MADISON, Wis. (AP) - Republican lawmakers got no closer Wednesday to figuring out how the Milwaukee Police Department’s data storage system crashed after most city leaders skipped a hearing on the matter.
Since January, the police department has been working to recover video and audio recordings rendered inaccessible after the storage system malfunctioned.
It’s unclear how many cases remain inaccessible. Still, Rep. Joel Kleefisch and Sen. Van Wanggaard, leaders of the Assembly and Senate criminal justice committees, said they’re afraid information from scores of cases could be lost forever.
They scheduled a joint hearing on the issue, inviting Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, Police Chief Ed Flynn, Sheriff David Clarke, District Attorney John Chisholm and Milwaukee Police Association President Mike Crivello. But Barrett, Clarke and Chisholm, all Democrats, didn’t show up.
Neither did Flynn, who told The Associated Press that he didn’t want to legitimize “a political charade.”
“I’m nobody’s political zombie,” he said. “(The malfunction doesn’t) mean it’s the end of the world and criminals will now roam the streets unpunished.”
Barrett’s spokeswoman said the mayor didn’t travel to Madison because he was attending a meeting of law enforcement and community leaders. Clarke spokeswoman Fran McLaughlin said the sheriff was testifying at a congressional law enforcement hearing in Washington, D.C. A message left at Chisholm’s office wasn’t immediately returned.
Crivello, the leader of the Milwaukee police union, was the only one who appeared. He offered little specific information about the malfunction.
The meeting devolved into a shouting match early on, with minority Democrats yelling over each other about why the state was getting involved in a local problem, why the committees were meeting without a bill on the table and why they were even bothering when no one showed up.
Rep. Evan Goyke, D-Milwaukee, a former public defender, pointed out that cases can still move forward in court without video recordings of interviews on the strength of investigators’ testimony and reports.
He also accused Kleefisch and Wanggaard of trying to embarrass Milwaukee’s Democratic leaders. Barrett has run against Republican Gov. Scott Walker twice, once in 2010 and again in a 2012 recall. Chisholm has launched two investigations into Walker’s aides when the governor was Milwaukee County executive and his gubernatorial recall campaign.
Wanggaard said the data crash is the Legislature’s business because Milwaukee receives state aid. Legislative committees often meet to gather information, he said, and the hearing wasn’t meant as a “witch hunt.”
“Seems like it,” Sen. Lena Taylor, D-Milwaukee, retorted. “You used the word.”
Milwaukee Police uses a vendor called MediaSolv to store video and audio recordings of in-custody interviews. According to the department, the system suffered a “catastrophic hard drive failure” on Jan. 2. According to a May 13 department memo, the failure was due to a hardware malfunction, not a lack of storage space or human error or interference.
Most of the inaccessible cases had been recorded on DVD, the memo noted, although Chisholm’s office had asked for interview recordings in seven cases, including a homicide, that have not yet been retrieved. The memo said all those cases have been charged based on investigators’ reports and other information and the homicide suspect remained in custody.
The department has contracted with a recovery vendor for $49,500. About 80 percent of the programming work needed to begin recovery efforts had been finished. The agency also has undertaken a $50,000 project to consolidate all the department’s video storage needs, the memo said. A message left for MediaSolv wasn’t immediately returned Wednesday.
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