- The legislative bill that
calls for making the primary
duty of law enforcement to
preserve the life of all
individuals and that deadly
force is to be used only
as a last resort is being
derided by the Republican state
senator who is chair of
the Public Safety Committee.
Senator Van Wanggaard of Racine
is a former
police officer.
He joins us now from Racine.
Thanks very much for being
here.
- I'm glad to be here,
Fredrica.
- So why in your mind, is it
wrong to codify in
statute that the primary
duty of law enforcement is to
preserve the life of all
individuals?
- Well, actually, under Chapter
66, it's already included
in there, and it requires
each department to have
policies in place,
both under state and federal
guidelines that
restrict those officers to
acting in accordance
with state and federal laws.
So just like what happened in
Minnesota, this officer
that stepped outside of his
department's policies,
guidelines and training
and did this horrific
positioning of his knee on
the suspect's neck.That
individual is outside of the
policies and guidelines
of the force continuum.
And he's been charged with
second degree murder.
We have all kinds of
criminal statutes on the books
that apply to everybody.
They apply to police officers
too. Not just the people on
the street that they police,
but the police officers
themselves.
And those guidelines are
already in place under
Chapter 60
and under Chapter
62-13, which deals with
police and fire commissions, et
cetera.
There are several layers that
would be involved in the
process if, in fact,
an individual steps outside of
those guidelines.
And I'd just like to point out,
I was a police and fire
commissioner for 10 years also.
- And so you describe
this proposal
as being micromanaging
of police departments,
and you also say
that it seems clear that
whoever wrote this bill
has never served with law
enforcement.
Why do you say that piece?
- I say that because
no matter what is
in this, this bill would
not have changed what occurred
in Minneapolis.
And I don't believe I would
have changed any of the
officer involved incidents that
have occurred in my recent
memory.
We need to get at the root
cause of why
this is happening.
And we need to look at
specifically how
can we address those issues.
So
we have a
piece of legislation that we've
been working on about two
years.
We've been working on it with
Mr. Michael Bell.
He lost his son to a
police officer down in
Kenosha few years
back.
And he has been looking for a
change in how we address
some of the officer
involved shootings and how
can we train better so
that maybe we can alleviate
some of these issues happening.
So we've
been working on that piece of
legislation which would get to
the root cause.
It would look specifically like
the National Transportation
Safety Board comes in when
there's a transportation
crash for public
transportation, something like
that. They come in.
They survey all of the
information.
There's
no place they can't go.
They can subpoena.
They can do all those different
things.
Find out why it happened so
that we can go in to make
changes so we don't have these
failures. Whether
or not Frank
[Floyd] was a
black man on the ground or a
white man on the ground wouldn't
have made any difference.
What this officer did was just
absolutely horrendous.
And he should be charged.
So that wouldn't have made any
difference. You know, so we
need to look at what would
happen here. Where was the
failure?
And I think that the process--
we will now have
not only will they have an
internal investigation, they'll
have their State Department of
Justice. I'm sure Minneapolis
is looking at it.
I know that the Federal Bureau
of Investigation, Department of
Justice at the federal level
and the state level in
Minnesota will be looking at it
just as we have happened
here when there's an officer
involved.
So I think we need to keeping
all of that in perspective.
- You talk about root causes
of this kind of thing like
happened in Minneapolis
happening.
Would that be training and
accountability then?
- I think training is a huge,
huge part of it.
We're blessed here in
Wisconsin. We've got some
really good bureau training and
standards, and
they work very closely with all
of our departments.
I guess I'm a little bit--
I lean a little bit towards
southeastern Wisconsin with
Gateway Technical College, and
MATC,
but they train our officers.
They have two year programs
and they're hands on
and they're phenomenal.
And then every officer in the
state of Wisconsin is required
to have 24 hours of
continuous education to
maintain their certifications. So
they go through all of the
other aspects of of interaction
with the community, which could
be mental health issues.
It could be DTAC training:
defensive tactics for arrests.
All those different things are
trained over that minimum
24 hour period.
So we're really fortunate to
have that and they upgrade that
training. So every year, an
officer has to have at least 24
hours of training for updating
on current things that
might change how they respond
to the community.
All right.
Senator Wanggaard, we need to
leave it there, but thanks very
much.
- You're welcome.