547: Cops See It Differently, Part One

Ira Glass

Hey there, everybody. If you're listening on our podcast or the internet, there are words in this episode that we have un-beeped. If you prefer a beeped version of the show, you could find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. There are 9-1-1 calls where people are basically calling the cops on the cops. Lisa Mahon did that in September. She was on her way to the county hospital in Chicago. Her mom was dying and the hospital called, saying that she'd stopped breathing and had just been put on a ventilator. So Lisa had her two kids in the back and her friend Jamal was up front, and she was just about to pull into the expressway near Hammond, Indiana, near where she lives, when a police officer pulled her over for not wearing a seat belt.

Ira Glass

Lisa had been in law enforcement herself. She'd been a corrections officer. Her dad taught criminal justice. She's got no problem with cops at all. But this one was acting so weird, she says, she kept her window up.

The officer, Lieutenant Patrick Fucari, didn't return our calls. According to Lisa and to a statement issued by the Hammond police, Lieutenant Fucari next asked for Jamal's ID. Jamal was sitting in the passenger seat and, Lisa says, wearing a seat belt, so it's not clear why this was necessary. Jamal didn't have his ID. According to the police statement, Jamal moved his hand below where the officer could see and the officer started fearing for his own safety. A second officer arrived. The interaction got weird enough that Lisa turned to her 14-year-old in the backseat and asked him to do what people do these days in this situation.

Ira Glass

The officers asked Jamal to get out of the car. Jamal didn't want to get out, and through the window, he asked for what he called a white shirt, a supervisor.

Ira Glass

"I got the bars." He is a supervisor. From the police perspective, Jamal is not complying. Jamal starts looking for a ticket that he'd gotten that could prove who he is. He reaches into his book bag.

Ira Glass

It continues like this. Lisa starts to feel like these cops are not acting the way cops should. Let's get some adults here. There must be somebody above these people, and she calls 9-1-1.

Ira Glass

"The officer pulled a gun on me, I'm sitting in my car, they asked me to open the door, I'm scared," she says.

Ira Glass

The Hammond police statement on this incident runs two pages but does not mention Officer Fucari drawing his gun. It does say that the officer was afraid that the passengers had a gun, though it doesn't say why this mom and her friend and two kids would make him think that.

Ira Glass

The next thing that happens you may have seen on the news from her son's video.

Ira Glass

The police bust through Jamal's window, taser him, open the door, and pull him out. He was arrested for failure to aid an officer and resisting law enforcement.

[CRYING]

Lisa says 9-1-1 hung up on her when they heard the window smash. In the end of all this, the car damaged, her kid's crying, she was handed a ticket for not wearing a seat belt.

[CRYING]

People in our country do not agree on what to make of a story like this. Lots of people hear the story or see the video and they side with the dispatcher, right? If you're stopped by the police, just do what the officer says. It'll be fine. This is what lots of people said after Eric Garner died while being arrested in July in New York. People said it after Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson in August. Then there are lots of people like Lisa who say if you're black, it might not be fine.

Ira Glass

Our country is divided on this-- people who think the police are on their side, people who don't, but it's complicated. For instance, if you're starting to think you know which side of the divide Lisa's on, especially after that experience, well--

Ira Glass

It was just this one officer, she says. He was the problem. She's now suing the city of Hammond over the incident and has learned that this officer was named in three other lawsuits for using excessive force. In all three, the city settled. For so long now, there's been this conversation or debate-- I don't know what you want to call this-- about policing and race and people being targeted, and whenever it comes up, it seems to split very quickly into a kind of my side versus your side sort of thing.

In these last few months, we've been talking about this stuff amongst ourselves here on the radio show staff and researching and reporting in different parts of the country, and we have found some things that surprised us about policing and how complicated and difficult it is, and about how hard it is to sort out the part that race and racism play in all kinds of incidents, and we found ways that racism seems undeniable. Anyway, we discovered things that made us see some of this differently and we want to share that with you this week and next. We have found so much of this, we actually couldn't fit it into one episode. So from WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

So today, what we're going to do is we're going to focus on just one police department, a police department with a troubled history, and we're going to tell the story of the chief who is trying to change that and why it is so hard to change certain things. Brian Reed tells the story.

Brian Reed

When Chief Ed Flynn took over the Milwaukee police department in 2008, he was coming into one of the most segregated cities in America, a city that sends enormous numbers of black men to prison. Wisconsin sends the highest percentage of black men to prison of any state in the country, and in Milwaukee, that means more than half of black men in their 30s and early 40s have been to prison. And just to give you a sense of how bad relations got between black residents and police, in 2004, the city saw a brutal incident that some people call Milwaukee's Rodney King case, the beating of Frank Jude.

Brian Reed

Jude was an exotic dancer. He did bachelorette parties. And one night after work, he ended up at a party full of off duty police officers. A group of about a dozen officers, all of whom were white and many of whom were drunk, surrounded Jude, who was black, and started beating him. They claimed he'd stolen one of their badges. Just like in the incident you heard about at the beginning of the show, one of the women who'd brought Frank Jude to the party decided to call 9-1-1 on the cops as they handcuffed Jude, cut his clothes off, and essentially tortured him-- kicked him repeatedly, bent his fingers back, shoved a pen in his ears, causing them to bleed. Even when the dispatcher sent on duty officers to the scene, one of them joined in the beating, stomping on Frank Jude's head while the other officers stood by.

Brian Reed

Eventually, seven officers were fired, three were sentenced to over 15 years in prison, but before that, officers closed ranks. No one talked. No one knew anything. It showed the city how cops would turn the other way and protect their own even if they saw something truly terrible. The case hung over Milwaukee for years.

So this was the climate Ed Flynn was walking into when he became chief. Flynn had been in law enforcement for 35 years. He'd led several small city departments-- Chelsea and Springfield in Massachusetts, and Arlington, Virginia. He'd served as Secretary of Public Safety for the whole state of Massachusetts. But when the job opened up in Milwaukee, it had a special appeal.

Brian Reed

And as Chief Flynn sees it, that challenge is--

Brian Reed

Flynn says he's confronted this his whole career, all the way back to when he started out as a beat cop in the '70s in Jersey City.

Brian Reed

Flynn still sees this today in Milwaukee. Most of the city's crime victims are African American and they're the group that has the most animosity towards the police. That's not just in Milwaukee, obviously, but all around the country. So here's a problem people have been debating heatedly, especially since Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, and here's a guy who's been trying to fix the problem, to mend the relationship between black residents and the police in his city for the last seven years. He's idealistic. He's smart. He can sound very professorial, especially when he talks about the history of poverty and crime and policing. He goes in front of residents and says things like this.

Brian Reed

By the way, he's not reading here. This is just how he talks.

Brian Reed

Flynn became police chief in 2008. So what's he done? How's it going? He didn't enact one single big reform. It was lots of smaller, sometimes boring stuff. He created a code of conduct, redrew the borders of police districts, shifted hundreds of officers from the citywide detective unit onto the streets, a move that wasn't popular in the department. He did a big push to work with dozens of community groups. He started this program with researchers at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee to go into schools and teach kids in high crime areas why police are stopping people more often in their neighborhoods, how they should behave during stops, and how officers should behave.

Brian Reed

As I spent time with members of the department, it was hard to pinpoint exactly what effect these changes have had, but I did get the sense that something had changed, even if it was sometimes intangible. For instance, I kept hearing certain words again and again. The most popular noun I heard, "community." The most popular verb?

Brian Reed

Of course, police departments all over the country use these exact buzzwords-- say they're engaging more and doing community policing-- but it's hard to know what this actually means.

Brian Reed

I'm on an evening shift with Sergeant Theresa Janick. She's been on the force seven years. She's worked juvenile crimes, auto thefts. She worked undercover. Now she's a supervisor and she says it's an entirely new police department.

Brian Reed

Sergeant Janick works in district three, a largely black area with one of the highest crime rates in the city. At around six o'clock, she heads to a block where shots have been reported.

Brian Reed

Janick talks through her window to a guy on the sidewalk. He says he's been out there like five minutes.

Brian Reed

It's worth noting that the gunshot Janick is responding to, she didn't learn about it from a 9-1-1 call. She learned about it from something called Shot Spotter. It's new technology that Chief Flynn and several other chiefs around the country have put in place that uses sensors around the city to detect when gunshots go off and tells the cops what block they happened on. What that means, though, is that even though Janick talks to several people who say, yeah, I heard a shot, not one of them called 9-1-1. No one in the neighborhood did. Sergeant Janick says this is common. When they installed Shot Spotter, the department found out that only 17% of all the shots fired were resulting in residents calling the police.

Brian Reed

The Milwaukee police department's standard operating procedures Chief Flynn put into place include this line. "Police members can be expected to make numerous contacts with the public on a daily basis. These contacts form the basis for the relationship between the department and the community." I rode on three shifts and watched a bunch of different officers, and one thing that struck me was how a single 9-1-1 call or just a single shot fired on Shot Spotter could quickly lead an officer to talking to a dozen people or more as they try to figure out what happened.

With this shot fired, for instance, when I was out with Sergeant Janick, there was no conclusion. They didn't find a shooter or a bullet or a casing, but still, it was an excuse for Sergeant Janick to interact with at least seven people, and it was easy for those conversations to move beyond the gunshot she was there to look into, like with this woman who was coming out of her garage.

Brian Reed

On one of her trips around the block, Sergeant Janick asks a man staggering outside a liquor store if everything's OK. He tells Janick that he's been robbed at gunpoint two times recently on that corner. Did you contact the police, Janick asks him. Nope, he says. Would you like to report it now? Yes. She gets two officers to come take the report for him.

Brian Reed

I know. Listening to residents and actually trying to help them. It didn't strike me as revolutionary, either. But Assistant Chief James Harpole, who's been with the Milwaukee police department for nearly 30 years, told my producer Ben Calhoun and me about this one time before Chief Flynn but not that long ago, when he went with an officer to a neighborhood meeting.

Brian Reed

The cop Harpole is talking about, his whole job was to coordinate with residents. His title was Community Liaison Officer. Contrast that with what I saw at a daily briefing in district three. So much of it was cops discussing intel from residents and taking it seriously. They updated the captain about a meeting they'd held with people who lived near the site of a recent homicide who had helped them identify 17 nuisance properties where criminal activity might be going on. They read aloud from emails a guy sent them with the license plate of cars he saw picking up suspected prostitutes, and--

Brian Reed

In case you didn't get that, this is literal broken window policing. They're going to get a landlord to replace some busted glass. Three years into Flynn's tenure, it was going pretty well. Violent crimes were down, homicides were down, citizen complaints against police were decreasing by quite a bit. Then in the summer of 2011, things took a bad turn, starting with the arrest of a man named Derek Williams. One night in July, officers responded to the scene of a robbery and found Williams. He was 22 years old, black. He ran. Officers chased him over a fence, caught him, handcuffed him, and put him in the back of a police car where a camera recorded what happened next.

Brian Reed

The video is horrible to watch. Minutes go by as Williams, shirtless and in handcuffs, writhes in the backseat, gasping for air. He pleads for medical attention but the officers ignore him.

Brian Reed

This goes on for nearly eight minutes, then Derek Williams slumps over on the seat, at which point an officer opens the door and tries to wake him up.

Brian Reed

He checks his pulse. A few minutes later in the video, you see police administering CPR, but it was too late. Derek Williams died in the back of a squad car as he pleaded for medical help. It was Milwaukee's own Eric Garner video three years before it happened in New York. And through all the investigations, Chief Flynn defended the officers involved and they continued on active duty. People were furious. They protested, demanded that the state press criminal charges against the officers, demanded that the chief resign. Amazingly, Flynn says when he and other commanders first watched the video, they did not foresee that reaction.

Brian Reed

Flynn says part of the disconnect stemmed from the fact that the video camera was infrared, so people watching it after the fact could see Derek Williams in a way the officers couldn't in the moment because it was dark. But the biggest problem, he says, is that he took for granted that the public would understand his reasoning for not disciplining the officers.

Brian Reed

One thing Flynn says he's doing to try to rebuild empathy, he's trying to get cops on foot patrols at least an hour a shift so they can have friendly interactions with people who aren't in bad situations. Assistant Chief James Harpole says cynicism is especially dangerous to cops on third shift from midnight to 8:00 AM. He worked that shift for four years and he remembers the moment he realized he'd become jaded. It was when he got switched to second shift in the afternoons.

Brian Reed

Harpole says working second shift completely changed his mindset for dealing with people on the job. I asked Chief Flynn if they ever change people's shifts with this in mind, rotate cops to give them different perspectives on a neighborhood, and he said they can't because the union contract doesn't allow them to. I told him it seemed like, from Harpole's story, there might be value in it. He said, yeah, there'd be value in renegotiating the contract, too.

Ira Glass

Brian Reed. Coming up, his story continues, and among other things, we go with Chief Flynn's officers as they try to solve a case, a shooting. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. This week and next on our show, "Cops See Things Differently," stories of policing and race. We're telling the story today of Chief Ed Flynn's tenure at the Milwaukee police department and how he's trying to improve relations between the police and black residents. One of the challenges he faced was he wanted to start a program that would basically be Milwaukee's version of the stop and frisk program, which is so controversial in New York City. Stop and frisk, of course, was policemen stopping pedestrians, but in Milwaukee, people drive, so lots of the stops were traffic stops. Again, here's Brian Reed.

Brian Reed

When Chief Flynn looked at the data from Milwaukee, he saw that when officers pulled over people in high crime areas more frequently for minor violations like having a taillight out or running a stop sign, car thefts went down. Flynn believed more stops would mean fewer crimes, so he wanted to do more stops, but somehow without angering people or alienating them.

Brian Reed

The number of traffic stops in Milwaukee almost quadrupled and the number of times officers stopped pedestrians tripled. And, like Flynn wanted, he says fewer than 20% of the traffic stops resulted in citation or arrest. Car thefts and robberies decreased, and Flynn saw an added benefit. Citizen complaints dropped, too. He thinks that's because more people were having good interactions with the cops, and there are numbers on this. A University of Wisconsin Milwaukee study that came out last month found that more than 60% of people who'd been approached by police during traffic stops said they were satisfied with how the officer handled the interaction.

But it was also during these traffic stops and pedestrian stops that one of the biggest scandals of Flynn's tenure as police chief happened. Dozens of people are now suing the department. One of them is Brandon Graham. Brandon is 25 years old. He says he started getting stopped back sometime in 2011, about three years into Flynn's push to increase stops. The way Brandon remembers it, one day he went back to a neighborhood he used to live in on the north side of Milwaukee, and his friends kept telling him how the cops in that district, district five, had been harassing them constantly.

Brian Reed

Brandon's naivete lasted for all of two hours. Sure enough, he says, that very afternoon, the cops came by.

Brian Reed

A warning. This gets explicit.

Brian Reed

Soon after, Brandon ended up moving back to that neighborhood, and the random stops continued in the same style as that first one.

Brian Reed

One night, I spent time with Brandon and some of his friends back in district five. Brandon doesn't live there anymore, but they got to reminiscing about officers from the neighborhood, and listen to how well they knew them. It's like they're talking about old high school classmates or something.

Brian Reed

They're saying "Vag," short for Officer Michael Vagnini, the most notorious cop in the district at the time, and maybe all of Milwaukee. This is Brandon's friend P remembering the night officer Vagnini followed him into his aunt and uncle's driveway.

Brian Reed

It was this officer, Michael Vagnini, who Brandon says was responsible for the worst night of his life. He and some friends were in the car and a group of officers pulled them over. In court documents, the police say it was because they ran a stop sign and were missing a side mirror. They asked Brandon and his friends to get out of car. One officer patted Brandon down, then another. Again, Brandon's description is graphic.

Brian Reed

Brandon says Officer Vagnini then pulled out a knife and cut open the waistband of his pants, where Brandon had two bags of cocaine. The officers arrested Brandon. He plead guilty to a misdemeanor possession charge. In the criminal complaint, the police say that Brandon consented to a search of his person. There's no description of the search.

Almost a year later, in 2012, Chief Flynn and the district attorney announced that they were investigating a pattern of complaints from the previous couple years about illegal searches, including illegal strip searches and cavity searches. Flynn asked any residents with information or complaints to call Internal Affairs. Three officers eventually plead no contest to being party to the illegal searches and were given community service. One went to jail for 20 days.

Officer Vagnini plead no contest to four counts of illegal cavity searches and misconduct in public office. He was sentenced to a little more than two years in prison. For his sentencing, dozens of police officers wrote letters supporting him, saying his only crime was overzealousness in keeping the community safe from criminals. They called him exemplary, one of the best cops in the city, the kind of officer they wanted to be.

But Vagnini's trial wasn't the end of it. About 60 people are now suing the department claiming they were also illegally searched. They name at least 40 officers and allege that supervisors looked the other way or ignored complaints.

A Milwaukee civil rights attorney who represented Frank Jude told me he'd been getting calls complaining about illegal searches for years before the chief announced his investigation. Even though he believed many of them and started to notice patterns involving specific officers, he couldn't prove the claims. Safran says a man who contacted him 10 years ago about an illegal search called him recently and said I told you so. Safran says some of the people who reported this behavior are still in prison because of the searches they say were illegal.

It probably goes without saying that Brandon is one of the many black Milwaukeeans who has not been won over by Chief Flynn's campaign to build trust. I asked him and his friend Rex if they could picture a scenario in which they'd ever call the cops for help, if they got robbed at gunpoint, for instance.

Brian Reed

Chief Flynn told me when he learned about the illegal searches and the cavity searches, he was furious and disappointed. He says this was a small, isolated group of officers who slipped into a game of getting the, quote, "bad guys" at all costs. But he also says he's skeptical of the people coming forward now claiming they were illegally searched and suing because of it. He called the lawsuits a cottage industry. He says the department only ever got three complaints and they were all from drug dealers who had been frequently arrested.

One thing that surprised me talking to Flynn, especially because he's such a student of history, was what he said when I asked him about the issue that's at the center of so many conversations about policing, race.

Brian Reed

Flynn says that whenever there's an incident between a white officer and a black resident, people get upset and say it's racism, but he says they're missing the big picture. So for instance, in 2011, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel did a story where a data reporter looked at police records and found that black drivers in the city were seven times more likely than white drivers to be stopped by police. In response, Flynn did a whole presentation for residents with maps and crime numbers where he told them the same thing he told me, that the disparity isn't because of officers' bias against black residents. It's just that the majority of crimes happen in neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly African American.

Brian Reed

That may explain the statistics, but what I wanted to know was doesn't race play a role in those interventions? Only 17% of the Milwaukee police force is black in an incredibly segregated city. I told Flynn there's evidence that race can influence the way cops deal with black residents. Some of this we're going to talk about more in next week's show. There's research about people's implicit biases, subconscious racism that can affect officers' decisions.

But there's also evidence in Chief Flynn's own department, according to that Journal Sentinel story, which showed that the largest disparity between blacks and whites getting pulled over in Milwaukee didn't happen in high crime black areas of the city, but in the two lowest crime districts, both with predominantly white populations. The paper also found that once black drivers were pulled over, they were twice as likely as white drivers to have police search their cars, even though that didn't lead to finding more drugs or weapons. Flynn eventually said he's not trying to say race plays no role in policing.

Brian Reed

I left this conversation not feeling like the chief was denying a reality because it was uncomfortable for him to admit it, more like he honestly didn't see reality the way many other people do and the way I expected him to.

One interesting finding from that police satisfaction survey, while black people were much less likely to say they were satisfied with the police, if they'd called the police in the last year and it went well, that disparity almost completely disappeared. If the resident initiated the contact, not the police, one positive experience could make a difference.

Brian Reed

I'm in a squad car with Officer Richard Gordy speeding towards people who say their neighbor fired a gun at them. I'm going to tell you the story of the whole investigation of this potential shooting because first of all, it's just a good whodunit, and more important, it's black residents who called the police for help which, according to the survey at least, means if it goes well could totally change how the callers feel about the police.

Brian Reed

We arrive at a small apartment building. It's around 9:30 in the morning on a Tuesday. Officer Gordy drives by the small parking area in the back to see if there are any bullet casings. There aren't. He and another officer go inside the building and talk to people in there, but no one says they heard anything, and there's nothing coming up on Shot Spotter, so Officer Gordy sits in his squad car, contemplating his next move, until suddenly a green car pulls up right behind us and some people get out.

Brian Reed

It's a young couple.

Brian Reed

This guy's name is Thomas. He's with his girlfriend, Trina. Thomas says after the neighbor came out with a gun, she then threatened to kill him, backed him down the hallway and out the back door, where Trina was waiting in the car with the kids.

Brian Reed

Officer Gordy told me that they frequently get calls claiming there's a gun when there really isn't, just because people know the cops have to respond more quickly to that. Since there was no evidence of a shot fired, Gordy thought that might be what was going on here, so he separates Thomas from Trina and takes them alone into the police car.

Brian Reed

The thing Gordy is not telling Thomas is that he doesn't think Shot Spotter covers the block we're on, but he doesn't tell him that because even though Thomas is the one who wanted the cops' help and says he was the victim, Gordy is trying to figure out if he's lying. He's approaching Thomas as a potential victim and a potential suspect, and it gets to Thomas. He starts to backtrack a bit with his story.

Brian Reed

Meanwhile, inside the building, other officers have found the alleged shooter, a woman named Charday. They didn't find Charday in her own apartment-- she was in one down the hall-- and she has quite a different story to tell about Thomas.

Brian Reed

For obvious reasons, officers are focusing on whether or not there was a gun involved in whatever happened during this dispute. Outside, the cops ask Thomas over and over, all different ways, if there had been a gun, if he'd seen a gun, if a gun had been fired. They do the same thing with Thomas's girlfriend, Trina. Again, these are the people who asked for the cops to help them. Officer Gordy takes Trina out back to the parking lot and has her act out how it went down.

Brian Reed

At this point, everyone's pissed. Trina is outside complaining to Thomas about how you can't even get help from the police, how they only care if someone's dead. And inside, Charday is sitting handcuffed. She's not arrested, but in handcuffs, as officers tear up her apartment looking for a gun.

Brian Reed

As for the cops, they're having trouble figuring out the truth. I heard the supervising officer on the scene, a sergeant, whisper to officer Gordy that he thought they should arrest both Charday and Thomas for fighting. Almost an hour passed. Inside, the officers continued to look through Charday's things, and then-- I'm not even sure if any of the cops noticed this-- a few tears began to run down Charday's face. Not long after, in a hamper full of dirty clothes in the closet, they found a gun, a long black revolver, exactly what both Thomas and Trina had independently described. It had one spent bullet.

The cops arrested Charday for recklessly endangering safety by use of a firearm. Officer Gordy let her change out of her pajamas into warmer clothes, made sure her grandma was able to watch her kids, and then walked her out of the building in handcuffs.

Brian Reed

As all this was wrapping up, Trina called me over. She said she had something to say about the police.

Brian Reed

Trina pointed to a group of guys who had been hanging around the block while the investigation was going on. She told me they were Charday's people, cousins, and that Charday had threatened that they would go after Trina and her boyfriend.

Brian Reed

Cops need to be skeptical during investigations. It's built into their jobs. They aren't supposed to fully trust the person they're talking to. But of course, the person they're talking to can feel that. Trina and Thomas did. And it's upsetting if you've just been shot at to have the police come and interrogate you like you're the criminal. And on top of that, there's the history, all the times the cops haven't treated people fairly or worse. That's always there, casting a shadow over every interaction. The cops feel like they're just doing their job the way they always do, but for Trina, it's hard not to wonder if the cops would be treating her this way if she was white.

One last story. On April 30 last year, a white Milwaukee police officer shot and killed a black man named Dontre Hamilton. He was sleeping in a plaza across from City Hall in the afternoon, and an employee from a nearby Starbucks called the police. Two officers checked on Hamilton and determined he wasn't doing anything wrong. Then a different cop, the beat cop for the area, Officer Christopher Manny, came and roused him and tried to pat him down. This led to some kind of altercation. According to officer Manny and some witnesses, Hamilton grabbed his baton and hit him in the neck with it. Manny says he feared for his life. He shot Hamilton 14 times. Hamilton was 31 years old and had suffered from schizophrenia.

And unlike after the death of Derek Williams, the man in the back of a squad car who couldn't breathe, Chief Flynn fired officer Manny, though he didn't fire him for killing Hamilton. He fired him for doing a pat down that was against department policy and not in line with his training. Flynn says Officer Manny could tell when he approached that Hamilton was in the midst of a mental health issue, which means he should have never tried to touch him. That's rule number one when dealing with someone in a mental health crisis. And by trying to pat him down, Flynn says, Manny created the situation in which he feared for his life and ended up killing Dontre Hamilton.

Brian Reed

In November, after Officer Manny appealed Chief Flynn's decision to fire him, the public was given a chance to comment before Milwaukee's fire and police commission. I was there. People packed into a senior center gymnasium. On the right, members of the police union, almost entirely white. On the left, Dontre Hamilton's family and supporters, largely black and brown.

For an hour, Chief Flynn and the commission sat silently on stage as supporters of Dontre Hamilton berated them. They were angry that Flynn had taken six months to make a decision about Manny's firing, that he'd announced it two days after Manny had filed for disability, which meant he could still get paid, and that under a new state law, what was supposed to be an independent investigation into Dontre Hamilton's death had been done by former Milwaukee police officers. On the other side, the police union members were furious that Flynn would even consider suspending Officer Manny, never mind firing him, for doing what union president Mike Crivello said any reasonable officer would do in that situation.

Brian Reed

There was one thing both sides could agree on. They both wanted Chief Flynn gone. Dontre Hamilton's supporters had issued a demand for his resignation, and the union had recently held a no confidence vote, where 99% of the cops who showed up had voted against the chief. At one point during the public comments, Chief Flynn began to look down at his lap. He was checking this phone. People shouted at him, saying how dare he, saying he was being insensitive. After the meeting, in the lobby of the senior center as Flynn was on his way out, he addressed it with a scrum of reporters.

Brian Reed

If you're going to repair the relationship between African Americans and the police, at least the way Chief Flynn is trying to, it's going to happen in the course of thousands of encounters between cops and black residents, thousands of encounters that need to go well, and even if they do, each one still only brings you one small step closer to building trust. It's a game of inches.

Right now, according to that University of Wisconsin survey, 63% of black Milwaukeeans say they're satisfied with police, versus 83% of white Milwaukeeans. Remember Trina, the woman whose neighbor shot at her and her boyfriend? On paper, her case looks like a success for the Milwaukee police. They arrested the shooter, confiscated the gun, and on top of that, they helped Trina out, offered to stand guard while Trina and her boyfriend moved out of the apartment building that day to make sure the neighbor's cousins didn't do anything to them. Trina thanked the officers before they left, and still, when we talked about if she trusted the Milwaukee PD, she said--

Brian Reed

Trina is not the only black Milwaukeean who said something like this to me. I asked one woman what she thought of the Milwaukee PD and she put it like this. You just don't know what to expect. That stayed with me. She wasn't saying all cops are racist or the whole force is corrupt. She was saying something much more measured, that the police are unpredictable, which means at least this woman felt that when you have an interaction with a cop, you can never be sure what you're going to get.

Ira Glass

Brian Reed is one of the producers of our program. Ben Calhoun helped produce that story. Next week, some cities where policing is so different from Milwaukee in the second week of our series.

Our program was produced today by Brian Reed with Sean Cole, Stephanie [INAUDIBLE], Chana Joffe-Walt, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Editing by Joel Lovell. Production help from Simon Adler. Seth Lind is our operations director. Emily Condon's our production manager. Elise Bergerson's our office manager. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Elna Baker scout stories for our show. Research help from Michelle Harris, Christopher Swetala, and Ben Anastas. Music help from Damien Graef and Rob Geddis.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX. the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he finally met a few of our listeners at a WBEZ event, and I don't know what he was thinking. They were very different from what he expected.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with part two of our series on policing and more stories of This American Life.