Detective’s discipline reduced
Sex assault case was mishandled
The Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission has reduced the discipline for a detective accused of mishandling a sexual assault case from a demotion to a 30-day suspension.
Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn demoted Brendan M. Dolan to the rank of officer in April, saying he violated the department’s core value of competency for failure to properly investigate the case. As a result, a sexual assault suspect was left free to sexually assault an 82-year-old woman at a bus stop in July 2015.
The decision to reduce Dolan’s punishment shows commissioners were convinced by his attorney, Brendan Matthews, that Dolan’s supervisors shared the blame for the flawed investigation.
In his complaint against Dolan, Flynn said a fingerprint found at the scene of an earlier assault, which occurred in April 2015, should have prompted Dolan to immediately locate and question the suspect, Stephen Ray Robinson, who was stopped by police six times between the two sexual assaults.
During a hearing Wednesday and Thursday, Dolan testified that his failure to do so was an error that was not caught by his supervisors.
Flynn’s disciplinary philosophy is to severely punish willful misconduct and to be more lenient with officers who make mistakes.
Dolan’s supervisor, Lt. Justin Carloni, testified that he had instructed Dolan to locate and question Robinson. He also told Dolan to alert other officers that Robinson was wanted for questioning, but Dolan ignored the instructions, Carloni testified.
Dolan said that never happened.
If Carloni had said, “Did you interview or locate him, and the answer was no, I haven’t done that yet, we wouldn’t be here today,” Dolan testified. “There wouldn’t be this inquiry or anything.”
In reporting him to internal affairs, Carloni was trying to cover up his own failures in the earlier investigation, Dolan said.
Shortly after Robinson confessed to both assaults, Dolan came in to work and saw Carloni and Capt. James Shepard talking in Carloni’s office.
“I saw my shortcomings and knew it wasn’t going to be good,” Dolan testified. “I asked if I was going to get transferred out. The captain was more worried about what was going happen to him at that time.”
Shepard has since been transferred to internal affairs, and Carloni works in police District 1. Neither of those transfers was for disciplinary reasons.
Dolan wasn’t the first person to be disciplined because of problems with investigations in Sensitive Crimes while Shepard and Carloni were supervisors there.
Last year, two others were demoted for mishandling a different sexual assault case involving a serial rapist.
The rapist, Robert C. Brown, was sentenced to 155 years in prison for five armed stranger rapes, four of which occurred after police had already identified him as a suspect in the first attack.
The lead detective on the case, Amy Stolowski, and her sergeant, Emeterio Guiterrez, were demoted in May 2015 to officer rank. The Fire and Police Commission upheld Guiterrez’s demotion but reversed the decision about Stolowski, restoring her to the rank of detective and giving her a 20-day unpaid suspension instead.
During that hearing, it came to light that cases “were not being investigated in a timely manner,” according to commission records.