The Wrong Investigation

Maia Pearson, the chair of Madison’s police oversight board and a Madison school board member, has been charged with criminal misdemeanors related to her resisting arrest in an incident in downtown Madison in December.

In a criminal complaint, it is alleged that she and her friend, Urban Triage executive director Brandi Grayson, verbally abused staff at a theatre and then physically resisted arrest and failed to comply with the orders of police at the scene. At one point the official complaint states that three or four cops had to remove her from her vehicle and then she extended her legs in the police vehicle so that the door could not be closed.

You might think that Pearson would be under investigation or some sort of official inquiry by both the school district and the city to see if she should be allowed to continue in her roles.

Instead, apparently, it’s not Pearson who’s the subject of deeper inquires, but the cops who arrested her.

If you find that incredible, join the club. But immediately following Pearson’s arrest on December 19th, the interim Police Monitor, Aeiramique Glass, who answers to Pearson’s board, announced that she was investigating the incident. Of course, the first question the public might be asking is, ‘investigating who for what?’

The Police Monitor is supposed to be a complaint driven process. In fact, the complaint process is so central that it took the previous Monitor two years to so much as come up with a complaint form. So, who filed a complaint here? Did Pearson complain about her arrest? We have no information, but right now we’d have to assume that Glass initiated the process on her own.

That conclusion was backed up today when it was reported that City Attorney Mike Haas ruled on a question of conflict of interest. In his informal ruling, he wrote: “It seems to me that if the focus of any such investigation is the actions of police officers and not the Board Chair, the Independent Monitor has the authority to investigate activities of the Police Department.”

In other words, Glass is investigating the cops and not Pearson. But that raises still more questions. If Glass’ job is to investigate police wrongdoing, then what’s the allegation against the cops here? Did Pearson file a complaint? If not, what was the information on which Glass launched her inquiry? And is there really no conflict of interest? I ask because what could be happening is that Glass, without any evidence, started from an assumption that the police were somehow targeting Pearson because she leads a board that looks for police misconduct. Glass might be trying to gain favor with Pearson by shifting suspicion from her to the police. She’s the interim Monitor and may want the permanent job. I respect Mike Haas, but it looks to me like he’s defining a conflict of interest too narrowly here.

An average citizen like me might actually assume that, if the police even knew who she was at the time, they’d go out of their way to treat her with care. So, far from jumping to the conclusion that the cops might want to harass Pearson, a reasonable person would think just the opposite.

The fundamental questions that the public should be asking are these: Why are Madison police being investigated? Who initiated the investigation? Based on what evidence? And why is Pearson being treated with kid gloves in all this? There’s a strange community silence about what, if true, is outrageous behavior on the part of Pearson and Grayson. And it becomes even more outrageous when it’s the police, who were just doing their jobs, who are the ones coming under scrutiny.

That’s it for this week. Have a nice weekend and, as always, thanks for reading.