MILWAUKEE — Following the in-custody death of a Milwaukee man in February of 2022, the I-Team raised questions about how the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) handled the situation.
On Tuesday, Chief Jeffrey Norman sat down for an exclusive one-on-one to discuss decisions around the department's release of critical incident videos.
WATCH: Full 34-minute unedited interview with Chief Jeffrey Norman
On Feb. 23, 2022, Keishon Thomas died while in police custody after ingesting several baggies of drugs. In April, 44 days after the incident, MPD released a video of the incident as part of its Community Briefing series; an effort MPD started in 2018 to be more transparent with the public about critical incidents. The video, in total, was less than 16 minutes long of an interaction that lasted more than 16 hours from when Thomas was pulled over to when he was pronounced dead inside a District 5 jail cell. Chief Norman shared his feelings after Officer Marco Lopez and former Officer Donald Krueger were charged in connection to Thomas' death.
"Obviously disappointment. We are expected to hold ourselves to the highest regard professionalism to serve our public in the best manner possible. And so, seeing these particular types of situations with the outcomes that we saw on Friday is a disappointing situation for the Milwaukee Police Department. And definitely again, not happy at all with that."
"Do you think that video was an accurate representation of what happened while Keishon Thomas was in the care of the police department?" Shaun Gallagher asked.
"Of all the community briefings the Milwaukee Police Department have done, this is one of them where we are owning that there were problems," Norman said. "We don't know the depth and breadth or who and what the eye of the beholder to the DA will find as the most problematic, but throughout the entire process, we try to be as transparent as possible. Try to choose the right things that was truly contributing to what we believe was the death."
Chief Norman explained MPD's process for publishing videos for a community briefing.
"We try our best to get as much information from our investigating agency in regard to that their part is paramount to this process. That could span anywhere between, you know, 20 to 30 days. Because again, you have to ensure that you have enough interviews, enough gathering of evidence because it's not always going to be your body camera. You may have other items of evidence out there that needs to be acquired, working with the Medical Examiner's Office to get information in regards to the cause of death. So there's a lot of different moving parts. So a lot of times the team doesn't start until like almost around day 30. Again, this is in a more general sense because I see that every word I say is always scrutinized that if it's not 25 days, it's 26 days, now Chief Norman is lying, so I have to talk in generalities. So the team has anywhere between, again, 15 days or so to really put a project together. The script is usually written out between, you know, the PIO supervisor, but he works sometimes with the Chief of Staff. We may weigh in from time to time but they really understand the process. Then he starts to go through the editing between [the PIO Supervisor] and one of our civilian staff members. So once we do start to get a product which usually comes a little bit over, maybe a week later because we still have timeframes, we as a team, do look over it in regards to the video to give our input to say, 'hey, what about this, maybe not that,' but during that process, the officers get to look at it. The family gets to look at it. The family sits down with the DA's Office or with the investigating agency, this is all happening within 15 days. So you know the lift is real and that is not some like fly-by-night situation of bing, bing, bam, bam."
"So, do you get final say on what's in and out though?"
"Absolutely," Norman responded.
"For the time that [Thomas] was in custody, when checks were supposed to be done four times an hour, did you request for those to not be included?"
"That was not considered at the time because it was determined not to be relevant at the time of the investigation," Norman said.
"Cell checks of somebody after they die in your custody aren't relevant?"
"It was not determined at the time to be relevant to the actual death that we were investigating," Norman said.
"Did you know cell checks were missed by the time the video was released?"
"No, I did not," Norman said. "I will say, based on what the DA had put forth now, again, not knowing that the particular time in regards to the actual relevancy because, again, the officer is being punished for lying in regards to the checks. He's not getting punished for not being the one responsible for the death. We're talking about two different things."
"Could those checks have saved his life?"
"I don't know," Norman said. "I can not speculate on that."
"Are cell check protocols in place to try to prevent something like this from happening?"
"Yes," Norman said. "We are attempting to be able to give some level of answers to a very fluid, and very outside of the Milwaukee Police Department's control. But right now, especially after everything is said and done, the scrutiny is real, which we own. This is not a perfect product. I don't know if there's a perfect way how to deal with these very sensitive, very critical particular situations."