Posted on Wednesday, 7th May 2008 by Bruce
Many of you saw Madison’s weekly Isthmus reporter Jason Shepard this evening on Greta Van Susteren’s program.
In the interview, they referred to a series of e-mails that had circulated between City of Madison and Dane County 911 call center officials. Oddly enough, what they didn’t mention in the interview was that Jason Shepard himself was the subject of discussion in those very e-mails. (Perhaps Shepard isn’t even aware of this fact.)
How does BadgerBlogger know about the references to Shepard, and other members of the Madison media, in these discussions? We’ve obtained the e-mails. You can find them at this link.
In an ongoing e-mail dialog which took place over a one-week period, April 8-14, 2008, a Captain Carl Gloede of the Madison Police Department is quoted to have told members of the Dane County 911 call center staff, in a personal visit, “not to release any information regarding Doty Street [the Brittany Zimmermann homicide]”
In another communication between Captain Gloede and a specific member of the Dane County 911 call center’s “communications” staff, a Wendy M. Phillips, Gloede tells Phillips explicitly, “[Madison] PD continues to request that the 911 call center not release information regarding the Doty Street homicide investigation and to refer any and all requests to the MPD PIO (Police Information Officer) Joel DeSpain“.
This is an inexplicable contradiction to what Madison Police Chief Noble Wray told Madison – and national – media when this botched 911 call story broke just last week.
Surprise, surprise… somebody in Dane County government is lying.
In that same e-mail, this 911 call center “communications” employee goes to great lengths to pat herself on the back for the tremendous strong-arm she gave Jason Shepard of Isthmus and other members of the Madison media, going so far as to brag about how she “refused to give him [Shepard] her last name” and how “he was not happy” with her stonewalling.
Shepard, in Wendy Phillips’ own words “continued to ask questions“… How dare he? A member of the Madison media “asking questions“? Obviously, this is not something the entrenched bureaucrats in Madison, and their union representatives, are used to. Jason Shepard, and other members of the Madison media who have refused to back down, should get a plaque to hang on their walls as a result of their tenacity.
I communicated today with a member of the BadgerBlogger team, a certain retired Milwaukee Police Department Captain with 30+ years on the job. He tells me that conduct like this is totally unfamiliar to him. Refusing to give one’s last name to a member of the press, and then chuckling about it in a public records document afterward, is something that could probably only happen in Madison. As our insider puts it, they’re “a small town, not yet accustomed to the scrutiny of big city media.”
I suspect they’ll be accustomed to that scrutiny, sooner rather than later. As much as the Madison establishment would prefer that these five unsolved homicides in the past year would not be in the national spotlight, the genie’s already out of the bottle.
BadgerBlogger will continue watching. We will not back down.
Posted in Home | Comments (14) |
14 Responses to “Madison officials brag about how they’ve stonewalled the media… and BadgerBlogger has the proof”
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May 7th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
Amazing story. Jason Shepherd won’t likey take it sitting down. Greta is bringing national attention to the Falk/Wray axis.
May 7th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
Maybe Milwaukee operates differently, but I’m not aware of any departments that allow the dispatch centers to release any information unless it goes through someone high ranking in the department whose job it is to communicate with the press or the interview is done with those individuals prior consent. I agree that a mistake was made by an individual in the Dane County dispatch center, but I think you guys are making this dispatch center story so big that it is distracting from the short comings of the ongoing investigation and Madison’s larger, growing violent crime problem.
Additionally, I don’t see Phillips’ communication as braggadocio like you do. Again, the dispatch centers that I’m familiar with are not allowed to discussed anything with the press. What I see here is someone at the dispatch center keeping her contact and likely superior at the Madison Police Department informed of what she is dealing with, and letting him know very clearly that she is not communicating information to the press.
May 8th, 2008 at 12:12 am
Did some research on Madison Public Outreach Officer Joel Despain. He is a civilian not a police officer.
Despain’s last job prior to becoming Outreach Officer for the Madison PD was at Ch. 3 in Madison.
Reading between the lines here Ch. 3 was the first station to get a hold of some information. Is it possible Despain gave someone at his old employer first dibs?
May 8th, 2008 at 6:14 am
Dane County is in full blown CYA mode. They aren’t trying to find the truth, they are trying to insulate themselves from the truth, because they know this isn’t going to break well for them.
May 8th, 2008 at 6:42 am
I don’t get the impression that Wendy Phillips (Dane County 911 Dispatch Center) works for the Madison Police Department. By that I mean it doesn’t seem that she would have a “superior” located within Madison P.D. who could give her orders. That said, it sure seems to me that there was little coordination between the two Offices/Departments in preparation for the inevitable inquiries that would be made by the media. I would have expected a protocol to be established early on so that any inquiries about the police investigation made to the 911 Dispatch Center would be properly referred to the Madison PD and that there would be no need for anyone at the 911 Dispatch Center to even have to ask about procedures in this case. As for Wendy Phillips not giving her full name to the reporter, that’s an indication to me that she rarely, if ever, gets such media inquiries and didn’t know how to respond. Strange for someone in her position and just another indication to me that a little more training and preparation are in order there.
As for the focus on this fiasco, if I were a member of Brittany Zimmerman’s family I would certainly leave no stone unturned in my attempt to find out what happened. And that includes finding out what happened with the original 911 call.
May 8th, 2008 at 6:43 am
Patrick
You are so right Madison is trying to cover thier butt. It sounds like the Union is going to tear apart the call center practices.
I will admit I am very curious. Especially when someone was getting out before this happened, taking a pay cut and her friends say because she didn’t like the call center practices.
Usually you are getting out of a job and taking a paycut because you want to get out of a sinking ship. Not to spend time with your partner.
SO did Old Joe come in trying to cut corners so some stat would made to make 911 center look good rather than take care of the people of Madison?
May 8th, 2008 at 7:17 am
Public Safety Communications
What ever gets communicated? What justifies her surely massive salary?
May 8th, 2008 at 7:27 am
Glenn, you are correct, Wendy M. Phillips is not an employee of the City of Madison, nor of the Madison PD.
Phillips is an employee of Dane County, working in the Public Safety Division’s “Office of Communication”.
The information in these e-mails directly contradicts information Noble Wray provided to the media last week.
On the heels of the revelation this morning that a Madison man believes he saw Joel Marino’s killer six weeks ago, called police, but police allegedly “did not take his call seriously”, it would appear that authorities in Madison are much better at throwing up smokescreens than solving crimes.
May 8th, 2008 at 7:49 am
The thought process that says Ms. Zimmermann was going to die anyway may be flawed. The freak who killed her may have sexually assaulted her or tortured her after she was over-powered during the 90 second 911 call. That was time when she could have been saved, if even by just the sound of a half-dozen screaming sirens converging on Doty Street. Of course, I am speculating, as all information on the case has been embargoed from teh public.
I’m bringing my daughter home from UW-Madison tomorrow. It is a relief that she does not have to go back. Public safety does not seem to be a priority of this extremely diverse police force.
May 8th, 2008 at 8:13 am
Headless, in a perfect world, that would be the case. In reality, no police department has the resources to send 6 cars with sirens blowing to a place where they do not even know if there is an emergency taking place for sure. And if they did do that for calls where the caller doesn’t speak, and someone else’s call got a delayed response and that person was further injured or died, we’d be sitting here complaining about how they misused resources by vastly over responding to an unknown situation.
Now, as for Zimmermann being unsaveable. If she had used a landline or if she had been able to say just an address over her phone, then maybe, maybe help could have gotten there. My impression is that this murder did not take place over a long period of time, though. Too often in very swift crimes, the police have no chance of preventing anything. It is just the nature of being responders.
Glenn, I agree with your assessment that she is not an employee of the Madison PD. This center is clearly run by Dane County. If it is like other shared dispatch centers, however, each participating agency is paying their portion of the bill, and as such, there is likely a standardized process by which the center defers to the individual agencies. In such a situation, she would get her guidance from the agency in question. And as for her apparent inexperience with the press, I would agree with that, too. That center probably does need to train their employees on how to deal with the press. I know how many reporters try to get information out of these dispatch centers, though. They start nice and try to get the person to give up some information that they aren’t supposed to give out. If that fails, they get aggressive in an attempt to intimidate the person into giving out information. The latter looks like the situation here, and I’m not sure I fault her for her lack of co-operation.
And Ron, their communications job does not include communicating with the media. Communications is the fancy title that gets used in dispatching jobs.
May 8th, 2008 at 8:23 am
I read those emails through the same lens that Jib did. I didn’t think anything in those emails came off as sarcastic, braggadocio, or anything other than flat-out informative. Emails have a nasty habit of being misinterpreted by people other than the sender.
I know that this woman screwed up at her job, and she should be held accountable for that. But as someone whose own email correspondences are subject to an open records request, I can tell you that it would be easy for people to get the wrong idea when someone is not allowed to explain themselves.
It looks like this gal was just informing her superiors of what was going on. Perhaps Dane County should have gotten their act together with the Madison PD to prevent this media debacle from taking place.
I blame Scott Walker.
May 8th, 2008 at 9:12 am
I agree that short bits of printed material like emails can easily be misinterpreted. Whether or not she was bragging, how does she expect a reporter to react when a public employee refuses to give a last name?
My other question would be, why are they keeping the CAD a secret? If it was just a hang-up call, as has been reported, there would be very little information in it, if any at all. So how would the release of that CAD printout jeopardize the investigation?
Keep up the good work, Bruce. It’s what separates this blog from the pack.
May 8th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Fascinating! keep up the good work
May 12th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
[...] on my end… Published May 12, 2008 public records Tags: FOIAing 911 … but Badger Blogger has got the goods! I just knew there would be some interesting e-mail about how the Brittany Zimmermann 911 call went [...]