This past week’s international civil disturbances, sparked by the ‘lynching’ of a Black man in Minneapolis, took me back four decades to the killing/murder of Earnest Lacy by Milwaukee police officers.
Milwaukee, still reeling from several questionable killings by police—including the murder of Joel Acevedo a few short weeks ago by an off duty cop—leads the nation in seven negative social indicators and has been judged the worst city for African Americans to live in the country.
While the Minneapolis chief of police was quick to condemn his officers for violating Floyd’s human rights, Milwaukee had the misfortunate of having an avowed racist leading our police department in Chief Harold Breier.
But I doubt if the Minnesota criminal justice community would have sought to delay, distort and sabotage the investigation the way the Milwaukee Police Department did in the Lacy case.
And they had many opportunities over an extended sojourn given how the Milwaukee district attorney (E. Michael McCann), the police union, and mayor (Henry Meier) used every trick in the book to delay, undermine and desensitize the White community about the incident and police brutality against Black citizens in general.
