So Just How Conservative Is Milwaukee Mayoral Candidate Bob Donovan?
So Just How Conservative Is Milwaukee Mayoral Candidate Bob Donovan?
Conservative. This has always been an adjective added to former Milwaukee Alderman Bob Donovan’s name in any media discussing his time on the Common Council or his attempts to run for Mayor of Milwaukee. And now with no incumbent in the race to replace former Mayor Tom Barrett, Bob Donovan has again surfaced as a candidate for Mayor.
So just how conservative is Bob Donovan in a fairly liberal…
New Milwaukee County Sheriff Earnell Lucas looks to repair his broken city.
Alan Pyke at ThinkProgress:
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN — By the time Earnell Lucas waves me up the walkway of the large stone house in Downer Woods, he’s taken off the light, patterned suit jacket he was wearing to vote at the church nearby.
It’s in the 80s before noon, hours before voters here will make him the next Milwaukee County Sheriff, and the afternoon schedule is crowded with eleventh-hour campaign events.
“I’m still that young boy that was born in a housing project here in Milwaukee, raised by his grandmother by the Golden Rule, who gave 25 years of his life serving that community,” Lucas says across the large pastel glass centerpiece his wife Linda chose for their antique dining table during a vacation to Vancouver. “That young boy inside of me saw what’s going on here in the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department, and not just here but around the country… and I thought I was needed here at this time.”
His voice, all contagious warmth when he recalled meeting Linda in a line for tickets to see Luther Vandross and Anita Baker decades ago, cools some when talk turns professional. The job he’s been asking his hometown to give him is a real fixer-upper, scarred by decades of brash politicking from the top and brutish conduct from some of the rank and file. The challenges of taking over a job defined for decades by firebrand right-wing sheriff David Clarke bring out an impassioned firmness.
“I’ve come to instill a culture that’s going to allow the deputies and correctional officers and medical officers to do their jobs,” Lucas says, displaying a thoughtful frankness about the law enforcement profession that’s been his home and benefactor for 42 years. “If there’s transgressions, they’re going to be addressed…Discipline is going to be swift [and] very public, so that the public knows that we’re not going to tolerate individuals violating the trust we have here in our community.”
Lucas will draw on every ounce of his immense charisma when he begins serving in Clarke’s old job in January. He’s been away from day-to-day policework for almost two decades, heading up security operations for Major League Baseball — a lucrative job he loves but is ready to leave to help his city again.
Lucas grew up in a center-city housing project called Hillside in the 1960s. He was 9 years old the night black Milwaukeeans got pelted with bottles and rocks for daring to march across the 16th Street Viaduct to the white south side in protest of housing segregation, which is still worse here than in any other U.S. metropolitan area half a century later. Hillside was still home a year later when an assassin shot Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and when an encounter with a white Milwaukee cop at age 12 made him decide the police force was his future.
Lucas was making a grocery run for his grandmother when the cop rolled down his squad car window to accuse him of stealing a woman’s purse. Not buying Lucas’ polite denial, the cop said he was “gonna run you over there and have her identify you, and when she identifies you I’m gonna run you downtown,’” Lucas recalls, half grinning.
“I said sir, you can do that, but if she doesn’t identify me you’re gonna run me back over here and help me get these groceries home, because my grandma’s gonna be pretty upset if I don’t get these groceries home.”
The officer gave up and sped off. When Lucas walked into the station house less than a decade later for his first day as a full officer, he spotted the same cop who’d profiled him as a child.
“I walked up to him and asked him that question none of us ever want to get asked – do you remember me? And I just said, sir, it’s because of you that I wanted to join the police force. Because you could’ve done anything you wanted to do with me,” Lucas says. The two are friends to this day, he added.
It’s one of Lucas’ two signature stories of his 25-year career with the Milwaukee Police Department, before baseball made him rich enough to move Linda and their kids into the handsome home at the top of the bluff above the lakefront where they danced to Luther and Anita years prior.
The other is the time he got shot, on New Year’s Day 1982, after responding to a noise complaint to find a man barricaded in an apartment near his old childhood neighborhood with a 12-gauge shotgun. There are still pellets lodged in his temple and orbital bone, and the joint where his jaw connects to his skull sometimes goes funky on him nearly 40 years later.
If police are a rare breed, the cop who comes back to the job in his sixties after surviving one shootout and then achieving this kind of financial security is almost extinct. Lucas describes his return as a calling.
“We had a sheriff who had no regard for immigrant communities, for communities of color,” Lucas says of Clarke’s reign, when people died in the county jail at an alarming rate.
“We’ve lost our way in terms of protecting the people that we’ve sworn to serve. I figured, I’ve had a wonderful life. My wife and I have gotten around the world, baseball has been wonderful to me, and I figure it’s time for me to do something with what time I have left on this earth for the betterment of my community.”
The community agrees. The news networks call the race less than an hour after polls close that night. He’s beaten the brakes off of Acting Sheriff Richard Schmidt, who was probably doomed by years as Clarke’s right-hand man but further toxified himself by preaching that battered women should “submit” to their abuser husbands.
The win isn’t just a referendum against Schmidt and Clarke. Lucas appeals to a wide swathe of residents, many of whom celebrate with him at the city’s 92-year-old Eagle’s Club on primary night. Lucas had the backing of both the mayor and the local prosecutor as well as the city’s immigrant grassroots. His promise to stop Clarke and Schmidt’s practice of honoring federal immigration orders without a judge’s warrant will mean 100 or 150 fewer deportations a year from the area, activists from Voces de la Frontera said at the party.
But the endorsement of a new black grassroots group on the north side highlights the core of his coalition: Black Milwaukee natives who look like him, but never achieved the economic exit velocity that carried him out of the Hillside projects and into this tastefully decorated home in Downer Woods.
We had a Fall Midterm Election in Wisconsin. But not many aren't pleased.
We had a Fall Midterm Election in Wisconsin. But not many aren’t pleased.
We the citizens of Wisconsinites have good news and bad news from August 14th.
Some of the good news was somewhat surprising that winners like Earnell Lucas won the seat to become a fresh new Sheriff of Milwaukee County, thus making the acting Sheriff Dr. Richard Schmidt finishing his term until the beginning of January 2019. Here’s the thing, Earnell was laser focused in my opinion last year to…
Earnell Lucas, a Major League Baseball security official, won Tuesday's Democratic primary election for Milwaukee County sheriff and he becomes a sure bet to be hired by voters in November to a four-year term in the office.
Lucas defeated Acting Sheriff Richard Schmidt by a solid margin Tuesday after a race featuring surrogate groups that pumped out messages and spent money on behalf of both campaigns. Lucas received 57% of the vote, according to complete, unofficial results.
Robert J. Ostrowski, a deputy sheriff for 16 years, failed to gain traction against his better-known and better-funded competitors in the three-way partisan primary.
The winner of the primary likely will become the next sheriff since no Republican is on the ballot in the Nov. 6 general election. Deputy James Villwock, a Republican, is planning a write-in campaign to challenge the Democratic Party nominee for the office.
Schmidt could not shed the mantle of his close association with former Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. and his role as the department's second in command since 2010.
Lucas, a 25-year veteran of the Milwaukee Police Department, gained endorsements from most other Democratic Party leaders in the county, including U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore, District Attorney John Chisholm and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.
Lucas urged voters to make a clean break from the Clarke era. With a primary victory in hand, Lucas told his supporters Tuesday evening that their work was not done yet.
"The work just begins tonight," he said at a post-election party the Rave/Eagles Club in Milwaukee.
Schmidt on Tuesday pledged to support Lucas.
Schmidt is a 32-year veteran of the agency and his campaign was supported by $300,000 worth of online advertising and broadcast commercials paid for by Leadership MKE, an independent political expenditure committee bankrolled by County Executive Chris Abele. Abele also publicly endorsed Schmidt in the race.
Schmidt, Lucas and Ostrowski sparred over which of them would move the department the greatest distance from Clarke's legacy of mistreatment of jail inmates, inadequate staff and budget deficits.
Clarke resigned in August 2017 and Schmidt became acting sheriff.
In his campaign, Schmidt emphasized the dozen or more changes he made at the agency since Clarke's departure, from balancing the budget and going after reckless drivers on freeways to reforming jail operations after several custody deaths during Clarke's tenure.
He reminded voters of his long experience in the department beginning in June 1986 when he worked in the jail and on patrol duty. Schmidt was promoted to sergeant in 1996. He became a captain in 2002, deputy inspector in 2003 and inspector of detention services in 2006. Clarke promoted him to senior commander in 2010.
Lucas retired as a captain in 2002 from the Milwaukee Police Department and went to work for Major League Baseball as supervisor of security and executive protection. He currently is employed as MLB's chief liaison of security and investigations.
The central theme in the Lucas campaign was "restoring integrity to the Sheriff's Office" post-Clarke. He has pledged to return deputies to doing more police work, such as drug enforcement and stopping human trafficking, and to ensure the jail is a secure and humane facility.
Voces de la Frontera, a local immigrant rights advocacy group, supported Lucas in the race and recently clashed with Schmidt on such controversial issues as jail deaths under former Clarke, while Schmidt was second in command though not the top jail administrator, and enforcement of federal immigration laws.
Voces representatives last week said Schmidt bears responsibility for deaths that occurred when he was second in command. Schmidt responded that he made changes in jail staffing and supervision soon after becoming the acting sheriff one year ago and that those reforms would not have been possible while Clarke was still the sheriff.
One of those reforms included adding three wellness monitors to the jail staff. They are responsible for daily one-on-one contact with inmates in mental health, medical and discipline units.
Voces has accused Schmidt of collaborating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, and helping to take immigrant parents away from their families.
Schmidt last week held a news conference to publicly state that deputies do not enforce immigration laws and do not ask possible immigrants about their legal status when they are arrested for traffic violations or other offenses.
The current annual salary for the acting sheriff is $120,555.
Three Way Dance: Youth fights, a family gets kicked out for cheering loud, oh and Sheriff David Clarke rescinded his application.
Three Way Dance: Youth fights, a family gets kicked out for cheering loud, oh and Sheriff David Clarke rescinded his application.
Usually around this time, I want to tell the 2017 Graduation Classes Congrats. That will come in the next two blogs. But right now, a three way dance is looking and it’s about the stuff that my homecity is going through. First Dance: Milwaukee Youth, Stop all this mess! On Facebook today through one of my local DJs page, there was a shared footage about two teenage girls were about to engage in a…
