Above photo: Dontre Hamilton’s mother, Maria Hamilton participates in a protest Monday, Dec. 22, 2014, in Milwaukee. Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm announced earlier in the day that there would be no charges against former police office Christopher Manney in the fatal shooting of Dontre Hamilton. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
Has Milwaukee out-Fergusoned Ferguson?
Writing in Slate, Michael Carriere argues that the real story isn’t that former Milwaukee police officer Christopher Manney won’t face charges in the April 2014 shooting death of Dontre Hamilton. It’s the Milwaukee Police Department’s decades-long history of brutality against African Americans.
And, Carriere writes, the Hamilton case might very well expose a police culture that is more egregious than the one that led to national protests over the Aug. 9 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
“While the Hamilton case has not received as much media attention as the Michael Brown shooting, it may very well out-Ferguson Ferguson,” Carriere writes.
Hamilton’s case is only the latest in a string of incidents of Milwaukee Police Department brutality against African Americans stretching back decades, he writes.
“The history of Milwaukee – and more specifically the history of police misconduct in Milwaukee – provides the perfect vehicle through which to understand how the culture that leads to events like Ferguson (and Staten Island and Cleveland) is created,” writes Carriere. “Sadly, this history is all too familiar in cities across America, and appears to have one common goal: to demean and dehumanize African-American men.”
The Milwaukee history of misconduct he’s talking about pre-dates the recent spate of police shootings of unarmed African American men that have sparked protests nationwide. Carriere traces it back to the two-decade rule of former Milwaukee Police Chief Harold Brier, who left in 1984.
“Under his watch, a series of African-American men died at the hands of his officers, including the high-profile cases of Clifford McKissick (1967), and Ernest Lacy (1981),” Carriere writes. “The death of Lacy – who died of respiratory distress after being wrestled to the ground by white police officers (all for a rape he did not commit) – brought to light the repressive tactics that Breier and his men had been employing in Milwaukee’s increasingly segregated black neighborhoods for decades.”
In 1983, Curtis Harris was rendered a quadriplegic after a run-in with Officer Kevin Clark, who was never charged. The city eventually did, however, settle a civil case for $3 million.
A year later a group of off-duty police officers, believing that Frank Jude Jr. had stolen one of their wallets, unleashed a barrage of kicks and punches on the 26-year-old African American man, in addition to sticking a pen in his ear and cutting off his pants with a knife.
Between 2007 and 2012, officers conducted about 70 illegal strip searches of African American men.
In documents from a civil case, “victim after victim describes how these searches were often done in public places and resulted in such harrowing physical conditions as anal bleeding,” writes Carriere. While the ringleader of the searches was criminally convicted, several other officers implicated in the illegal searches escaped charges.
Then in 2011, 22-year-old Derek Williams, suffering a medical crisis after being roughly arrested, died in a squad car as an officer ignored his pleas for an ambulance.
Hamilton’s case is playing out in the context of the nation’s growing realization that police brutality against African American men is an epidemic. An autopsy showed that Manney shot Hamilton, an unarmed 31-year-old schizophrenic African-American man, 14 times, with half the bullets traveling in a downward direction, one of them hitting him in the back.
The U.S. Justice Department is conducting a civil rights review of the Hamilton case. Whether or not it will deal with the historical context in which the shooting took place — like the federal investigation into excessive force by Cleveland police — remains to be seen.
Predicatably, the decision not to charge Manney set off a rally of nearly 300. But instead of acknowledging the concerns about police brutality, current Police Chief Ed Flynn took to “Fox and Friends” to dismiss the protesters.
“We get a big community of hipsters in town, waving their signs about oppression, fascism and Nazism, and their last experience with police was in their D.A.R.E. class,” he said.
“One could perhaps excuse Flynn’s position if the Hamilton case was an anomaly; sadly, it is just another example of police action that ultimately serves to both hurt and humiliate a city’s African-American population,” writes Carriere. “Hamilton’s death should best be seen as yet another building block for a culture that creates moments like Ferguson, circa 2014. Until this culture – and the history that has shaped it – is confronted, there will be more Fergusons. And more Dontre Hamiltons.”