| As we sit in his living room on Milwaukee's northwest side, it's hard to think of former Milwaukee Police Chief Arthur Jones as a controversial figure. Jones is mild-mannered and very polite and talks freely about his tenure as Milwaukee's first African American police chief from 1996 until 2003. And yet, a simple Google of his name shows that he has been a central figure in the mix of race relations in the Milwaukee Police Department from his successful suit through the League of Martin to fully integrate the Milwaukee Police Department (MPS) in the late 1970s to the federal lawsuit of 17 White police officers who claimed that Jones practiced "reverse discrimination" in his promotions of police officers to the rank of captain, a suit that went against Jones in 2005. The Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) had been the province of White males since it had been founded in 1855 and had 120 years to solidify the hold of White males on the department before people of color and women began to join the department in significant numbers. With a long tradition of White male privilege, people of color and women would have to fight their way up the ladder of advance, oftentimes only after filing a complaint or a lawsuit./When Jones was appointed the chief of the Milwaukee Police Department in 1996, no one expected him to become chief, perhaps because he had filed several lawsuits against the city in order to get promoted or perhaps because he was African American. Even the African American police didn't expect it to happen. Even when it was down to me and another person, officers would walk up to me and tell me -- even when I knew it was going to be me -- 'You know, it's not going to be you,'" Jones said. "They would come to my office and say 'You're a good guy and everything, but you know, you're not going to be chief.' I knew the Monday of the week when I was appointed on Friday. And the whole city knew the chief was going to be appointed that Friday. Some people heard it was going to be me, but nobody wanted to believe it. Nobody in the police department believed I was going to get the appointment. The inspector of the detective bureau was the other person. Everyone was going 'Vince is going to get it. The word is that you might be the assistant chief. People thought the mayor wasn't crazy to appoint me. 'We're not going to have a Black chief. Black officers didn't believe it either. When I became chief, 25-30 percent of the force was African American. The force didn't reflect the population of the city of Milwaukee as a whole." Jones was well-prepared for the job because he had worked most of the major positions within the department and had also witnessed problems that he was determined to clean up if he were ever to become chief. One of them was the abuse of overtime. "When I became chief, the overtime was outrageous," Jones recalled. "We had police officers making on top of their salaries $120,000 in overtime. I would come in at night and from the previous shift, the lieutenant on the next shift was signing a stack of overtime cards, 120-130 overtime cards from the officers on the previous shift. Nobody knew why they turned in the overtime cards and who authorized it. The lieutenant's job was to sign them and process them. There was no verification and no authorization they worked the overtime to begin with. "During my first year as chief, I reduced overtime by $2.5 million," Jones said. "The way I did it was that if I wanted to work overtime, I had to go to a supervisor and say 'I have this accident report or I have this burglary.' And they would sign my card approving the overtime. But that same supervisor had to take a look at it and say 'Yes, this is what I authorized and sign it.' Before, the second part would never happen. Somebody would come in to the lieutenant and say 'We have an accident report we have to complete on the next shift,' and he would say 'Okay.' So they would sit back in the assembly for an hour or two. One of the officers may go home. And the other person would take the overtime card and drop it in there and then the lieutenant on that shift would sign it because he or she was busy with their own shift. After a while, it was just routine. While you were on the phone talking, you'd be signing overtime cards. It wasn't easy to implement. I had to threaten to take disciplinary action for hundreds of people." Another problem that Jones saw was the practice of some MPD officers to handcuff everyone in the car during routine traffic stops in some areas of the city. Jones tried to change the practice. "They were starting to carry 2-3 pairs of handcuffs," Jones recalled. "And they would go buy their own. Some were good and some were bad. Sometimes they would handcuff the man and the wife and the kids were standing there for a traffic stop. They would get people out of their cars, handcuff them, check them out, find out they weren't wanted, unhandcuff them and tell them to go and have a good day. Now how can you have a good day when you're driving down the street with your kids and you've been stopped and handcuffed. So we only issued one pair of handcuffs and we trained with one pair of handcuffs. So I said that they couldn't bring in their own handcuffs. They said that sometimes they needed another pair of handcuffs. So I put an extra pair of handcuffs in every car. They stole them. They took them. After a month or so, those handcuffs were gone." Jones was also determined to end the practice of using traffic stops as a method to go on fishing expeditions for drugs and other items. "I issued a directive that on a routine traffic stop, if you have no other reason to believe that anything else is going on, you can not search the person's car," Jones said. "And if you do, then you had to notify your supervisor that you did. I never said they couldn't. Let's say I stop you for not stopping for a right turn on a red light. And I have you outside of your car, up against the car, and I'm searching your car. They don't do that in all neighborhoods in the city of Milwaukee. So why are you doing it in certain neighborhoods? If you can articulate certainly under the law and the standard operating procedure that it is legal, then you can search. But just a routine traffic stop, don't search somebody. Don't treat people like that. If you have two officers up in your face and one of them is starting to go into your car and they say 'Can we search your car?' what are you going to say? Are you going to say no? Once you start yelling 'Get out of my car' the officer can say you are starting to get disorderly. That was an uproar. Everything I did was to kill the officers and I didn't care about their safety." Jones implemented other changes in procedure such as making detectives first responders to police calls that would eventually require their services. It was a battle throughout his tenure as police chief and met resistance as he tried to institute changes in the department. Some called the chief vindictive in the implementation of his policies. Jones felt he was just doing his job to ensure the efficient use of the city's resources. Near the end of his career, Jones was slapped with the lawsuit by 17 Euro-American policemen alleging Jones practiced "reverse discrimination" in his promotions. Since the Milwaukee Police Department had been established, the chief had a relatively free hand in whom he appointed to the top positions in the department so that the chief felt confident he had the people in those positions whom he could trust and would carry out his initiatives. During the first 140 years of the department, no one challenged the fact that only Euro-American males were being appointed. When Jones made his appointments, while the majority of the appointments were Euro-American, there were a greater number of people of color and women and so, the 17 officers filed suit. "There were 41positions for captain that I filled during the seven years I was chief," Jones recalled. "25 of those went to White people. 21 went to White males and four went to White females. There were ten Black males, three Black females, two Hispanic males and one Pacific Islander. The White males said the White females didn't count. And the court went along with that." The federal court ruled against Jones in 2005. Jones is proud of his accomplishments as Milwaukee's first African American police chief. And , in Jones' estimation, it is the conflict he experienced almost from Day One that blinded people to his contributions. "Every year I was chief, crime went down," Jones said. "Crime was reduced to the lowest it had been in 23 years. And my operating budget from 1996-2003, did not change, even for inflation. And I bought new cars and uniforms. I updated everything in the police department. I started the commdata center. But you would never read about any of that. You would never read an editorial. And then they said I was disciplining all of the officers. In seven years, I fired four officers. In 3.5 years, the new chief fired 23-32 officers. I never had the Frank Judes and all of the conduct the officers got into. That never happened when I was chief. So how do you grade and rate a police chief? By the results. And I stand on what I did. With any administrator, you want them to be effective in reducing crime and you want them to be efficient and that's handling the people's money. I ran the police department efficiently and I ran it effectively. And that's all you can ask for from a chief." |
| The Story of Arthur Jones, Milwaukee's First Black Top Cop And Still I Rise By Jonathan Gramling Part 3 of 3 |
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