David Michael Miller
Mike Koval needs his Janet Piraino.
Piraino was my chief of staff in the mayor’s office and she never allowed anyone to teach me how to directly post my own blogs. They had to be cleared by her and by our communications director.
Occasionally, I would write something spirited just as Police Chief Koval did last Sunday. Pleased with myself I would send it off for posting forthwith. But the forth and the with never came. It would be “lost” or my fine, perfectly sharpened barbs would be dulled. Some of my best work never saw the light of day. In retrospect I grudgingly concede that this was for the best. (Don’t anyone tell Janet.)
But Koval apparently has no such filter. His tirade made for good reading, but poor public management.
Koval’s target was the Madison Common Council and its proposal to spend a total of $400,000 to study his police department and its procedures. The fatal police shooting of Tony Robinson in March 2015 prompted the study.
Koval took exception to the proposed expenditure in his blog. He clearly sees the study as an implicit challenge to his department and to his own leadership. An emotional guy to begin with he’s taking this personally.
But while the amount does strike me as pretty darn high and while there’s no question that our police department is one of the best in the nation, we have to recognize that Madison is a process-oriented town. We believe in studies and committees and if we can get a committee to oversee a study, well, so much the better. It’s almost less about whatever the study might conclude than that the study take place in the first place. Sometimes, process in itself can be a part of the solution.
That might be frustrating, but someone who has been part of this town’s police force and our community for as long as Mike Koval should recognize that and go with the flow. He should have known he was likely to lose as he did on a vote of 19-1. His blog may have been satisfying but was it really worth the political capital he spent to oppose it with such gusto?
Still, I respect Mike Koval for fighting for his officers and for raising what are not illegitimate issues about the use of scarce resources. And I respect the council for struggling to find ways to address what are clearly legitimate concerns in the community about how policing gets done here.
They had a rather raw discussion the other night, but you have to credit them all for just being there and sticking it out until everyone was heard in the wee hours.
But who wasn’t there? Mayor Paul Soglin. He was absent yet again as he tries to set a Guiness world record for junkets by mayors. Woody Allen said that just showing up is 80% of any job. Soglin must be doing a heck of job on the other 20% because the public just doesn’t seem to care much that he’s racking up the frequent flyer miles.
But they should. This is the kind of important public debate worth canceling a trip to New York for. Soglin does a masterful job of dodging responsibility for the city’s most troubling and vexing problems while he carries on the important fight to ban bars on State Street on the days when he bothers to be in town at all.
Say what you want about Mike Koval, he was there to take (and give) the heat. Where was the mayor?
