by David Clarke
In other words, Black LIES Matter and its predecessor, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), have taught black people that they can’t trust the police, that their futures are hopeless, and that American institutions are against them. But that’s only because they want to separate all actions from their consequences.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was once asked if there were any areas in which the civil rights establishment, including the NAACP, was doing good work. This was his response:
No. I can’t think of any … There were grand opportunities for them to focus on the proper education of minority kids, the kids who are getting the worst education, and instead they’re talking about integration…. I went to segregated schools. You can really learn how to read off those books, even if white folks aren’t there. I think segregation is bad, I think it’s wrong, it’s immoral. I’d fight against it with every breath in my body, but you don’t need to sit next to a white person to learn how to read and write. The NAACP needs to say that.
But then he got to the heart of the issue:
You’ve got a situation recently where the president of the NAACP or one of his spokespersons is defending a kid who punched out a teacher. Give me a break! How … are the kids going to learn if they can punch out the teacher? I would have died if I’d done something like that and I went back home to my grandfather—literally died. You’ve got to have some standards of morality, some strong positive statements about expectations—and those organizations could do that. Instead, they spend their time telling minority kids that it is hopeless out here. Why is it hopeless? Because Ronald Reagan is making it hopeless. When Ronald Reagan is gone, why are you going to tell them that it’s hopeless? Because the government isn’t spending enough money. It will always be hopeless if that’s the reason. You don’t have any control over that. What you do have control over is yourself. They should be telling these kids that freedom carries not only benefits, it carries responsibilities. You want to be free, you want to leave your parents’ house? Then you’ve got to earn your own living, you’ve got to pay your own mortgage, pay your own rent, buy your own car, and pay for your own food. You’ve got to learn how to take care of yourself, learn how to raise your kids, how to go to school and prepare for a job and take risks like everybody else.11
That was during the 1980s. Since then, the so-called civil rights groups have gone even farther off the rails trying to insulate people from terrible behavior, laziness, insubordination, and resentment. The bottom line is this: If you stop when a cop tells you to stop, and you don’t point a gun at a cop or try to fight him or her, you’ll probably survive your encounter with the police.
But that’s not the message the black activists want to convey. No matter how wrong, misguided, reckless, and dangerous a black person might be acting, they’ll side with that person over the police every time. That’s why I knew, as soon as I saw on television my officer place his boot on Lamar Nash’s neck, that I’d be hearing from them soon enough.
I was right.
Within days, the complaint came. It was from an official of the city of Racine’s local chapter of the NAACP saying the officer who placed his foot on the suspect’s neck used—you guessed it—excessive force. I ordered an internal investigation, something that I do on all citizen complaints, to look more closely at the incident.
In the meantime, the NAACP president, Beverly Hicks, went to the press. “When [the suspect] was on the ground, he wasn’t resisting,” she said to the Journal Times. “I didn’t see the need for officers to react the way they did … I guess the guy was wrong, but he’s still a human being and [the sheriff’s deputies] still need to look at their actions.”12 Note that she couldn’t bring herself to say definitively that Nash was “wrong”—even after stealing a vehicle, trying to ram innocent civilians and police officers off the road, and breaking out the window of a squad car.
But the NAACP wasn’t familiar with me. Newly elected, I was an unknown entity. After all, I am a black Democrat in Milwaukee. I think the black racialists (people who view everything through the prism of race) thought they had “one of their own” as the new sheriff of Milwaukee County. They saw my skin. They figured I’d be on their side.
They would soon be disabused of this notion.
About a week after the incident, I held a news conference in the Sheriff’s Office Operations Center. I walked the attendees through the video of the incident and informed them that my internal investigation concluded that the officer’s use of force was reasonable under the circumstances. Once and for all, I wanted to settle the issue, to stop the allegations, and to clear the names of the brave deputies.
A week later some black community agitators organized a community forum for a discussion of my decision. As the room filled with about fifty concerned citizens, NAACP representatives, and the local television media, I thought, Here we go!
The meeting was called to order. I immediately showed the footage from the news helicopter, offering my observations as the film rolled. When the moment came in the video of the deputy putting his boot on the suspect’s neck, I paused it.
“I talked to the deputy, who explained why he used this tactic,” I said. I always believe addressing issues head-on is best. “He wanted to make sure the guy would not get up from the ground, something that has happened before in these situations.” The faces of the people in the crowd remained hard, frozen in incredulity. “He feared he might end up fighting for his weapon, and—to be honest—that was my thought as I watched it on television just like you did.” A few people talked to each other, obviously unmoved by the explanation. “But I’m here to tell you that I’ve ruled that the officer’s tactic was reasonable under the circumstances.”
The talking grew louder as people began to shuffle in their seats and call out questions.
“Do you teach your officers to place their foot on people’s necks even after they’re on the ground?” someone piped up from the back of the room.
“We don’t teach it,” I said, “But it seemed to work pretty well, didn’t it? We can see from the videotape that it’s not time for milk and cookies, nor was it time to exchange pleasantries.”
Obviously my decision did not sit well with the race hustlers. I didn’t care. It was the right decision under the circumstances. This was one of the early glimpses for the public that I was not going to put up with nonsense. But I wasn’t finished yet.
“I took you through the entire incident because I wanted to point out the danger the suspect placed everybody in,” I said. “But it seems you still believe this is a race issue, right?”
People nodded, and I heard someone sarcastically say, “Yes, sir.”
“Let me see a show of hands,” I said. “I want to see how many think this is about race?” Every hand went up. “So, it’s unanimous,” I said. Then, I held up an 8 x 10 picture of the deputy—the black deputy. “This is the officer who used his boot.”
The room fell silent as everyone was absolutely gobsmacked. The helicopter footage, which was shot in the dark, wasn’t clear enough to show the race of the officer. The media coverage had described the officer as Caucasian. Everyone assumed that this was yet another incident of a white cop using excessive force with a black kid. “He wasn’t white,” I said. “And it wasn’t excessive.”
Everyone started murmuring. They’d been had. They’d jumped to a conclusion without waiting for the facts from the moment the incident happened.
“Hey,” someone yelled from the back of the room. “Black officers can be racist too!”
Typical rationalization to save face.
“Okay, then I’ll ask the question again,” I said. “How many people believe this man is a racist?” No hands went up.
The people in that room were not pleased with me, but we’d come to an uneasy truce. Truth be told, I got many compliments from people in the black community who rightly called the suspect’s behavior outrageous. They are a silent majorit
y for fear of being ostracized by other blacks. But on that night, the shallowness of the activists had been exposed, and they knew I wasn’t going to let them get away with their war on police.
Not on my watch.
4
Guess What? Prison Is Supposed to Be Unpleasant
“YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME,” I said, holding papers I’d just been served. “I’m getting sued?”
My secretary, walking by for coffee, paused at my door.
“By whom?”
“Terrance Prude,” I read.
“Should that name ring a bell?” she asked.
I read down the complaint and smiled in disbelief. “He’s an inmate.”
In 2007, then County Executive Scott Walker decided to move the Milwaukee House of Correction from the county executive’s authority to the sheriff’s office for oversight. Things at the jail weren’t good. To figure out just how bad they’d gotten, California-based corrections expert Dr. Jeffrey A. Schwartz documented dozens of organizational, administrative, and operational problems. He said ours was one of the most poorly run detention facilities he had seen in decades of inspecting lockup facilities: It had a $5 million deficit and was plagued with a lack of discipline, poor supervision, employee sick use abuse, inmate fights, and excessive and unnecessary overtime use. More than four hundred inmates had escaped their electronic monitoring.1
“These problems will take at least five years to change,” said Dr. Schwartz, but he definitely didn’t know me. I inherited 1,100 inmates being held in deplorable conditions. I wasn’t going to drag my heels when people’s lives were at stake. Neither was I going to whine about the horrible situation I’d been handed. Instead, I rolled up my sleeves, put an organizational change team in place, and went to work.
Over the next year, I wiped out the deficit; inmate fights became rare; employee attendance improved; overtime was within budget. Also every inmate who had escaped electronic monitoring had been located and arrested by an absconder unit I created. The facility became a well-functioning part of county government.
When Dr. Schwartz did another evaluation, he was certainly surprised, and his report showed it:
Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. assumed responsibility for the deeply troubled Milwaukee HoC on January 1, 2009. The positive and comprehensive transformation of that facility in less than a year’s time is nothing short of miraculous. That is not hyperbole but is the carefully considered conclusion of the author based on over thirty years of observing and studying changes in correctional facilities.2
Catch that? “Not hyperbole” and “nothing short of miraculous.” Rare phrases to read in a report about a correctional facility. But that’s not enough for some people.
“Why would an inmate sue you?” she asked.
I glanced through the lawsuit. “Because he hated his food so much he claims … we violated the Eighth Amendment … which says prisoners shall not be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment.” I stifled a laugh and added, “Well, I sure hope teenagers across America don’t figure out they can sue over not liking what’s put on their plates.”
Prisons lately have come under fire for not being sufficiently comfortable, especially now that lefties seem to run the prisons. Social justice warriors use the word rehabilitative because they believe that prison should help satisfy practical, intellectual, and spiritual needs through job training, educational initiatives, and other activities.
I don’t buy that. When I took over the House of Corrections, I dug in deep. First, I looked at the GED program and discovered that the average reading level of all the inmates was at the seventh-grade level. I went to the college running the GED program and asked, “How many inmates who start the program in jail continue once they get out?” The House of Corrections was never intended to be an institution where inmates were kept for long durations.
“We don’t know,” they said. “We don’t keep those kinds of records.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” I asked. I was astounded. “So you get paid money to start the program in jail. But once they get released from jail, you could care less about them?”
Keep in mind sometimes judges make continuing education one of the stipulations of their sentencing. A criminal might be ordered to get a job, get a GED, not partake of drugs or alcohol, and have no further contact with the law. If the man doesn’t continue to pursue his education, he’s in violation of the sentencing order. But as I stood there, I realized no one was keeping up with this. Seventy percent of inmates end up right back in jail, and this guy falls through the cracks. No one cares; no one follows up. The fact of the matter was that these programs were not about helping these inmates get a GED. It was about getting paid for running a perpetual program in the jail. I ended this ineffective program.
Then I looked into the so-called job-training program, which, of course, looks good on paper. “What are we training them to do?” I asked. I knew we weren’t training them to be electricians, plumbers, or steel workers. No, we were spending a great deal of money to prepare them to do low-paying, unskilled labor, exactly the type of training that an employer does upon hiring. For example, if an inmate went to a warehouse to get a job driving a forklift, the employer would provide forklift instruction. Or a former inmate could go to one of Milwaukee’s many meat-packing plants that could always use unskilled labor. The processing plants have a tough time keeping workers because many think it’s too cold. It’d be a great job for someone recently out of jail, and the employer would train him to do the dumping, grinding, and processing work. There’s no way we could teach him that kind of stuff in jail.
Prison Isn’t a Country Club
Prison isn’t a country club, a university, or a spa. I really can’t believe I have to point this out. It’s a place where people are sent to be disciplined. I don’t want my prisoners to kick back and be happy. I want them to feel so uncomfortable that they never want to darken the door again.
And I wasn’t afraid to make it less comfy when I noticed the inmates lying around in bed all day and staying up late, harassing the guards. This night owl tendency probably got them in trouble in the first place. They kept ungodly hours and never could find employment because they were asleep during what you and I might call work hours.
“Lights off at 10:00 p.m.,” I said when I took over. That meant lights out literally. There would be no card playing, nothing. The prisoners were welcome to stay up, but they’d be sitting in the dark. Then, in the morning, when productive people should be awake, I took the mattresses off their beds. They were welcome to sleep on the uncomfortable wooden planks, but they weren’t getting a mattress. If anyone wanted to go to bed early, I put the mattresses back on the beds at 8:00 p.m. We repeated this process every day so the prisoners could get on a schedule that could help their lives once they got out. That was one way I was encouraging them to get into a more traditional lifestyle so they could easily transition into society when they left.
Also while I was in charge of the correctional facility, the global price of food skyrocketed. The cost of eggs, for example, went up 30 percent; milk rose 13 percent.3 The price of our meals went up by 12 percent.4 I began to look more closely at the menu and realized that one item on their plates didn’t absolutely need to be there: dessert.
When a local newspaper reporter was interviewing me for the inevitable he’s-so-mean story, I asked why people who have broken society’s rules should get dessert. I told the writer, “I don’t get dessert every day at home. As long as the taxpayers have to struggle with rising food costs and eat more Hamburger Helper, as long as they have to adjust their living and eating habits, why should they have to pay increased costs for people who have disregarded society’s rules?”5
Everyone went crazy over this decision. But the criminals were just as upset by what they were being served, even though all of my inmates were getting nutritionally adequate meals with the proper vitamins and proteins. We’ve come a long way in this nation from the brea
d-and-water days when prisoners received only those basic rations until they proved they were trustworthy enough to receive meat. Today’s politically correct world questions using food as a deterrent for bad behavior, and that’s why I was being sued.
The meal in question was not mere bread and water. It was Nutraloaf, made from various ingredients (depending on location) like carrots, biscuit mix, a dairy blend, and cabbage. Nutraloaf has all of the vitamins and minerals a human being needs, but the inmates don’t love it. That’s why I gave it only to inmates who had attacked inmates or my staff members.
It’s not as bad as all the reporters make it out to be. I’ve eaten it. It’s sort of like meatloaf. No, not the kind of meatloaf your mom used to make, but I’m nobody’s mom. Nor am I the manager at Applebee’s. After hearing of the lawsuit, a writer for the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel baked some and described it as “the devil’s meatloaf”6 that looked like a brick of dog vomit.
“The taste is not that horrible,” he wrote. “Just enough so to remind you why it’s wise to avoid incarceration whenever possible.”
Exactly. You don’t want to be in jail.
I just couldn’t sit by and let violence occur inside the walls of my facility. No way. And it wasn’t just a matter of safety. It was a matter of the bottom line: when unruly inmates attacked members of my staff, they had to take time off to recover, we had to pay other officers overtime to take the place of the injured employees, and our insurance premiums skyrocketed. Saving taxpayer money was important to me.
When Prude filed a lawsuit against me, claiming I was violating the Eighth Amendment, I was eager for my day in court. He wasn’t a good guy who’d made a few mistakes. He was arrested for armed robbery, and the assistant district attorney explained that he was responsible for several threatening calls made from the jail to one of the robbery victims after he’d been arrested. His victim and the victim’s family had to be put under witness protection.
