Chief Flynn leaves behind mixed legacy
He served as the head of police for 10 years
Milwaukee’s outgoing police chief has always been a historian.
Edward Flynn, 69, has traveled to Europe to visit the fields and towns where his father and grandfather fought in world wars before he was born.
There, he saw a parallel between his career in policing and his grandfather’s time as a field surgeon — both dealt with dramatic changes in technology and in their professions.
Flynn will retire Friday after more than 45 years in law enforcement, in-
cluding 30 as a chief.
When he first came to Milwaukee a decade ago, some theorized he took the job as a stepping-stone. Now he is leaving the city as its longest-serving chief since Harold Breier, who held the post for 20 years.
Flynn arrived in 2008, heralded as a “changeagent” and only the second outside chief in the department’s history.
He is widely credited with modernizing the agency, introducing new technologies and raising the profile of the department in national policing circles.
His decisions in Milwaukee have not always been popular — and some continued to generate criticism throughout his tenure — but they have substantially changed how the agency operates.
“He did bring to the Milwaukee Police Department a whole world of information and a whole world of connections,” said Michael Scott, director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.
“He’s got a strong personality,” Scott said. “When he thinks he’s right, he thinks he’s right and he’ll let you know that.”
Flynn’s decisions and his personality at times brought him into conflict. In the past few years, he came to be seen as standoffish by political leaders, activists and some residents and rank-and-file officers.
He acknowledged that during a talk last week at Marquette University.
“In the chief job, you have to be willing to alienate everybody at some point,” Flynn said.
A lifetime in policing
Major city police chiefs usually don’t last longer than three years in a given department. Flynn made it 10.
“That’s like a lifetime in policing,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum.
Flynn continued to be well-respected in national policing circles throughout this tenure, despite the criticism he faced in Milwaukee.
“He was one of the voices everyone looked to,” said Charles Ramsey, former police commissioner in Philadelphia and Washington D.C.
Flynn was successful enough to win reappointment twice, but his longevity likely came with a price in public perception, Ramsey said.
“I was in the business and the longer you’re there, the more people forget about the good you’ve done and the changes you’ve made,” he said.
Flynn has maintained that by any “objective measure,” he is leaving behind a model department.
Throughout a series of farewell interviews with local media outlets, he has pointed to data to back up his assertion:
Six of the lowest homicide totals in 25 years occurred in his tenure, though murders spiked in 2015 and 2016 to totals last seen in the early ‘90s.
Citizen complaints have dropped off sharply and use-of-force has declined.
A resident survey in 2015 showed the majority of Milwaukee residents were satisfied overall with the Milwaukee Police Department.
Numerous national awards and grants were given to the department, and other police agencies have traveled to Milwaukee to learn from it.
Flynn, who declined an interview with the Journal Sentinel, has said he blames a polarized political environment and media coverage of crime for the perception that the city is more dangerous than it actually is.
“He’s had some ups and downs,” said George Kelling, a criminologist who pioneered the “broken windows” theory of policing.
The “broken windows” theory holds that focusing on minor quality-of-life problems brings a sense of order to a neighborhood, which in turn helps lower violent crime. Kelling, a Milwaukee native, was instrumental to Flynn’s rise here.
Like Flynn, Kelling highlighted the declining number of citizen complaints as a measure of success. But some have argued complaints have slowed because people don’t understand the process or don’t believe a complaint will lead to a fair resolution.
‘Dots on a map’
Flynn ushered in the era of police data and technology in Milwaukee.
“I think he brought the department into the 21st century,” Mayor Tom Barrett said.
Early in his tenure, Flynn introduced CompStat, a program police officials nationwide use to analyze crime and identify new trends.
In weekly meetings, the chief and his top commanders analyzed data, including crimes, arrests and traffic stops, and pressed district captains about what they were doing to address problems.
His critics have contended Flynn had an over-reliance on data. A draft of a federal review of the department indicated the strategy may have widened the gulf between residents and police.
It also took a toll on the officers, said Alex Ayala, president of the Milwaukee chapter of the National Latino Peace Officers Association.
“At the end of the day, we became dots on a map and that drove a wedge with the community because instead of building relationships, the pressure was on traffic stops and field interviews,” Ayala said.
In many ways, Flynn lived and died by the num-
bers, even as he sought to put crime in a broader societal context, often overlaying data on poverty, housing and educational attainment with crime. The resulting maps showed the same neighborhoods struggled with all of those issues.
Policing organizations have been victims of their own success, in the sense that three or four decades ago, no one expected police to be responsible for crime reduction, said Tracey L. Meares, a law professor and founding director of The Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School.
“The prevailing wisdom in the late ‘60s and ‘70s was that crime was caused by root causes, police are there to respond and bring those responsible to justice,” she said.
Since then, evidence has shown police strategies can make a difference, and agencies have embraced that idea. Now the dialogue has shifted, as police organizations recognize how they operate within a larger social safety net, she said.
Personality clash
Flynn is smart, and he knows it. “I think his intelligence was one of his greatest strengths, and I think for some people it became an issue, because his personality is so strong and forceful,” Barrett said.
Flynn himself acknowledged flaw during his talk at Marquette.
“One of my weaknesses in government life is suffering fools gladly,” he said.
Flynn said he tried to address his shortcomings by having a civilian chief of staff to work with Common Council and other government partners, but the position has been vacant since the council cut the funding.
“I kept having to go to public meetings and be told stupid stuff to which I make faces that kind of invited criticism of me,” he said.
For many, it went beyond that: No one could tell him he was wrong or had a better idea than he did.
Some residents also felt Flynn was indifferent to their concerns.
Flynn only changed his chase policy when he was ordered to by the city’s Fire and Police Commission.
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He continued to insist at Marquette that changing the policy was a bad idea, saying last year the department had 11 crashes involving police chases, but has already had six such crashes so far this year.
Flynn announced a traffic surge in October, less than two weeks after a Common Council committee grilled his top brass about traffic enforcement and residents handed over a petition with hundreds of signatures calling for action on the issue.
Good leaders regularly re-evaluate their decisions to make sure they are not having a negative impact on the agency’s mission, said Sheronda Grant, president of the League of Martin, an association that promotes the hiring and promotion of minority officers.
“When a leader’s ego becomes more important than the lives of those he took an oath to protect, that leader fails,” she said in a written statement.
“When residents believe they have a higher chance of being injured or killed by a reckless vehicle than by a stray bullet, and the leader in control of changing that policy does nothing until forced to do so, that leader fails,” she said.
Flynn’s responses to the in-custody death of Derek Williams, the fatal police shootings of Dontre Hamilton and Sylville Smith, and a series of illegal strip and body cavity searches also came under criticism from activists and some local leaders.
At recent town halls, residents have repeatedly said they want Flynn’s replacement to be authentic, transparent and willing to work and listen to others.
Inside the department
Early in his tenure, Flynn radically restructured the department, shifting it to a patrol-based organization focusing on crime prevention.
He moved many of the detectives into districts and dismantled the traditional gang and vice squads. He created the Intelligence Fusion Center, described as the “nerve center” of the detective bureau.
The Milwaukee Police Association, the union that represents about 1,600 rank-and-file officers, has said this reorganization, and the reduction in detective ranks, made it more difficult for officers to be effective.
“You have to know what’s going on in
the streets. We’ve lost so much of that,” the union’s president, Michael Crivello, told the Journal Sentinel in 2015 when homicides began to spike.
The union and Flynn frequently clashed. In 2014, Flynn received a noconfidence vote from the union’s members after he fired an officer involved in the fatal shooting of Hamilton at Red Arrow Park.
Despite his troubles with the rankand-file, Flynn had strong support from his top brass, many of whom have become chiefs in other agencies.
“His biggest legacy will be in the command staff that he developed,” said Wexler, a national policing expert.
Assistant Chief James Harpole, who withdrew as a finalist to be interim chief, praised Flynn’s leadership. Harpole also will retire Friday.
“He’s been a great mentor,” Harpole said. “I learned so much about the history of policing, policing in America, major city policing and leadership principles.”
‘Pivoting to the future’
Milwaukee’s outgoing chief has left his mark on the department — whether his changes were good or bad depends on your perspective.
Regardless, the to-do list for the incoming police chief looks much the same as it did when Flynn arrived: Build community ties, reduce crime and fear, understand the political landscape, establish trust within the Police Department and at City Hall, appoint a command staff and more.
The mayor and other political leaders have stressed the importance of building police-community relations.
“I think (Flynn) brought us a good distance,” Barrett said. “I want to go farther and that’s what I’m hoping we do with the next chief. I’m pivoting to the future, quite honestly.”
Every Milwaukee police chief, from about 1980 onward, has had to grapple with a city with changing socio-economic factors and demographics, said Scott, the director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing and former professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison.
“And there is just no two ways about it, there is a long legacy of racial hostility, racial tension and outright racism in Milwaukee that the Milwaukee Police Department had always played some role in,” he said.
That history cannot be ignored or understated, Scott said.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re the chief with the best of intentions, you inherit that history and you inherit all of the understandable hard feelings that might exist, the fundamental distrust of the police and the skepticism as to whether anything is really going to change,” he said.
“You do your best to chip away at it, and that’s multi-generational work that’s not accomplished in a couple years or with a few programs.”