Police Monitor Circus Goes On and On

A few years ago the circus came to town. And it just won’t go away.

In 2020, and for no apparent reason, the Madison City Council created the Madison Police Civilian Oversight Board and the Office of the Independent Police Monitor at an annual cost to taxpayers of around $500,000. They did so even though a very lengthy and very expensive independent review of the MPD found that it was “far from a department in crisis.”

Madison has long had one of the nation’s most progressive police forces. And it already had plenty of civilian oversight, starting with the mayor and the council itself. Moreover, under state law, the chief and all officers are hired and fired by a Police and Fire Commission made up of five citizens. In addition, there was a Public Safety Review Board. True, nobody knew what the Public Safety Review Board did, given that there was plenty of accountability provided by those other bodies. Nonetheless, if the Council had wanted to beef up oversight in some way they could have simply given some additional authority to that existing board.

So, when I say they created these new offices for no apparent reason, that’s what I mean. But, of course, there were lots of political reasons. There had been a few incidents of officer-involved shootings in Madison, though very few compared to other cities our size. And, of course, this was in the wake of the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis and another non-fatal shooting of a suspect in Kenosha. Madison seemed to want to do something here, even if there was nothing much to be done.

Let’s be honest. In the wake of Floyd’s murder, awful as it was, there was just a lot of hysteria and Madison got caught up in it. The oversight board and monitor were unfortunate manifestations of that.

But while the very existence of the board and monitor were unnecessary, the legislation creating them was also flawed from the start. A last minute amendment required that at least half of the board be made up of African Americans, a clearly unconstitutional provision, which was struck down by the courts in short order.

Once it was finally appointed, the board took months just to get itself organized. When they finally were ready to start the hiring process for the monitor they couldn’t get a single executive search firm to help them, a bad sign when you consider that these firms should want the business.

So, they took the process in-house, but dragged their feet, and were less than transparent about their process even while board members took to social media to air their biases about the candidates, resulting in a discrimination lawsuit.

When they finally did hire a monitor it came to light that, at a previous job, Byron Bishop had discriminated against an employee who he had had an affair with and he had owned a private security firm that had dropped the ball in supplying security personnel for the city’s first Freak Fest (something I recall all too clearly).

One might stop here and wonder how well the board was vetting its candidates even as it took an inordinate amount of time in the hiring process. In any event, after Bishop withdrew they picked another candidate who thought better of it (how can you blame him?) and he also withdrew. They finally got down to second runner-up Robert Copley.

Copley was hired more than two years after the board was established during a period when simply making that hire was the only substantive thing on its agenda. Then for the next 18 months or so Copley couldn’t accomplish the first thing on his to-do list, which was to come up with a complaint process. While that was still simmering it was reported that Copley hadn’t even been working for the previous three months while he’d been on a medical leave. He was gone for three months and nobody noticed. Tells you something right there.

And at this point, to reward themselves for all of that stellar work, the board voted to recommend that they should be paid thousands of dollars in “honorariums”, including $20,000 for the chair. The mayor and the council chose wisely to ignore their demand.

Finally, Copley emerged from his medical leave as Robin Copely and shall be henceforth referred to as she. And after four full years her office now had a formal complaint process. Four. Years.

Last year Copley suddenly resigned and was replaced with an interim monitor from Baltimore, Aeiramique Glass.

In December, the chair of the oversight board, Maia Pearson, who also serves on the Madison school board, got into an altercation with Madison police officers and was recently formally charged with criminal misdemeanors for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Glass immediately announced that she was investigating the incident without saying why.

With a record like that you’d think maybe the mayor and council might decide to save the half million dollars and just fold up the circus tent altogether. And in fact, two budgets ago they did consider just that, but settled instead for a modest budget cut. In this most recent budget, three brave members of the council offered an amendment to eliminate the office. It failed with only their three votes.

And now there’s more. Last week Glass issued a report that called, not for elimination of her office, but for a lot more money and staff. She claims that, based on some unsupported national standard, an office like hers should get $2 million instead of the $405,000 in its current budget — an astonishing five-fold increase.

But that report also included a claim that Black youth are being arrested for disorderly conduct at a rate much higher than white kids. The police chief has disputed that claim, which is part of the reason that this report has now been taken down from the city’s website.

Another reason is that the report’s cover featured an AI-generated image of a place that is not Madison or probably any place else. The picture featured two capitol buildings, one on a lake.

You may see the cover image as a minor thing. And it would be, except for the fact that it’s a perfect illustration of the mess that is the oversight board and the monitor. Far from increasing its budget, the city should save the $400,000 and admit that the whole fiasco was a mistake. At some point the circus has to end.

Have a good weekend.