During his seven-year tenure, Democrat Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm has failed to file charges in any of the deaths involving his county’s police officers.
This revelation comes as Governor Walker signed into law Wednesday morning a bipartisan bill, passed earlier this year in the Wisconsin state legislature, which responds to public pressure for greater oversight over use of deadly force by police.
There were 41 officer-related deaths in the state of Wisconsin between 2008 and 2013. 14 of those deaths occurred in Milwaukee, under the watch of Chisholm, who was elected to office in 2007. Chisholm says there hasn’t been enough evidence (from the police’s internal investigations) to support charges in any of those cases.
Amid growing public distrust toward what may be interpreted as “police protecting their own,” the Wisconsin state legislature passed a bipartisan bill earlier this year to require outside investigations in addition to the internal police investigations.
One of those cases Chisholm failed to file charges in was the death of Derek Williams, a robbery suspect who died while unable to breathe in the back of a squad car. A video showed Williams gasping for air and pleading for help as the officers on the scene accused Williams of “just playing games.” After ten minutes of the officers failing to render assistance, Williams was dead.
The coroner’s office originally determined Williams died from natural causes, but later changed this finding to homicide. Chisholm did not press charges against the officers involved.
Here is the **graphic video** of Derek Williams dying while in police custody:
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While most small police departments already use outside investigators, larger departments from Milwaukee, Green Bay and Madison who conduct theirs internally aren’t happy about the proposed law.
From Fox 11:
“There’s going to be a number of unknowns here,” said Green Bay Police Lt. Chad Ramos. “We put together very transparent investigations. How is it we can’t trust our own officers to investigate themselves?
“No one has any problem being transparent. I just don’t know that (the investigations) can be done any better than they are now,” Milwaukee Police Association President Mike Crivello said. The association is the union for city officers.
Supporters of the law find this reasoning flawed—they question why if the officials ask the public to trust their investigations, the same trust couldn’t be extended to another agency’s investigation.
Source:
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