Monday, June 8, 2009

Sheriff Napolean Clarke

Sheriff Clarke is showing himself to be quite the little general, even if he is somewhat heading towards his own Waterloo.

It was recently reported at OnMilwaukee.com, that Clarke's office could come up with only one solution to the drunk driving dilemma: Infringing on people's rights with mandatory sobriety check points.

The whole idea of Clarke offering any suggestions about how to diminish drunk driving incidents is laughable at best. This is the same guy that had worked on helping a drunk driver out of a snow bank without noticing once that the driver was drunk or that he had open intoxicants in his car. Clarke then tried to cover up his incompetence by accusing the arresting deputy sheriff with bogus claims of not doing her job by not taking the open beer cans into protective custody.

Apparently, the Sheriff's Office's investigation is over now. The result was that Clarke had one of his top officers issue a written reprimand for her doing her job not doing Clarke's job:

Apart from all that, Santoro was called out by the brass in the letter for supposedly not documenting all of the evidence not taken from a crime scene.

But she did, in fact, detail in her police report all of the evidence in the disputed drunken-driving case. Otherwise, we wouldn't know all this...

[...]

Clarke's new policy emphasizes the need for deputies to collect and document evidence from crime scenes. It says photos of evidence can be used in most cases. The first officer at a potential crime scene, it says, is responsible for preserving evidence as quickly as possible.

The revised policy came out this month.

Felber was quick to point out that Santoro was not the first cop to arrive at Allen's accident. That was Clarke, who did little to preserve any evidence there, Felber noted.

But it was Santoro, he said, who came under the department's scrutiny.

"She wasn't the first (officer) at the scene," Felber said. "But she was the first union person at the scene."

Imagine that...a right wing county elected official that won't take responsibility for his failures. Now who does that remind me of?

In a related matter, it was also recently reported that Clarke finally got around to formally firing Ron Malone, the former Superintendent of the House of Correction. I am not complaining about that. After all, I had spent a lot of time complaining about his management, or lack thereof, of HOC. And my complaints were validated and then some by a federal audit showing the great amount of problems there.

But it is worth reminding the gentle reader that despite all of these problems, Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker nominated him for reappointment to the position, and lauded him on the job he had done. Walker then, in the 2009 budget, abdicated his responsibility for the mess he created by having control of HOC switched over to the Sheriff's Office, so that Clarke could act as his hatchet man, and help clear up Walker's mistake. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, it seems that things keep only getting worse down there.

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