When Bo Ryan was hired to lead the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball program, Sports Illustrated referred to him as “a coach no one heard of.”
Chris Dufresne of The Los Angeles Times wasn’t a fan of Ryan being hired, either: “What was Wisconsin thinking?” Dufresne wrote. “You don’t fire Brad Soderberg, Dick Bennett’s hand-chosen successor, unless you have Rick Majerus or Ben Braun signed, sealed and delivered. Don’t the Badgers look silly now that Majerus has formally rejected the school’s overtures and Braun has signed a four-year extension at California? It appears Wisconsin will hire fall-back candidate Bo Ryan of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, not exactly a household name. How is Bo Ryan better than Brad Soderberg?”
Earlier this week, Dufresne wrote a column setting up the Final Four, which begins Saturday at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. He wrote that the field — UW, Kentucky, Duke and Michigan State — is as “traditional as the Rose Parade.”
Reporters don’t write headlines for their stories, but it’s worth noting the one on Dufresne’s column: “The Final Four will be where elite meet — only blue bloods need apply.”
Indeed, Ryan has changed a lot of people’s opinions since he was hired on March 29, 2001.
He has helped UW win four Big Ten Conference regular-season championships and three conference tournament titles. He’s 172-68 in Big Ten play, the best conference winning percentage (.717) of any Big Ten coach.
The Badgers are 14-for-14 on trips to the NCAA tournament under Ryan, with seven Sweet 16 appearances, three trips to the Elite Eight and now back-to-back Final Four appearances.
By Monday, Ryan could be announced as a member of the Naismith Hall of Fame. By Monday night, he could have a Division I national championship to go along with the four Division III titles he won at UW-Platteville.
The Badgers (35-3), who meet Kentucky (38-0) in the national semifinals for the second consecutive season, set lofty goals when the season began. They wanted to sweep the Big Ten regular-season and tournament titles and return to the Final Four after last season ended with a heartbreaking loss to the Wildcats in Arlington, Texas.
“They said it and they did it,” Ryan said. “I told them I would go along with them, I would patrol the sidelines, I’m with you. But I don’t ever put that on teams, ‘Hey, you’ve got to do this or you’re not fulfilling anything.’ (It’s), ‘OK, guys, you ready? Let’s go. Roll your sleeves up, let’s get after it.’ They’ve lived up to what they said they were going to do, to this point.”
UW associate head coach Greg Gard has been with Ryan for more than two decades, including stops at Platteville and UW-Milwaukee. Gard is well aware there were doubters — inside the state borders and beyond — back in 2001.
“When Coach got here, we’ve always set goal No. 1 as trying to win the conference championship, and if you can strive for that and you put yourself in good position there, whether you win it or come close or whatever, that usually sets you up for having a chance in March and into April. And then it’s a matter of playing well at the right time, having the right matchup, being healthy, having a good team.” …
Ryan spoke earlier this week about all the people he was grateful to for giving him a chance. His coaching career, which spans more than four decades, has included stops at a junior high school and high school in Pennsylvania; an eight-year stretch as an assistant under Bill Cofield at UW; the dominant era at UW-Platteville, his first head coaching job at the college level; and a two-year run at UW-Milwaukee that paved the way for Ryan to be hired by former UW athletic director Pat Richter.
In the 14 years since, Ryan has won 356 games and silenced many a critic along the way.
“The best way to say thank you to people … is to do your job the best you can,” Ryan said. “When I was an assistant, (my) eyes, ears, and mind were constantly open. Thank goodness, because it helped me later.”
Ryan paused.
“That,” he said, “and I didn’t like losing.”
As far as the previously preferred candidates: Majerus would have been a fun coach to watch, but he died at 64. (I question how successful he would have been at UW anyway given UW’s academic standards and Madison’s culture.) Soderberg, fired after he replaced Dick Bennett upon Bennett’s midseason retirement, was fired after an awful NCAA tournament loss to Georgia State. He went to Saint Louis and was fired there, replaced by … Majerus. He is now the coach at Division II Lindenwood University in Missouri. Braun, a Wisconsin graduate who played for John Powless, was fired by Cal in 2008, then resigned after six years at Rice, where he was 63-128.
Ryan got, and gets, criticized because his teams play a style of basketball casual fans don’t like to watch. (Of course, winning overrides style complaints. As it is, Ryan’s teams are considerably more enjoyable to watch than teams coached by Bennett, who seemed to want to be the first college basketball coach to win a game 2-0.) Ryan does, as Bennett did, recruit players who don’t seem as athletically gifted as those who choose not to go to UW. (Most recently, Whitefish Bay Dominican’s Diamond Stone, who is going to Maryland, although Stone’s decision may have been based more on not being able to get into UW due to academics.) Ryan also has a public image of being bristly with the media, and the media retaliates by claiming that a coach who won four national championships in the division of the NCAA where no scholarship money is available can’t coach.
Oakland/Los Angeles/Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis was fond of this answer to his critics: “Just win, baby.” I doubt Ryan is a Raiders fan, but wouldn’t you like to see the geniuses of the sports keyboard after Ryan cuts down the nets Monday night?
Those of us who marched in the greatest marching band on the planet probably wondered at one point what UW Band director Mike Leckrone was like when he was closer to our age.
WISC-TV in Madison has the answer from Leckrone’s sister:
Pat Egolf looks at her big brother Mike Leckrone, or more specifically the flamboyant outfits he’s fond of wearing at the head of the UW-Madison marching band, and simply shakes her head with a smile.
“It’s not what we saw back here,” she said in an interview in the Manchester, Indiana school library, just a few miles from where they grew up. “It amazes me how he’s at the university with the sparkle jackets and the way he talks to the audience because he was rather laid-back.”
The portrait of the legendary UW band director starts with his father, Harold Leckrone, who students called “Leck.” He was a perfectionist, an avid and prolific composer, writing the Manchester High School fight song that was used as the fictional Hickory High’s song in the movie “Hoosiers.”
That attention to detail was not lost on Mike. However, his style and flair came from his mother.
“My father was very quiet,” Pat said. “He’d give you a big smile, but you’d better do and play as he says.”
Growing up in a small Indiana town in the 1940s and 50s, there were two extracurricular activities every boy aspired to participate in: basketball and band. During his time in high school, Mike was in the varsity starting five and served as first trumpet in the band, often pulling double duties during games.
“At halftime, he would run as soon as the buzzer went off, straight to the dressing room, jump in a band uniform because the high school band put on a show on the gym floor just like they do at the football fields now,” Pat said.
Leckrone, who graduated from the now-closed down Chester High School, was given a distinguished alumni award from the Manchester School District last summer. He was valedictorian of his 1954 class and followed in his father’s footsteps to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees from Butler University and Indiana University.
“Everything was so simple for him,” Pat said. “It was just natural for him, anything he did.”
His love of music came through at an early age, said Tom Airgood, who played the trombone in the high school band with Mike. Even after basketball games, he’d gather some of the band members for a 1950s version of a jam session.
“We would play together some extra down in the locker room, impromptu jazz,” Airgood said. “We’d play extra stuff from our usual pieces. We had a lot of fun with it.”
Leckrone’s love of jazz may be the one negative he’s left with his younger sister. She said his passion for it and the cramped nature of their three-bedroom house leaves her unable to enjoy it to this day.
“He played it all the time,” she said with a sigh. “It’s not like it’s a song either. He’d play up and down keys, and he was always in his room blasting away. That just wasn’t for me.”
Butler, by the way, is in Indianapolis, as are the Badgers for Saturday’s Final Four national semifinal. Wisconsin once played Butler in men’s basketball, and yes, Leckrone made us play the Butler fight song. Wisconsin also once played Ball State, apparently a Butler archrival, and Leckrone labeled the week’s marching instructions as Wisconsin against “Fruit Jar U.” (Home canners should appreciate that joke.)
Wisconsin’s spring general election — which is also the presidential primary election in years with presidential elections — is on the first Tuesday in April.
In 1980, the spring election was on April 1. That was appropriate in 1980 because of what happened four days before that.
On the bitter cold Friday night of March 28, 1980, outside the State Capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, the famed film director Francis Ford Coppola produced a 30-minute TV infomercial that effectively ended California Gov. Jerry Brown’s campaign for president.
For Brown, the production was a hideously embarrassing political disaster. It not only crashed his Democratic primary challenge to President Jimmy Carter, but also reinforced his Governor Moonbeam reputation and marked the start of a decade-long decline in his once-meteoric political fortunes.
Titled “The Shape of Things to Come,” the bizarre half-hour show was seen only by Wisconsin viewers who happened to tune in to the statewide broadcast, a pot-hazed crowd of 3,000 who showed for the event and a small group of political reporters who panned it the next day.
Dubbed “Apocalypse Brown,” after Coppola’s Vietnam War epic “Apocalypse Now,” the program has never been seen by most Californians, including even some of Brown’s closest associates. …
We got our DVD copy from TV consultant and Calbuzzer Peter Shaplen, a freelance network news producer who now teaches video journalism at the Art Institute of San Francisco. At the time, he was covering Brown’s campaign as an ABC News producer. As Shaplen recalls:
The governor and I got into a heated argument the following day aboard the campaign plane. He maintained the audience would see beyond the technology snafu and hear his message, respond and vote for him. I suggested that the audience was so busy laughing at the failure of any reasonable communication that it was impossible to listen and respond.
A Francis Ford Coppola Production: Using — or misusing — the technique of chroma key compositing, Coppola projected impressionistic images both on a big screen behind Brown, which was flapping in the strong wind, and in the simultaneous TV broadcast.
The signature moment of the infomercial comes about 11 minutes into it with the sudden appearance over Brown’s right shoulder of an astronaut, clad only in white boxer shorts, doing somersaults, flips and other gymnastic moves inside a space capsule while in a weightless state.
Just. Plain. Weird.
Things were going badly well before that, however.
Right before the broadcast begins, a voice from the crowd says, “America has lost its environmental ethic and also Wisconsin doesn’t grow enough sinsemilla.”
Then the titles go up and someone types on a dateline, which is misspelled “Madisno, Wisci” before being corrected; next an utterly grim looking Brown walks to the stage, wearing a serious trench coat apparently a size too big, and starts orating into a sound system that isn’t working.
“We can’t hear,” a few people yell, whereupon Brown is given a hand-held mic and ad libs: “Even the technology of this age needs some human assistance.”
Not long after, the stage lights go out for a while, as seemingly random images – a steel mill, a rural cabin, an old guy shucking wheat – appear behind Brown, while quadrants of his head mysteriously keep dissolving into gaping gashes of flickering black and white.
How the deal went down: Just three weeks before, Brown had appointed the 40-year Coppola, who’d by then won an Academy Award and produced, directed and written the first two “Godfather” movies, to the state Arts Commission.
Brown’s campaign against a Democratic president never really took off – not least because the late Sen. Edward Kennedy was also challenging the incumbent – but Coppola was doing his bit to help his political patron. …
The Brown manifesto. The following Tuesday, Brown won only 15 percent of the primary vote and dropped out of the race. But the 25-minute speech he delivered during the program, overshadowed by the technical debacle, was framed by many of the ideas and attitudes he still holds – and a few he long ago dumped on the Krusty ash bin of history:
1-Paddle to the right, paddle to the left: Brown’s commentary on global and national political economics, the absolutely humorless tone of which is at odds with the counter-culture crowd on hand, is a case study of how he combines conservative and liberal views in his politics.
His theme was rejuvenating America’s economy, then beset by a crippling combination of high inflation, skyrocketing energy prices and widespread unemployment. He proposed a Japan-like “new economic order,” led by government but including both business and organized labor, that would rebuild the nation’s manufacturing capacity.
“A call to arms, not for war, but for peace – we can re-industrialize this country,” he said.
Among the left-liberal elements of this policy: a “coupon rationing method” for gasoline; a “ban on import of foreign oil by private companies” in favor of a government-run “U.S. Oil Buying Authority,” and new mandatory conservation policies to curtail “profligate, scandalous, unnecessary” energy consumption.
At the same, however, he sounded fiscally conservative themes: stop the government “printing press” of inflationary monetary policy; “balance the budget” by ending “fiscal gimmickry, borrowing from the future (and) huge deficits.” He also called for private-public sector cooperation to sell “re-industrialization bonds (and to) double research efforts into information technologies.”
2-The value of service: Brown’s remarks about himself and his reasons for pursuing elected office echo across three decades.
He recounted growing up in a household dominated by the career of his father, the late Gov. Pat Brown, and his revulsion at what he considered the demeaning nature of much political interaction – “the political language we hear is debased.” He said this led him to his time in the Jesuit seminary.
“I didn’t like politics…I wanted to find God,” he said, an experience that resulted in “development (of) a commitment to be of service.” Railing against “consumerism,” he said that as president he would manifest this idea, which remains a central thread of his politics today, by creating a “domestic Peace Corps” to channel young people into “voluntary service.”
3-The vision thing: Brown’s 1980 speech is also notable for how much it foresees mega economic and political trends that were just then forming.
Speaking of how we all live in “a very small global village,” for example, he foresaw globalization and trade policies a generation into the future, calling for a “North American Economic Community” including the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and enthusiastically describing the possibilities of “co-generation, solar, photo-voltaic” energy sources, as well as the need for “mass transit, bullet trains, fuel efficient cars.” …
“I have the skill, the know-how, the commitment,” for high office, he said at one point; when a woman asked him what he will do to assure the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, he presaged his get-them-all-in-a-room plan for solving the current budget deficit: “I’ll bring recalcitrant legislators to Washington and keep them there until they change their mind.”
Somewhat awkwardly, Brown concluded his remarks by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance – without inviting the crowd to join him. Then he left the stage, unaware that the technical meltdown of the program within a few hours would lead to widespread mockery of the event.
The Wisconsin State Journal’s Doug Moe starts by picking up the story after the “Ashtar” of live political TV:
On the cab ride from the Park Motor Inn to Four Lakes Aviation, where his private plane was waiting, the most celebrated film director in the world did not feel like celebrating.
It was close to midnight in Madison, March 28, 1980.
The cab driver studied the director in the rearview mirror, and said, “You know, this event tonight started out to be pretty interesting, but then something went wrong.”
“You’re telling me,” the director said. “It was a disaster. Just a disaster.”
Thirty-five years ago this week, Francis Ford Coppola, director of two revered “Godfather” movies, and with another film, “Apocalypse Now,” recently released amid great controversy and melodrama that only added to his legend, came to Madison to direct a live half-hour television show for his friend, California Gov. Jerry Brown, who was running for president in the Democratic primary in Wisconsin.
In the years since, the 30-minute program has itself become legendary. The events played out across three days in Madison. Coppola visited West High School and ate at local restaurants, even as technicians ensconced on the state Capitol lawn raced against the clock to ready the live production.
“I have no experience in this kind of thing,” Coppola announced cheerfully, during his time at West High. Later, anyone looking for a title for the extravaganza had one on a platter: “Apocalypse Brown.”
“There was a lot of hoopla building up to it,” Chuck Martin, a former State Journal journalist who covered the event, said this week.
When Jerry Brown decided to challenge incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic nomination, he first asked Coppola — whom Brown had appointed to the California Arts Council — to create some traditional, short television commercials for the campaign.
Brown’s team was happy with the spots, but the campaign itself, by mid-March, was foundering. They needed something dramatic to happen and figured the primary on April 1 in Wisconsin — a state with a history of appreciating mavericks — might be the place.
The idea for a half-hour event, to air live a few days before the primary, came from Coppola and was put together in just a few weeks, according to the production manager, quoted in Martin’s State Journal story.
The show was to be titled, “The Shape of Things to Come,” from an H.G. Wells futuristic short story.
Speaking of the director, a Brown staff member told a reporter from New York City’s Village Voice, “I have no idea what he’s going to do. All I know is that Coppola intends this thing to be one of the collector’s items of his career.”
Coppola arrived in Madison on March 26, a Wednesday. The show was set to air statewide on eight stations at 7 p.m. Friday. Wednesday night, Coppola spoke to students at West High.
Walt Trott covered the West High appearance for The Capital Times and quoted the director in the next day’s paper:
“We’ll center ourselves by the Capitol building,” Coppola said, “where we’ll put up this immense television set and we’re going to go on TV live with the governor making a statement that he wants to make. I’ll be in a truck where I can make a live mix, making any combination of things.”
Thursday morning, Coppola spoke at Russell Merritt’s film history class at UW-Madison. Throughout his time in the city, the director talked about evolving technology and how a new process, called chroma-key, would allow him to flash relevant images on a screen behind Brown as the governor spoke.
Thursday night, a Village Voice reporter was at the Capitol observing the frenzied crew trying to ready generators, search lights, and TV cameras, while Coppola gave Jerry Brown a tour of the set.
“After this,” Coppola said, “you’ll be the movie star and I’ll run for governor.”
Friday evening was chilly and damp. Fires burning in garbage cans provided heat on the Capitol lawn. Search lights pierced the sky. A young woman in the crowd of 3,000 told the Cap Times, “This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”
It got weirder. Eventually Brown, in a trench coat, took the stage. Not much went right after that. The chroma-key technology failed, even as the candidate talked about the need to re-industrialize and invest in new technologies. Images broke apart on screen. At one point an image of a Skylab astronaut doing weightless somersaults in his underwear appeared behind Brown.
Later, in a suite at the Park Motor Inn, Coppola and rock music promoter Bill Graham drank red wine and waited for Coppola’s cab driver. When he arrived, Graham offered some wine. “Even at Union,” Stuart Levitan said, “we’re not supposed to drink with the passengers.”
Yes, Coppola’s cab driver was Levitan, the Madison journalist and historian.
Levitan viewed the show from the Capitol lawn, and this week recalled how strange it was to watch “the most innovative politician of our generation self-destruct before our eyes.”
Additional technological insight comes from Greg Buzzell on the Facebook “If You Grew Up in Madison You Remember” page:
I was Chief Engineer at the time at WMTV channel 15. We were the station picked to do the state wide live feed of the show. From the outset we knew the program was in trouble. They had to borrow cable from us, because they did not bring enough. They were trying to do a chroma key outside in the wind, we knew that would not work. Everything was live, and being on headset with Coppola, it was evident he had never done anything live before. The chroma key wasn’t working, the graphics did not work, and we were struggling at the station to input live names into our character generator for lower thirds. After a few minutes in Coppola had lost his cool and started yelling at everyone which only made thing worse. Eventually he just took his headset off, and just left the set, and let the assistant director finish the show. It was a great embarrassment for Governor Brown, but also an embarrassment for the station. But we all learned that you can be a great movie director, and not be able to do something live. Obviously in live TV there are no do overs as there are in film.
So what did this TV train wreck look like?
While the debacle certainly ended Brown’s 1980 run for president (the winner was Brown’s predecessor as governor, Ronald Reagan), it didn’t end Brown’s political career. Brown didn’t run for reelection in 1982, but a decade later he ran for president again. Even more unpredictably, he is again governor of California.
Today is April Fool’s Day. Which John Lennon and Yoko Ono celebrated in 1970 by announcing they were having sex-change operations.
Today in 1972, the Mar y Sol festival began in Puerto Rico. The concert’s location simplified security — it was on an island accessible only by those with tickets.
I noted earlier today that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel refused to run a letter about the Milwaukee police chief’s throwing one of his officers under the bus.
While the Journal Sentinel wouldn’t run that, they did run a column that is so idiotic all you need know about its idiocy is the headline: “A just and free world means a world without police.”
Read it if you dare. I read it, and thought it was satire — it was that out of touch with reality. (Not to mention tasteless either on her part or the part of the Journal Sentinel for printing it immediately after the death of a Wisconsin State Patrol trooper.)
For all my adult life, I have worn a uniform in the SERVICE of my country. I have been in the ARMY National Guard, ROTC, US Civil Air Patrol and US Coast Guard Auxiliary. I have served as a firefighter, EMT and Law Enforcement Officer. I realized it was a privilege to serve, it is not a right, nor did I embark on my service as validation through applause.
I served by choice, because the ideals what the United States of America were founded upon were a noble and worthy of service. Our strongest ideal is that of the right of the individual to express his anger against the government without the fear of reprisal. A person has the ability to choose one path in life to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. No other nation on earth enjoys such freedoms. Soldiers and Law enforcement are responsible for their protections of those rights. For democracy to work; it needs the individual to have personal accountability and responsibility. It requires it citizens to be involved and educated to make sound decisions as a collective.
It requires balance by all. I am closing in on the end of my career, and I am asking you to think about this perspective. There is a large and growing fringe in America, outlaw motorcycle gangs, organized criminal networks, both foreign and domestic and ideological groups who want nothing more to promote anti American values. About 700,000 men and women go to work every day working to keep America safe internally. The ideas of comparing ISIS and American Law Enforcement is just egregious. For ISIS due process in a bullet to the head because they don’t like your religious values and your pursuit of happiness. The United States we are a nation of laws. It is not a perfect system, but it does allow the individual the right to challenge the government in a forum of decorum and order. It gives you the right to criticize me why I go about my work every day.
Behind the badge, no cop wants to become involved in a shooting, just like no soldier want to kill another human being. The world has people who predators are willing to exploit and harm good people, that includes you all the while you criticize us.
In the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt’s speech the critic I offer this to you. You enjoy the opportunity to express your first amendment right, in the safety and convenience of your home. I think you should walk a mile in a person’s shoes before your criticize. I think you should take the opportunity to become a police officer and work the street. Change the system from within,
I think you should have the opportunity to see what I see, work where I work. After 25 years then you can criticize, and I think your article was in extremely poor taste printing on the death of a State Trooper who was attempting to arrest an armed bank robbery suspect.
On behalf of the thousands of Wisconsin law enforcement officers, you’re welcome for the appreciation you have shown by expressing your right to freedom of speech. We stand between you and the predators that would rather not let you have that right. Enjoy the fact, you can criticize me and my brothers while we continue to protect you. If you would rather, the folks in ISIS might welcome you with open arms, on second thought no, the would not…it is their intent to suppress women’s rights. Not sure; ask a veteran. In this world, there is the idea of Karma, and I think you better prepare for that “Ah Ha” Moment. Until then, this is an open invitation for YOU to come ride in my squad and see first hand whether we are part of the solution or the problem.
Retired police officer Steve Spingola wrote a letter that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel refused to print:
On the first floor of the City of Milwaukee’s Safety Academy, the names and photographs of over five dozen Milwaukee police officers grace a wall that literally showcases their service. This distinguished honor, however, is one that every Milwaukee police officer seeks to avoid, as the faces on this wall are of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice.
During my three-decades with the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD), I have spent a great deal of time — as a homicide detective and as a lieutenant — retracing the final moments of those who no longer walk among us. Certainly, some of these tragic deaths could have been avoided. One particular case that comes to mind is the March 19, 1985, coldblooded murders of Rosario Collura and Leonard Lesnieski — two Milwaukee police officers gunned down on the near north side. On that fateful day, the officers approached Terrance Davis, who they suspected of selling drugs from the porch of a home. When one of the officers asked if he had anything in his pockets, Davis replied, “Yeah, I’ll show you,” at which time he removed a handgun from a pocket and shot both officers to death. What we will never know is why the officers, instead of asking, did not conduct a pat down of Davis.
Seventeen-years earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court held that police officers could conduct a frisk of an individual’s outer most garment if an officer — based on the totality of the circumstances— reasonably believed that a person may be armed. Pat downs have undoubtedly saved the lives of numerous police officers. From experience, few things are as hair-raising as conducting frisk and detecting a concealed weapon on a person. Yet, 29-years after the deaths of Officers Collura and Lesnieski, the importance of officer safety is being marginalized by the political correctness of Police Chief Edward Flynn.
On October 15, Chief Flynn terminated the employment Officer Christopher Manney, an officer with 13-years of street-level experience, for allegedly conducting a pat down of Dondre Hamilton in violation of MPD policy. After reading the MPD’s allegations and Officer Manney’s response, I sought input from a number of veteran officers. To a person, we collectively believe Officer Manney’s actions were appropriate. While I typically do not purport to speak for others, I am confident in noting that Chief Flynn’s firing of Officer Manney is being met with widespread condemnation from those who have worn an MPD uniform.
Unfortunately, I believe Chief Flynn’s irresponsible termination of Officer Manney is directly related to his lack of an institutional memory. In 1985, while serving with Officers Collura and Lesnieski at District Five, I have vivid memories of both officers smiling and conversing with their colleagues. During the same period, however, Chief Flynn was an officer in far-away Jersey City. Thus, the image of Flynn as an east coast carpetbagger is fueling a consensus amongst the rank-and-file that the chief sees those fallen officers on that wall at the Safety Academy as simple strangers from a bygone era. This perception, vis-à-vis his treatment of Officer Manney, is reinforced by the police chief’s de facto memo to the rank-and-file that politics takes precedent over officer safety. No doubt, Chief Flynn is sending a dangerous message that, I believe, may result in more faces appearing on that wall of no return at the Safety Academy. Will officers — fearful for their careers — be compelled to repeat the disastrous ways of the past by asking a dangerous or unstable person what those “bulges” are in his or her pockets instead of conducting a simple frisk? If only Officers Collura and Lesnieski could speak from the grave.
Spingola calls Manney the first officer in the history of the Milwaukee police to be fired for violating a training memo. Let’s hope that Officer Manney gets the justice from the Milwaukee County court system that the City of Milwaukee — that is, Tom Barrett, the Barrett-selected Police and Fire Commission, and Barrett’s police chief — refuses to give Manney.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 