her parents would spontaneously dance in the kitchen to sentimental songs, but now she likes it
-Ald. Bob Baumann also called the chief twice with concerns about issues. “Once I never got a call back, and the other time an assistant chief called back.” Baumann had Hegerty’s cell phone number. “He’s guarded with aldermen,” concurs Ald. Bob Donovan.
-Flynn explains of the time apart from his wife, “We’re a middle class family. I don’t have John McCain’s income.” He jokes about “all the houses” they own – detritus of careers past.
-Former Massachusetts police chief John Polio on Flynn: “Cripes, he sounds like he’s just come out of Harvard.”
-Victor Huyke, editor of El-Conquistador newspaper, says some Latino leaders were miffed Flynn didn’t reach out early on. “They tried to meet with him, but his schedule way busy.” But Huyke thinks that’s dissipated.
-“Some of it’s dumb luck,” Flynn tells the officers about the decline in crime. Police can’t affect baby deaths and domestic homicides much. “But there is a number that we can have an effect on – how many young men are murdered on the streets, and that number is fifty percent less,” he says.
-Then, Flynn deadpans: “Yes, I went to Boston last month. No, it had nothing to do with the Boston police commissioner’s job.”
-“He’s not just an academic or theorist,” insists Tobin. “He puts the ideas into action.”
-“He’s operationalized Broken Windows,” says Stan Stojkovic.
-In Arlington, a few thought Flynn was brusque, aloof, or formal. One critic said he’d Balkanized the department.
-Flynn – who once told the media he was “an independent who has never registered as a Republican” – considered Mitt Romney pragmatic. “I don’t want to be the darling of the right or the left,” Flynn says.
-A friend calls Flynn a Democrat. But Flynn once joked to a reporter that he might be a Nazi by now if he’d started out as a Young Republican because life, and policing, makes people more conservative. “There aren’t Republican or Democratic solutions to crime, “ he says.
-Over the years, Flynn has spoken out against liberalizing marijuana laws and slammed Miranda Rights. He’s also said that it’s crime that causes poverty, not just the other way around. But he’s upset gun rights’ groups, advocates crime prevention, said conservative talk radio makes his hair hurt, and calls immigration an issue for demagogues. He remains tough to politically categorize.
-Even in Springfield, where he landed next, crime dropped in most categories during Flynn’s 18 months there, with the exception of homicide, which ticked up due to domestic violence cases.
-What would happen if people refuse to evacuate during a terrorist attack, asks one woman (at a community meeting in Milwaukee). “Then, they’re going to die,” Flynn snaps back.
-He’s asked about the defaced Barack Obama poster found at a police district station. He says, “We called in the Secret Service. We turned some nuts to raisins. It wasn’t a political terrorist. It was an active jerk.”
-The chief who can probably rattle off every up-to-the-minute crime statistic in the city and is steeped in arcane historical trivia can’t name a city street. Are we just a conglomeration of red crime dots on a map?
-In Braintree, Flynn also fired two officers, sparking union tensions. Larrabee says the northeast has strong unions – much like Milwaukee. This can lead to tensions, as could Flynn’s role as an outsider.
-With his five-year term up in Braintree, Flynn was offered an insulting single year contract. He left for Chelsea.
-The Chelsea union voted no-confidence in Flynn, feeling he had reneged on contracts. But Kyes says Flynn was a changed agent. “Chief Flynn wanted to get things done.”
-Running public safety for Romney caused some controversies. The Boston Globe crusaded against racial profiling. Flynn created a commission to study causes of racial disparities but didn’t admit racial profiling existed or order departments to document stops, saying such actions could hinder effective policing. It was the sort of tricky two step – appease community pressure groups without tossing officers under the bus – that former Milwaukee chief Phillip Arreola never mastered here.
“He wasn’t super sensitive to the perceptions of the Hmong community,” says Alex Runner, chief of staff to Common Council President Willie Hines. “Still, you have to admire how he stood by the officers.
-In Springfield, when Flynn referred to “nitwits killing nitwits”, some saw it as dehumanizing victims. When a prominent priest pedophile was killed in the state prison system he oversaw during his time in Romney’s administration, newspaper editorial boards criticized Flynn for seemingly blaming the dead man by saying the priest should have asked for more security.
-In Springfield, “he wanted to push our district into a downtown district that years ago was a wonderful Italian neighborhood but now is a crime-ridden Puerto Rican and black neighborhood,” Virginia White says.
-“He has this tendency to identify the enemy in a concrete way,” says Runner. “It can come back to bite him.”
“It’s all PR. They say he’s slick,” says Van Vergetis, a retired Milwaukee police officer of 40 years. But even he sounds unsure, “He’s articulate. I have mixed feelings.”
“It was a backdoor deal,” says Vergetis of Flynn’s hiring in Milwaukee.
“It was a mean-spirited place.” Flynn’s wife Susan says of Springfield.
-Flynn also brought two civilians along from Romney’s administration (to Springfield) and gave them lucrative administrative jobs and equal footing with deputy chiefs. The unions were fighting the control board over officers’ wages, so this fueled their anger (in Milwaukee, for a time, he also brought over a civilian employee from City Hall as chief of staff).
-Sandi Vella, a Forest Park Civic Association board member in Springfield, accuses Flynn of having a “forked tongue”. She says he didn’t deliver on community policing promises. “He was a political animal.”
-But Sheila McElwaine, another activist, says, “He was extremely smart. We were just devastated when he left. Nobody here likes change. That’s why we have the problems we have. He held people accountable.”
-Flynn has navigated scattered mini-controversies. When a Wall Street Journal reporter, John Fund, accused the chief of disbanding a voter fraud unit, quoting a detective, Flynn took to the talk radio airwaves to adamantly deny it. They story, Flynn says, “was 100 percent made up.” Fund counters that he’s “never been treated as shabbily” as he was by Flynn. Fund abruptly hung up before elaborating to Milwaukee Magazine .
-“We were using candles, and then incandescent lights, but now, under this chief, we’re using flood lights,” says Hagen, who is so excited about the department’s new technology that he is practically jumping up and down.
