Officer: ‘Could things have been handled differently? ... yes’
The officers and their attorney acknowledged they could have done more.
“As I said during the hearing, did these officers do a great job on the call at issue? No. But they did what was required of them,” Matthews told the Journal Sentinel.
“In this case, these officers will never know what they might have been able to accomplish if they’d been given accurate information — or even the appropriate information,” he added.
The officers raised similar points during their appeal hearing.
“Considering and looking back at the day in question, could things have been handled differently? My answer is yes,” Solati said, addressing the commissioners.
“Could the outcome of the morning been altered by a change in our actions? My answer is I don’t know.
“What I do know is that there was no malicious intent, laziness or lack of care on our part,” he said. “I am truly sorry for the pain the surviving family has had to endure.”
His partner, Kuchta, said he continued
has covered public safety, crime and policing in Milwaukee since 2013 when she joined the Journal Sentinel staff. She was the Journal Sentinel’s lead reporter on Precious Lives, a two-year collaboration between local media outlets exploring the causes and consequences of gun violence on youth in the city. That work was recognized with two first-place national awards from the Society for Features Journalism and was named a finalist for a Peabody Award. During the 2018-19 academic year, she was an O’Brien Fellow in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University where she investigated homicide clearance rates and what justice means for victims’ families. The project was recognized with a first-place national Sigma Delta Chi Award for non-deadline reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Email her at Ashley.Luthern@jrn.com and follow her on Twitter: @aluthern.