Ed Flynn Interview - Mark Belling

Yesterday, Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn was interviewed by Mark Belling on his radio program.

Belling asked straightforward questions and Flynn gave straightforward answers.

An issue that Belling has been covering on his show is response time by the police department. He highlighted a couple of cases that were clearly troublesome in terms of how long it took for police to respond.

Flynn stood by his department's police strategy and performance but he did state that there have been instances of inadequate response. Flynn said there were times when "we didn't meet our own standards."

Read a news release from the Milwaukee Police Department, Chief Ed Flynn: CHIEF FLYNN DISCUSSES RESPONSE TIMES

During the interview, Flynn also addressed the three-part series by reporter Gina Barton that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has been running about Milwaukee police officers being disciplined.

Read the Journal Sentinel's report:

Part 1: A hidden problem

From shoplifting to battery, some 93 officers faced few consequences for violations.

Part 2: Drunken driving

A conviction can derail your career as a cab driver, but not as a Milwaukee cop.

Coming Sunday, Part 3:
Domestic violence

Abusive officers can keep their guns and jobs - and respond when battered women call for help.

Clearly, Barton and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel have a major axe to grind when it comes to Ed Flynn and the police department.

Flynn was as straightforward in his reaction to the series as he was in his responses to Belling's questions about police response time.

MARK BELLING: This week, the newspaper has been running a massive series of reports, taking up a remarkable amount of space, on current Milwaukee officers who were not fired despite various violations of the law. In some cases, ordinance violations, and in some cases, incidents that were more severe - a focus, in particular, on drunk driving. The newspaper says it's been working on this for a year. I want to get, Chief, first of all, just a general question: Do you believe that the series has been fair, and if not, why not?

CHIEF ED FLYNN: OK. Again, thanks for the question. I'm going to take a deep breath and I'm going to answer very calmly. The short answer is no. It's a hatchet job. They developed their premise, devoted extraordinary resources to proving that premise, and then used a mallet to kill a flea.

Now, they had to go back 30 years to come back with their misconduct. They had to cover events that were committed by 19-year-olds. We have guys who got city citations for jumping snow fences to pee in the wrong place when they were 21 years old, and now they've got a mug shot in the newspaper. You know, we've got families who had trouble once, might have been an act of domestic violence. They've reconciled. They've been living together peacefully for years, and now any Tom, Dick, or Harry can go on this wonderful website and figure out who the victim of a domestic violence assault was ten years ago and humiliate that family when nobody else knew. I think it is despicable.

We ran the numbers ourselves, and once you clear out all the city ordinance violations and the one-time drunk driving violations and the guys that got jammed up on a traffic violation, you are dealing with 31 officers out of 4,989 who worked during those 30 years. That's .62 percent of the force.

I'd be happy if that newspaper spent one-tenth of the words of that article on the positive work of this police department rather than an all-out assault on an important civic institution which they seem committed to discrediting.

...I can't help but feel that bringing up all of this stuff now in the last quarter of my current appointment is motivated by something other than coincidence. I think they took their swing and they missed. But in so doing, I think they unfairly maligned a lot of good police officers who've done good things and made a mistake when they were baby cops, and now they're being humiliated in public. I think it's just a dreadful assault on good people who made mistakes.

...For some reason, it's a full-court press on this police department. We are up to our ears in freedom of information requests from those people. They can't get enough of trying to undermine us and undermine our credibility. I do not know what their motivation is, but I can tell you they have become a secondary job for me here. I spend nearly as much time trying to deal with just them as I do with crime, fear, and disorder.

Flynn was angry and I think justly.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has shamelessly smeared officers and their families. They're victims of its agenda. Apparently, decency is in short supply in the newsroom.

I don't understand why the newspaper is trying to undercut the police department.

It's disgraceful.

Once again, I find myself in the position of wanting to cancel my subscription to the Journal Sentinel, but I can't cancel what I already cancelled years ago.