Nate Wegehaupt/Courtesy WORT-FM
The family of Quadren Wilson held a press conference on Feb. 9 in the location where Wilson was shot.
The public is concerned about crime and about police conduct. Sitting on public information only makes things worse.
On Feb. 3 on Madison’s far east side, Quadren Wilson was arrested for a parole violation. More than 21 officers from several different law enforcement agencies took part in the arrest and two officers from the state Department of Justice’s Division of Criminal Investigation discharged their weapons. Wilson was shot several times (his family says five). He was unarmed. He was taken to a hospital, but after undergoing surgery on Feb. 5, he was released the next day and booked into the Dane County Jail. He has been charged with delivering fentanyl last April to a person who died of an overdose.
And that, people, is what we know, now three weeks after the incident. A few questions arise.
Why did an arrest for a parole violation need to involve that kind of force? Statements from officials say that Wilson had a history of weapons violations, but that’s not all that unusual for parolees.
Why did Wilson need to be picked up on that day? He was scheduled to see his parole officer the next day and his lawyer claims that the information to back up the drug delivery charge is dated, implying that he could have been arrested and charged much earlier.
How many times was Wilson shot? While his family claims he was hit five times, officials have not confirmed even that.
Being shot several times would seem to indicate serious and painful injuries. Why was Wilson released from the hospital so soon? His family says that he is in pain and needs better care than he can get in jail.
The charges against him were filed by the Dane County district attorney, so why did state DCI officers take the lead in making the arrest, when he apparently wasn’t being sought on state charges?
And, of course, the fundamental question: If Wilson was unarmed, what prompted officers to fire several shots into him?
On Feb. 21 Dane County Executive Joe Parisi raised some of those questions publicly and voiced frustration over the slow dribble of information coming out of his county sheriff’s office. The sheriff’s office is leading the investigation, which would normally be handled by DCI, because it was DCI officers who allegedly did the shooting. Technically, officials have not even confirmed that the two DCI officers who have been named by the sheriff's office actually shot Wilson. They say only that they discharged their weapons. It’s left for us to surmise that the bullets flew from their guns and landed in Wilson’s back.
Parisi’s statement is important for a couple of reasons. For one thing, he has been generally supportive of his sheriffs. And for another, if there were good reasons for the tight lid on information, he would know it. When I served as mayor of Madison it was standard procedure in cases like this for me to get updated by the police chief with the understanding that any public information would come from the department, not from me. I assume the county executive has the same relationship with his sheriff’s department.
There are generally three good reasons to keep information from the public. The first is to avoid the fog of initial reports. Early information from an incident like this is almost always confused and often just plain wrong. But it has been three weeks. It may be too early to draw conclusions about the justifiable use of force, but certainly the basic information about what happened must be clear to officials by now.
The second reason to keep things close to the vest is if family members haven’t been notified. In this case, family members have been notified — although of only the sketchy information I have outlined above. They want more answers. So should the public.
The third reason for secrecy is more complicated. Sometimes, amid an ongoing investigation, law enforcement doesn’t want to tip off a suspect as to what they know. But in this case it appears that there are no other suspects at large and that Wilson has already been charged with the crimes that led to his arrest. Maybe when all the information finally does come out we’ll understand the need for all the hush-hush, but right now it does not look like it is justified. We’ll see.
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Last fall a Madison police officer was shot on State Street. For a week the department just left that information out there, the clear assumption being that a man they were arresting, Katoine Richardson, had shot the officer. It turned out that he had been shot by accident by another cop. Now, Richardson may not necessarily elicit your sympathy. He resisted arrest and had a loaded gun. He well could have shot a cop — but he didn’t. It is beyond understanding why the Madison police didn’t clear that up within days, if not hours, after the incident. There is still no explanation for that.
Around that same time a police supervisor was caught on the camera of a passerby having sex in his police vehicle while on duty. It took the department weeks to even identify the supervisor involved. And, in fact, his name was first revealed from unofficial sources.
And then there’s the Madison school district. Earlier this year, a La Follette High School student was brutally beaten. A fellow student was arrested in the incident on Feb. 4, but the arrest wasn’t officially made public until a week later. There was no explanation for the lapse.
That shows a pattern. Reporters have been trying to get information about violent incidents at Madison high schools going back to 2019, with an eye toward comparing data to see if any conclusions can be drawn about the removal of school resource officers in 2020. MMSD released data only after a public records request and then they did not release all the data requested.
As Wisconsin State Journal reporter Chris Rickert wrote in a Jan. 26 story, “The newspaper had requested copies of the actual referrals tracked by a system the district uses to log behavior incidents and other student data, but district staff attorney Mankah Zama Mitchell instead provided a one-page summary with the total number of referrals at each school.”
Conspiracy theories love a vacuum. It’s human nature, I suppose, to assume the worst when you’re not being told what you want to know. And, frankly, when the public’s servants use deadly force the public has a right to know why they did it, and as soon as possible.
Look, I understand better than most people why all the information about sensitive incidents like these can’t always be shared immediately. But I join Parisi in my growing skepticism that there is a good reason for what might now be characterized as stonewalling in the Quadren Wilson case.
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
