The rise and fall of city top cop Alfonso Morales
Popularity and goodwill devolved into conflict
A new chief took over the Milwaukee Police Department, promising improved service for residents, lower crime rates and better community relations.
He enjoyed a period of popularity and goodwill, reorganized the department to suit his vision and touted declining crime statistics. But then high-profile instances of police misconduct and clashes with officials on the Common Council and the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission took center stage. The same people who praised the chief ’s selection to the job wanted him gone.
That was the story of Alfonso Morales — and in many ways, also that of Edward Flynn, his predecessor.
Morales was chosen as chief in large part because he was seen as the anti-Flynn: homegrown talent, focused on investigations instead of patrol, popular inside and outside the department.
In the end, his critics found in him the same problems as the prior chief. He was defensive, unresponsive and unwilling to engage with activists in the streets or residents at public meetings, they said.
Morales’ brief tenure leading the department was marked by tragedy, political infighting, a pandemic and a global protest movement against racism and police brutality — steep challenges for even a veteran police chief. For Morales, they proved overwhelming.
Morales announced his retirement Wednesday, less than one week after the city’s Fire and Police Commission removed him as chief and returned him to his prior rank of captain.
“Mr. Morales has failed the men and women of the Milwaukee Police Department, the people of the city of Milwaukee and he has misled me. And none of this is acceptable,” Commissioner Raymond Robakowski said.
After that, Morales said he had no choice but to leave the department.
“The Lord put me there,” Morales said in a WTMJ radio interview.
“I have no regrets.”
A compelling biography propels him to chief
Those who had the highest hopes for Morales pointed to his background.
Morales grew up on the city’s north side, the ninth of 10 children in a family whose patriarch came to the U.S. from Mexico for better opportunities. A product of Milwaukee Public Schools, he was the first in his family to graduate from college.
Morales often credited his mentors, particularly those from his football career, for pushing him to higher education. One of his professors at Carroll University got him interested in criminal justice, and he joined the Milwaukee Police Department in 1993.
Morales chose the detective track, working homicides and becoming a leader of that unit and the gang crimes squad. He also spent nearly a decade as the commander of the department’s crisis negotiations unit.
“He was a cop’s cop and homicide detective,” said Shawn Lauda, who retired in December from the department after serving as president of the Milwaukee Police Association, the union for rank-and-file officers. “You didn’t want Al Morales investigating you for homicide because you were going to prison.”
In 2002, Morales led the investigation into Laron Ball, who was charged with felony murder and armed robbery. As a judge read the jury’s guilty verdict, Ball leapt out of his seat and tried to escape out a courtroom window. When deputies tackled him, Ball grabbed one of their guns and started firing, wounding one deputy in the leg. Morales drew his own gun and shot and killed Ball.
“Detective Morales reacted quickly, appropriately and heroically,” one judge said at the time.
More than a decade later, Morales had risen to the rank of captain and was in charge of District 2 on the city’s near south side, which has a large Latino population. There, he enjoyed broad support among residents.
“As a captain, he was very accessible and an all-in partner with grassroots organizers,” said Tammy Rivera, executive director of the Southside Organizing Center.
He stayed late into the night to speak in Spanish and English with residents at meetings. He knew every corner of his district and every small business owner. He understood why the undocumented community sometimes feared the police.
By February 2018, when the chief job came open, Morales was working downtown at police headquarters, where he ran a project focused on repeat gun offenders.
The chief’s job wasn’t the first time Morales made his aspirations for leadership known.
He was among five finalists to be named interim Milwaukee County sheriff and was one of three candidates recommended to the White House to serve as U.S. marshal for Wisconsin’s eastern district.
Even his critics say he was a responsive, effective leader while serving as a district captain.
“Those are two different universes, a district and being the chief,” Rivera said.
“One’s a little city and the other’s a whole world,” she said. “It’s hard to say — did the job change him?
Was he the same person? I’d have to point to a very a tangible thing, and I can’t do that.”
Changes inside the department, as tragedy hits
The city’s Fire and Police Commission chose Morales to fulfill Flynn’s term in a process marked by confusion and secrecy.
The commission voted to make Morales interim chief without a defined term. Months later, the commission had to vote twice to give him the position for the rest of Flynn’s term. The second vote was needed after the board violated open meetings law with the first.
To residents, Morales’ personal story was compelling. He seemed like the kind of officer who might be able to mend the city after Flynn’s polarizing tenure.
“A lot of us had very strong feelings about Chief Ed Flynn,” said Angela Lang, executive director of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, known for its get-out-the-vote efforts in some of the city’s most challenged neighborhoods. She said the feeling with Morales was “let’s give him some time and see what he does.”
Morales quickly made changes inside the department. He hired an extremely diverse command staff of women and people of color, something noted even by his critics. He disbanded the Neighborhood Task Force, which Flynn used for high-volume traffic stops in targeted neighborhoods and drew condemnation from residents who felt profiled.
Drawing on his background as a detective, Morales formed the Special Investigations Division to build gang and drug investigations. Morales replaced Flynn’s weekly CompStat meetings, which covered all crime data, arrests and traffic stops, with weekly shoot reviews. This shifted the focus away from statistics and toward people involved in gun violence.
During the new reviews, police, prosecutors, probation officers, federal agents and others examined every shooting, fatal and not, from the prior week. The goal was to solve shootings and stop retaliation. Morales pointed to declining numbers of shooting and homicide victims in 2018 and 2019 as signs of success.
But his efforts were limited by personnel challenges. He consistently had a shortfall in the number
of detectives. Promotional exams stalled for years at the city’s Fire and Police Commission, which experienced its own turnover, and that made it hard for the chief to fill vacancies in his tenure.
Morales also was popular with the rank-and-file, a shift from the prior administration, during which the police union took a vote of “no confidence” in Flynn. His bond with officers strengthened when he became the public face of the department’s grief after three officers were killed in the line of duty within a year — the first such deaths for the department in more than two decades. Morales was hospitalized twice for stress after the death of his friend, Officer Michael Michalski.
“He had an extremely hard time, even though he did an excellent job being a brand new chief,” said Dale Bormann Jr., current president of the Milwaukee Police Association. “He took the time out to try to know the officers and detectives. I think he was dealt a very difficult hand from Day 1.”
“He had an extremely hard time, even though he did an excellent job being a brand new chief. He took the time out to try to know the officers and detectives. I think he was dealt a very difficult hand from Day 1.” Dale Bormann Jr. President, Milwaukee Police Association
Promises broken, progress stalled
When he was hired, Morales pledged to listen to residents and work with them to solve problems, demonstrating the very basis of community policing.
Instead, he would quickly leave after giving presentations at public meetings and before residents could ask questions. Advocacy groups were met with silence from Morales when they proposed policy changes or expressed concerns.
“The chief continuously failed to show up,” said Amanda Avalos, senior civic engagement director at Leaders Igniting Transformation, a youth advocacy group that successfully pushed for Milwaukee Public Schools to end its contracts with the Police Department.
His defenders said Morales did community outreach, just quietly. He took part of his schedule each week to knock on doors in neighborhoods to listen and learn from residents.
Last fall, video circulated showing Milwaukee officers assisting immigration agents in an arrest. Voces de la Frontera, an immigrant rights organization, pushed successfully for a Police
Department policy with stronger protection for immigrants that required judicial warrants before Milwaukee police could assist federal agents.
“Our relationship turned sour after that,” said Tommy Molina, lead organizer for Voces’ Milwaukee chapter. “We wanted to form a working group with him, and he denied us that and we had to fight him through the Fire and Police Commission.
“We thought he could use (his) experience to help immigrants, refugees and communities of color,” Molina said. “What we saw was a dereliction of duty.”
Community groups focused on police reform also expected Morales to work with them. Instead, Morales rarely addressed proposals residents pushed forward. By the end of his tenure, almost none of the recommendations from community groups that stemmed from a draft U.S. Department of Justice report were put into practice.
Soon after he was sworn in, Morales quickly settled a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin that had alleged a pattern of stop-and-frisk targeting African Americans and Latinos. Flynn had signaled he would fight the lawsuit in court.
Nonetheless, the department struggled to comply with the settlement, which included an independent monitor to make sure police met certain benchmarks. So far, the monitor has found progress to be slow and uneven, citing challenges at Police Department and the Fire and Police Commission.
Residents expected Morales to punish police misconduct, something the chief said he did regularly. But his popularity with the rank-and-file likely undercut his claims of being tough with cops who broke the rules.
“A chief shouldn’t be loved by his officers,” said Chris Ahmuty, retired director of the ACLU of Wisconsin and current treasurer of Milwaukee Turners. “A chief should be respected and maybe a little bit feared.”
Morales has defended his disciplinary record, and even the police union president said recently he felt Morales’ punishments were “too harsh.” But the way Morales handled a number of highprofile cases drew criticism.
He did not fire officer James Collins, who was involved in both the arrest of Milwaukee Bucks player Sterling Brown and with leaving a 4-year-old girl in a towed vehicle, nor did he fire a dispatcher who sent officers to the wrong address in a case that ended with a teen’s brutal murder.
This year, Morales was criticized for not acting quickly enough to fire officer Michael Mattioli, who was charged with homicide in the death of Joel Acevedo during an off-duty fight, a disciplinary case that Fire and Police Commission took over.
A fateful statement: ‘Law enforcement is being crucified’
The Fire and Police Commission reappointed Morales to a four-year term in December.
He lasted less than eight months. His relationship with the Fire and Police Commission deteriorated, with members of the board accusing Morales of being untruthful and Morales saying he was being set up to fail.
Morales faced pointed questions about a department that seemed illequipped to handle both coronavirus and a series of protests against police brutality.
Fighting a virus that has taken a harsher toll on people of color throughout the U.S., the Police Department faced a shortage of masks and other personal protective equipment. In District 5 on the city’s north side, at least 10 officers fell ill.
Although other government entities bore some of the responsibility for those problems, Morales had to come up with a plan. Critics, including some on the Fire and Police Commission, said he never did.
Then a white Minneapolis police officer dug his knee into the neck of George Floyd, a Black man, for nine minutes, killing him.
For months, demonstrators have led peaceful marches in response around Milwaukee. But when protests began May 29, out-of-control crowds set buildings on fire, burglarized dozens of businesses, drove recklessly and occasionally fired shots, wounding one officer in the foot.
In the weeks that followed, Milwaukee police used tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets on a half-dozen occasions. Some of them have come under heavy scrutiny by the Fire and Police Commission and Common Council.
On June 5, as top police commanders answered questions before the council about those tactics, Morales spoke at a news conference at the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
“Two-thousand years ago an angry mob came before people to say ‘crucify that man,’ that man being Jesus Christ,” he said. “What are angry mobs doing today? We say we are civilized. But are we really? Just think about that.”
When a reporter asked who was being crucified, Morales answered: “Law enforcement throughout our nation. Law enforcement is being crucified.”
For Fred Royal, president of the Milwaukee branch of the NAACP, that was a turning point.
“Around the world people were asking for reforming the police,” Royal said. “And he did not understand that it was not personal — it was the years of folks being summarily executed at the hands of rogue law enforcement.”
Two months later, Morales was ousted.
Looking back on his brief tenure as chief, a common theme emerges: Lost promise and a missed opportunity to mend the relationship between the Police Department and the community.
Some see Morales as a victim of political infighting. Others cite his resistance to change. Some argue he didn’t have enough time in the chief’s job to fulfill his vision. And still others say he didn’t keep his promises and has only himself to blame.
What does Morales say of his tenure? “I can look at myself in the mirror,” he said in an interview. “I was honest, and I really cared about the men and women of the Milwaukee Police Department.”