NEW POWER TO VICTIMS
LITTLE HAS CHANGED IN MILWAUKEE, BUT A LAWSUIT GAVE
At first, the contents of the manila envelope seemed ordinary: A few pages of a Milwaukee police report about a sexual assault investigation and a video. h But when a reporter hit play, everything changed.
• The man repeatedly denying he’d raped anyone was Kalan Haywood Sr., a politically connected real-estate developer. Months earlier, he’d gotten millions in taxpayer-backed city loans for a new hotel project.
• And his lawyer? Fire and Police Commission Chairman Steven DeVougas, who was single-handedly delaying a vote on whether to reappoint Alfonso Morales as police chief.
• The envelope showed up in December 2019, following a fall full of rumors that Morales was about to lose his job. It was no secret that Morales, a conservative, was not the top choice of Mayor Tom Barrett, a liberal. But even Barrett was urging the commission to schedule an up-or-down vote on Morales’ future. The chief had the support of the rank-andfile. Business leaders and some residents liked his low-key approach, which stood in stark contrast to his predecessor. Crime was down.
Practically speaking, the city was poised to host the 2020 Democratic National Convention, with its myriad security concerns. To many, choosing a new chief seven months before such a huge event seemed unwise.
For weeks, reporters had struggled to figure out why DeVougas was holding up the vote. What if the case against Haywood was the reason?
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s attempts to answer that question exposed leadership failures at numerous city departments responsible for protecting citizens and allocating their tax dollars. Politicians’ efforts to hold individuals accountable and reform broken systems have stalled. Only Haywood’s accuser has managed to force lasting change.
A political attack?
Before writing a story based on the video and partial police report, Journal Sentinel reporters requested an interview with Haywood and DeVougas.
They agreed, and sat down with reporters for nearly three hours. During the meeting, Haywood and DeVougas tried to convince the reporters not to publish a story about the rape allegation, which Haywood repeatedly denied.
He seemed genuinely surprised the case remained open and under review by the district attorney’s office, considering four months had passed since police questioned him.
“A man being accused of essentially raping somebody hurts your core,” Haywood told reporters. “That’s like the worst — I can’t be accused of nothing else. There’s nothing else you can accuse me of that would make me feel, like, that despicable. I can be accused of murder, that ain’t as bad as raping somebody.”
Haywood and Morales knew each other, and Haywood said he thought they had a good relationship. He acknowledged discussing the sexual assault case with the police chief at least once. Other than that, Haywood said the two of them had talked about life, community policing and the Milwaukee Police Foundation, a new fundraising group Morales was trying to start. Haywood had been asked to join the board, but the invitation was rescinded when Morales learned about the reported rape.
DeVougas defended both his client and himself. He said it wasn’t a conflict of interest to go along when Haywood spoke with the detective. Although the video of the meeting showed DeVougas interjecting at least 22 times — none of them with business concerns — he insisted he only went because he was the Haywood Group’s corporate lawyer and the allegations could affect the company. He claimed to have stepped aside as soon as he realized Haywood needed a criminal attorney.
Both Haywood and DeVougas saw the leak of the police report and video as a political attack prompted by DeVougas’ actions on the Fire and Police Commission.
“There’s an active effort to keep the commission from being independent and from doing its job — from the inside and the outside,” DeVougas said. “When you start asking questions and trying to hold people accountable, they don’t play fair.”
DeVougas would continue to promote that idea for months, later convening a news conference where he framed it in stark racial terms: “We can no longer tolerate politics that play both sides against the middle, pandering to Black and Hispanic communities, but doing nothing for either.”
Former Common Council President Ashanti Hamilton, along with several other high-profile Black community leaders, also spoke at the event.
“I’ve known Steve DeVougas since he was a law student at Marquette, and spoke with him then about the commitment to the community and the willingness for people like him to stay in Milwaukee and serve. And he decided to do that,” Hamilton said.
“One of the challenges in serving, especially when you want to do the will of the people, is that sometimes change is not welcome.”
A pivotal vote
The chief’s reappointment was still up in the air.
On Dec. 16, 2019, DeVougas removed the vote from the agenda for the Fire and Police Commission’s last regular meeting of the year, claiming members still had too many questions for Morales.
The next day, the commission’s vice chair emailed DeVougas.
“I just read another Journal Sentinel article in which you … indicated that the ‘commission’ (does) not want to take a vote,” Nelson Soler said in the email, which he copied to the other members. “I am disappointed. … You do not speak for me on this matter.”
Then, Soler called for a special meeting with a single purpose: To vote on Morales’ contract. But unlike DeVougas, who as chair could schedule and cancel meetings on his own, Soler needed another board member to join him.
That commissioner would turn out to be Raymond Robakowski, whose appointment had been approved by the Common Council earlier that day despite some opposition because he was a retired cop whose son was still on the force.
The commission’s executive director, Griselda Aldrete, added Robakowski to the email chain. He quickly seconded Soler’s motion. The vote was scheduled for the following evening.
But the chief’s performance wouldn’t be the only topic of contention at the meeting.
The other one was a Journal Sentinel story focusing on the possible ethical problems posed by DeVougas’ presence at Haywood’s police interview. The story had posted online earlier that day, after the Milwaukee Police Association issued a news release that publicly disclosed, for the first time, much of the information anonymously leaked to the Journal Sentinel earlier.
In addition to blasting out Haywood’s name and calling for DeVougas to resign, the leaders of the union — with its majority-white membership — were pushing for a full, four-year term for Morales.
The meeting, which lasted more than two hours, illustrated the city’s deep divides — along racial and economic lines, and between the city’s booming downtown and its struggling neighborhoods. The racial dynamic seemed to divide people into two camps: either they supported DeVougas and Haywood, or Morales and the union.
In the end, only DeVougas and one other commissioner voted against Morales. With four yes votes and one abstention, he was appointed to a fouryear term.
A concerning leak
Three days later, the Journal Sentinel published a follow-up story based
on the leaked interrogation video and partial police report. The article also raised questions about the Police Department’s decision to interview Haywood at the Sojourner Family Peace Center — which serves victims of domestic violence and sexual assault — despite a written agreement that officers would never question suspects there.
After the story was published, District Attorney John Chisholm called the victim, identified publicly only as Jane Doe, to apologize. So did Carmen Pitre, the executive director of Sojourner.
The mayor never did. Neither did anyone from the Common Council or the Fire and Police Commission.
Their public statements largely focused on one concern: Who provided the information to the Journal Sentinel and why.
When reporters asked about the woman who had reported being raped and possibly drugged, Barrett and members of the Common Council said they were concerned. But they deflected reporters’ questions about the sexual assault allegation, talking about the leak instead. They also didn’t want to discuss the video of Haywood’s police interview, let alone watch it.
They seemed to have little interest in investigating whether police had gone easy on Haywood — who had donated to several of their campaigns — because of his connections.
They said almost nothing about whether it was appropriate for DeVougas to show up when Haywood was questioned about a sexual assault — even though DeVougas had the power to promote or discipline the detective involved.
Until she read the Journal Sentinel stories, Doe had no idea Haywood had been questioned at Sojourner or that DeVougas worked for him.
The leak wasn’t the only thing that traumatized her. What she learned from it did, too.
As she later put in a lawsuit against the Police Department and the city, Haywood appeared to receive special treatment, just as she feared he would.
And no one in power seemed to care.
A likely ethics violation
Only one member of the Common Council wanted to look into DeVougas’ conduct.
Ald. Bob Donovan, a conservative with close ties to the police union who wasn’t running for re-election, asked the city attorney’s office if DeVougas had broken any commission rules about conflicts of interest or standards of conduct.
The response: No — because it didn’t have any.
Further guidance, an assistant city attorney wrote, would need to come from the state’s Office of Lawyer Regulation. Although officials there didn’t open a formal investigation, they said the situation “raised issues that were of concern” and advised DeVougas to avoid similar scenarios in the future.
DeVougas touted that finding as vindication. He wouldn’t step down from the Fire and Police Commission. When one of his fellow board members asked him to take a temporary leave, DeVougas also refused to do that.
DeVougas did resign as general counsel for the Haywood Group effective Jan. 1, 2020, to “allay concerns.” However, he stayed on with the company’s subsidiaries, including HG Sears LLC, which had been established to manage the taxpayer-backed Ikon hotel project.
The other commissioners voted to hire Mel Johnson, a retired federal prosecutor, to investigate the source of the leak and to determine whether interviewing a suspect at Sojourner was appropriate.
Johnson decided to look into DeVougas’ actions as well, but DeVougas refused to meet with him.
Instead, DeVougas provided a letter from his own lawyer, which cited the findings of the assistant city attorney and the Office of Lawyer Regulation as evidence he had done nothing wrong.
Johnson’s final report, released in July 2020, suggested police rushed to question Haywood because Morales was considering him for the board of the new police nonprofit. The fact that the interview took place at Sojourner violated policy but did not seem to indicate favorable treatment, Johnson concluded.
He was unable to determine who gave reporters the video of Haywood’s interview and the nine pages of police reports about Doe’s sexual assault claim. Copies of both had been left unsecured by police, according to Johnson. Employees of the district attorney’s office and the city attorney’s office also had copies.
Johnson concluded DeVougas likely violated the city’s code of ethics by trying to use his position to gain benefits for Haywood.
“That’s seemingly what Mr. DeVougas attempted to do here by representing a criminal suspect in a Milwaukee police criminal investigation, considering his position,” Johnson told the Fire and Police Commission.
Unless he was volunteering his time during the police interview, DeVougas also violated the section of the city ethics code that prohibits city workers from representing “a person for compensation before a department,” Johnson concluded.
Further, DeVougas repeatedly lied when he claimed he’d attended Haywood’s police interview as a real estate attorney, not a criminal one, according to Johnson.
“That contention is simply false,” his report says.
“DeVougas has been consistently untruthful about his role in the Haywood interview.”
A refusal to resign
So far, neither Haywood nor DeVougas has faced legal or professional consequences.
Haywood has not been arrested or charged in connection with Doe’s case. While the investigation is pending, he has continued to use city funds for his work on the Ikon hotel project, which has been delayed due to the pandemic.
The Ikon hotel was to be completed by the end of 2022. But in December, Haywood declined to say when it might open.
“Everything’s a moving target,” he said after acknowledging his company had been late to pay the building’s 2019 property tax bill of $52,329.
DeVougas, whom the mayor initially named to the Fire and Police Commission in 2013, didn’t run for re-election as chair in the wake of the independent investigator’s report last summer. At the time, Barrett suggested it might be best for DeVougas to leave the board altogether, but he refused.
Although Barrett appointed DeVougas, the mayor didn’t have the legal authority to remove him. The Common Council, which under state law could do so “for cause” with a three-fourths majority, didn’t take action, either.
A month after the report was released, DeVougas used his remaining power as a commissioner to help force Morales out. The board gave the chief a series of directives with tight deadlines, including one prompted by the leak in Doe’s case: an audit of the way sensitive crimes evidence is stored.
At the time, DeVougas said the office of newly elected City Attorney Tearman Spencer had reviewed the directives and determined they were legal. That contradicted Morales, who contended he’d asked the city attorney for a written legal opinion but never received it.
The directives followed widespread protests prompted by the killing of George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis police officer drove a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes. They also were the culmination of months of tension between Morales and DeVougas. The clash between them got so bad, the mayor described it as a “blood feud.” DeVougas emerged victorious. Just eight months after giving Morales a four-year term as chief, the commission unanimously voted to demote him back to captain. They also named a new acting chief: Michael Brunson, who had been passed over in favor of Morales two and a half years earlier.
A claim for damages
Morales retired and promptly filed a claim against the city, seeking $625,000 in damages and reinstatement as chief. In it, he noted that the city attorney’s office had earlier sent a letter to Barrett saying one of the directives was illegal. The letter had advised Barrett to consider overturning it, but the mayor had done nothing.
After the claim was filed, City Attorney Spencer, who had never held elected office before and previously specialized in real estate law, quickly conceded Morales had been denied due process. A judge agreed and reversed the commission’s decision to demote Morales, upending the group’s search for a new chief and all but ensuring Morales a settlement. Because the city is self-insured, any money he receives will come directly from taxpayers.
The commission and the city attorney’s office have blamed each other for the flawed process, and a recent report from the city inspector general faults them both.
On one hand, commissioners voted to demote Morales without holding a disciplinary hearing even though the city attorney’s office had advised against doing so in emails to Aldrete, then their executive director, the report says.
On the other, Spencer told commissioners they should “do what needs to be done,” the inspector general’s report says. Spencer also offered assurances that his office would support and defend their decision.
In January, nearly a year after the police union filed a complaint against DeVougas, an investigation by the city ethics board finally got off the ground. Once it did, DeVougas resigned from the commission, stepping down five days after the Journal Sentinel reported on his attempts to dodge an ethics board subpoena for his tax returns.
His resignation ended the ethics investigation, since the board only has oversight of city supervisory personnel, elected officials, boards and commissioners.
In his resignation letter, DeVougas once again characterized himself as a crusader whose efforts for reform were thwarted by racism.
“There are many individuals and entities that benefit from the system operating unchecked,” he wrote. “I have watched this system try to keep people of color ‘in their place’ as long as I have lived here — through public lynchings and sensationalism.”
A ‘dysfunctional group of individuals’
Barrett, whose decisive re-election victory in April 2020 gave him the opportunity to choose a new cabinet, reappointed everyone who didn’t retire. That included Aldrete — despite the fact her first year running the Fire and Police Commission was marked by violations of the open meetings law, huge staff turnover and complaints of mismanagement.
A Common Council committee voted 3-2 that she be allowed to continue, but Aldrete withdrew her name from consideration before the full council could vote. She left the agency in October.
“The climate at City Hall today sadly puts a premium on political point-scoring and conflict,” she wrote in a letter to city officials.
She went on: “Regrettably, it is hard not to argue that dysfunction has been baked into the (commission’s) governance structure for far too long, with too many interests pulling in too many dissonant directions, in the end undermining the vision of a strong, independent civilian oversight body.”
Robakowski, the commissioner who initially stepped in to force the vote that gave Morales his four-year term — and had some of the harshest words about Morales when voting to demote him — resigned the same day.
“That’s got to be the most dysfunctional group of individuals I’ve ever worked with, and the pitiful thing about it is none of them has any knowledge of how a police department even operates,” he said at the time.
As a result of his departure, the commission was reduced to six members, who voted three times on a new chief. Every time, they tied.
Although Robakowski’s replacement was confirmed in January, the group will not hold another vote until at least March 18 due to the ongoing legal dispute with Morales. Since the commission again has only six members due to DeVougas’ departure, that vote could result in another tie.
The Milwaukee Police Foundation has yet to fund a significant project; media reports mention only a neighborhood barbecue in the summer of 2019. Raymond Banks, the assistant chief who recommended Haywood for a spot on the foundation’s board, and John Corbett, the captain who ensured Haywood was questioned before its August meeting, both have retired. James Collins, the officer DeVougas wanted fired, resigned last summer.
A system where little has changed
Jane Doe is still waiting for justice. Her prospects improved in early February. That’s when the Milwaukee Police Department agreed to turn over her case to the state Department of Justice, which will report any new findings to the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office.
The move came as part of a settlement in Doe’s civil suit against the Police Department and the city. The deal also requires the department to implement new procedures to safeguard evidence and keep victims informed about the status of their complaints. Further, it mandates annual training on victims’ rights for all Milwaukee police officers and specialized training for officers assigned to Sensitive Crimes, the division that handles sexual assault, human trafficking and child abuse.
While the Police Department initially defended its work on the case, it filed a written apology to Doe with the settlement documents.
In part, the letter said: “In your case, we fell short and we deeply apologize for the trauma and loss of trust this caused.”
It goes on to say: “We are committed to doing better. Please know that your decision to seek accountability has effected real change and will help ensure that we meet our goal to respect the privacy and dignity of all victims in the future.”
The other institutions that failed Doe haven’t acknowledged their mistakes, let alone taken steps to fix them.
Neither Mayor Barrett nor the Common Council has examined the city’s standards for who can serve on the Fire and Police Commission or benefit from tax dollars.
The commission has done nothing to strengthen its ethical standards. Instead, four commissioners voted to reaffirm that the board is governed by the city’s code of ethics and receives guidance from the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. Those policies already were in place when DeVougas accompanied Haywood to his police interview.
Zachary Thoms, initially the lead investigator on Doe’s case, has disputed her characterization of their last conversation, which took place in October 2019. But according to Doe’s interview with the independent investigator, Thoms told her “Haywood wasn’t the only one who wanted the case to go away.”
A new prosecutor took over Doe’s case when the first one moved into a different position. Officials at the district attorney’s office have kept in touch with Doe, but their mandate is to represent the state’s interests, not hers. Even if prosecutors believe she’s telling the truth, they won’t file charges unless they feel they can prove the case to a jury. That may be harder to do because of the Police Department’s decision to question Haywood so early in the investigation, experts have said.
While state law includes strong protections for crime victims, the responsibility for enforcement falls to police and prosecutors. Before the settlement in Doe’s civil suit, victims had little recourse if those agencies failed. Now, they have a clear path forward.
“This settlement shows the power that victims can have when they assert their rights,” said one of her attorneys, Rachel Sattler.
“Victims should not have to ask police to respect their rights,” she said. “But, when violations occur, as Jane Doe has powerfully shown, victims can seek justice from the courts.”