Paco Alvarez: Your investigation focused on the Milwaukee Area Investigative Team, or MAIT. Could you explain what MAIT is and what were the main findings of your investigation?
Isiah Holmes: MAIT stands for the Milwaukee Area Investigative Team as you described. You can think of it as something akin to a task force or a kind of membership organization that includes basically all of the local law enforcement agencies within the Milwaukee area. So that accounts for Milwaukee County as well as one agency from the neighboring Waukesha County. MAIT is designed to investigate what are called officer-involved deaths. So police shootings of civilians, cases where people die while they’re in the custody of the police and this sort of thing. And the idea was to provide some level of independent review of these shootings rather than have police departments investigating themselves.
So essentially how it works is different members of this team – these agencies all basically contribute investigators to the team and they all neighbor each other. They all work together the rest of the time. But when a fatal shooting happens or when a civilian dies, let’s say it involves the Milwaukee Police Department, they kill someone, then one of the other agencies in the area which are part of the MAIT team, say Wauwatosa PD or Oak Creek or whatever it may be, will lead the investigation into that shooting.
And all this is necessary because in 2014 -15, around that time, the state passed a statewide law called the Michael Bell law that essentially mandated that these sorts of investigations need to be led by an uninvolved agency. And that is to produce this level of hopefully objectivity and unbiasedness to the investigation. But the team has long been criticized for – all these agencies still work together and they rely on each other the rest of the time and there’s a lot of friendships and intermarriages and things like that between agencies. And there’s always been these concerns that the MAIT team is really designed to kind of shield and protect police officers.
What our story found was that really from the policy level up that appears to be the case. So we were able to get a hold of the protocols and policies for how MAIT does these investigations. And some of our key findings were that – let’s say a police officer shoots someone and kills them, that officer is interviewed as a witness or a victim only, they’re not interviewed as a suspect unless a higher authority orders that, which we can’t find examples of that actually happening. The officers also can refuse to be recorded during their interviews and they can also view video evidence after making a statement and then adjust their statement after based off what they see in the video. And viewing video evidence is a privilege that is not afforded without difficulty to the families of the people on the other side of these instances who lose their loved ones. And we also found that different MAIT member agencies on top of participating in these sorts of investigations that have procedural issues, not only with the policies but also with some of the actions that the officers do on the scene, but they also monitor and keep an eye on sometimes for years the families of the people that they kill. So those were kind of the kind of bird’s eye view findings that we had.
Alvarez: What inspired you to begin investigating MAIT?
Holmes: MAIT has been an enigma for a long time. So I think that it started with just kind of talking to these families and interviewing them after these instances and hearing repeatedly that their interactions with detectives from MAIT felt as if the detectives were interrogating them or seeking to demonize their dead loved one or dig in ways that didn’t make sense. If you’re here to ask about when was the last time you saw them and everything, why are you asking about other questions that may seem inappropriate or designed to kind of fish out an alternative excuse for why that person may have been killed. So it started with the families kind of describing those experiences and also feeling as if they were being surveilled and the consistency of those reports. And then also no media outlet had really closely looked at MAIT, scrutinized MAIT in our area or really at all. So the project that I undertook with Type, figuring out what are the protocols, how many times have officers refused to be recorded, how many times have involved agency officers moved things around the scene or sequestered themselves off and like with one another, which is against policy – that had never been done before. So it was ripe ground for investigation.
And to this day, and there have been these longstanding concerns about MAIT, just no one could really put a number to it and really prove anything. And to this day, there are still cases that MAIT investigated that are working their way through civil court and people still have lingering questions on, such as the Alvin Cole shooting, which was a main case that we analyzed in our investigation. So those were some of the things that really kind of compelled me to look at it with a closer eye.
Alvarez: Like you just mentioned, you spoke to several families affected by police shootings and other types of killings. How do you handle interviews with people who have lost a loved one? How do you think about building trust with those sources?
Holmes: Yeah, so I think that above all, you have to try to really keep in mind that number one, they’ve gone through a really serious loss and they are actively processing it and this is all new to them. And there may be a lot of things that they’re experiencing, not just with losing a loved one, but just interacting with public officials that really make them very suspicious of anyone who pops up and asks too many questions. And it can really exhaust them. So first you have to really try to just see them as human beings and not the subject of a story, which along with all those other things, they’re also going to be interacting with a lot of media, a lot of local media, TV journalists and written journalists, everyone in between. And those folks may or may not interact with the families in a particularly sensitive way. So for one, you try to set yourself apart by how you approach them.
And then you take what you can get, if they’re willing to give you just a quote there or they’re willing to invite you to their house later, you take what you can get and you can try to build on that relationship. And also keeping in touch with local activist groups as well, who are oftentimes the first ones to get to these families, working to not only cover their events, but also just interact with them so that they’re familiar with you so that when you approach the family and the family will go and ask their allies, hey, what do you think of this journalist? They’ll vouch for you.
And then also bringing a certain knowledge base to the table, but also about how investigations work or the different police departments involved, but also willingness to have an open mind and just hear everything that they’re willing to tell you and be honest about what you’re going to look into and what you’re not going to look into. All that definitely helps build the trust, and also identifying which family members are the most talkative. In the Alvin Cole case, it was really the mother and one of the sisters who was very much in the forefront and oftentimes it was the sister, Talevea, who was most vocal because these are difficult things. Families break down crying in the middle of speeches and stuff, so you have to assess who is the best person to talk to and what the personal cost to that person may be for just discussing it.
Alvarez: A lot of your reporting came from public records, including investigative files and troves of emails. What was the public records request process like?
Holmes: I describe it as a game of chess and a lot of strategizing. In Wisconsin, we consider a quote -unquote sunshine state, so we have a lot of robust open records laws, but the police department finds different ways to still restrict information and those strategies are continuing to be so.
First off, I’d like to quote from the show Mr. Robot, or kind of draw from that for a second, there’s a scene where he says, “you have to understand a target and its flaws and there are always flaws.” That’s kind of what you have to do with open records. Say a police department, it really helps to know what you want to look for. If you’re looking for intelligence reports, where is their intelligence unit? Do they have one? How many detectives do they have? What are their names? Be as specific as possible. There’s a lot of strategizing and fore-thinking that really goes into just crafting an open records request so that you don’t get bounced or screwed with.
Then with MAIT specifically, one problem with the team, and something they’ve actually discussed internally according to their annual reports, is that they have really inconsistent open records policies. The investigative file for whatever situation or incident or death that occurred, that investigation is retained by the agency that actually led it. So many agencies can participate in the investigation, sometimes the involved agency even, but the leading agency is supposed to maintain those records so you have to go to that agency. You have to figure out what agency led it, and then you’ve got to go to that agency and ask for the records, and then there’s a long wait process. There may be redactions. They may even try to hide the officer’s names. MAIT agencies, when the investigation’s over and the DA renders their decision, they’re supposed to release the file and release it online. Some agencies have done that, some agencies have not, and the ones that have, they haven’t released all of their files. So there was a lot of back work on the open records end that we had to go through just to get the investigative files, just to find out that annual reports for the team existed and all this other stuff. And I think that that kind of decentralization with MAIT is really by design.
And actually, just a minute or two to kind of tell an actually interesting story. I was investigating the Alvin Cole case, he was a kid who was the third person killed by a single officer at Wauwatosa PD, and all of his cases had been investigated by MAIT and then the DA cleared him as for wrongdoing. He killed three people in five years. Looking into that case, I went down to the Milwaukee courthouse that kind of maintains a list of all the warrants that have been filed over a given year, and then you can ask for those records and just get them printed out and pay for the prints. So I saw that a particular police department that asked for Facebook warrants for Alvin Cole’s Facebook pages two weeks after he died.
So I went to that police department and asked for more records and Alvin Cole and they said, go to the Milwaukee Police Department, they led the investigation. And I told them, well, these warrants are not in the death file that the Milwaukee PD released. So you clearly have records about Alvin Cole that the Milwaukee police department does not have. And I was able to file open records requests with that police department, which was the West Allis PD. And all these police departments are part of MAIT, by the way. And I got interviews that were done of some of the kids who were with Alvin Cole that night. And some of those interviews really showed that detectives were really pushing some of these minors to specific answers and not accepting the stories that they were telling. And that was kind of evident in those interrogations. So it was interrogations, downloads of phones and other things that were part of that MAIT investigation into Alvin Cole’s death that were not in the files that were released. I don’t know why they weren’t released, why they were basically missing, but that’s an interesting story of how one thing leads to another and you just keep digging and following the trail.
Alvarez: In the article, you wrote about how police were surveilling people involved in protests, including family members of police shooting victims or even people who just reported on the protests like yourself. What did the surveillance look like and how did you discover what was going on?
Holmes: There was kind of a three phase step there. The first phase was prior to 2020. And 2020, early 2020 February was when Alvin was killed and of course in May the George Floyd protests popped off everywhere, including Milwaukee. And here actually those protests lasted for over 400 days after George Floyd’s death, consistently every single day, marchers or activists were doing something.
But prior to that kind of big period, going back to 2016 when Jay Anderson was killed, who was the second person killed by this same officer that killed Alvin, when you talk to these families, they will typically describe to you saying that they feel that they’re being monitored, they feel that they’re being surveilled, there’s odd things happening to their phones, there’s specific things happening to their phones that they all describe to a tee, they feel that they’re being followed around town, they feel that there’s more police traffic circling their homes. So that’s kind of where my awareness of that kind of issue kind of started.
When 2020 happened, and this happened with Alvin Cole’s family as well, when 2020 happened, because of the mass scale of the protests, there were many people who were calling their alders, and I wrote an article about this in 2020, Alderman Nik Kovac was getting worried phone calls from different people he knew to be activists, just community activists who were saying there’s strange cars and there are lots and there’s strange things happening. And he actually went around to the police department asking questions like who’s doing this activity, like some of these people are leaving behind business cards, claiming to be detectives and stuff. And the police said, well, we don’t know anything about it. And Nick said, well, if you don’t know anything about this, then we have a bigger problem here because there’s somebody out there impersonating the police then. So this strange thing of protest and police-related surveillance had been kind of a growing issue for a long time. And then in 2020, so many people experienced it that it became this wider known thing.
So as I was covering the protests in 2020, cops that you’ve never seen before will call you out by name, and in creepy ways, just like you’ll pass by a riot line and one will say, hey, Isaiah, or that sort of thing. The police in Wauwatosa were taking photographs of me, just me, they took pictures of me, my press credential, and I saw them do that. And at one point, I got kind of irate because I was like, why are you taking pictures of journalists? I’m not even near the protest. And this was after identifying, like, sir, I’m a journalist. And he said, yeah, me too, and took another picture. The next day, I saw that guy in a riot line and he said, yeah, everyone knows you, everyone knows who you are. He knew all this information about me. Sometimes when the protesters would go and try to pick up people who had been arrested, they had stories about officers going into the, not coming out, not knowing who they were, going into the back room and then coming back out and knowing exactly who they were and where they lived. So people were saying, you know, we’re all up on a board somewhere. You know, that was kind of the second phase.
The third phase was in 2021, through open records requests and lawsuits and everything, we found out, you know, there was “target lists” that were being compiled and sent around, and they were gathering a lot of information about us and by us, I mean, there were protesters that they were gathering information about, and then journalists who were, I guess, they thought were writing critical stories or something. Because when they put me on the list, they even had my press outlet there and everything. But then in depositions, they almost didn’t want to give me the credit of being a journalist, you know, so almost in this kind of spiteful way. So I think that some of it was kind of personally motivated.
I think there was a lot going on there, but, you know, there is this phase by phase thing of discovery, and 2021 onward, we really figured out the scale of what was going on and how discriminant it really was, you know. So there are things that you noticed, but then later on we all found out exactly what was going on.
The last thing I’ll say is I even had certain cybersecurity events, like just things happen to my computers right in front of me and stuff that were recorded in the logs and in my antivirus that time up suspiciously to when law enforcement were using their list and doing certain things. So there’s a lot of things that happen that still kind of you think about to this day, like, wow, that was crazy, I wonder what that was, you know.
Alvarez: What was the biggest challenge you encountered while you were reporting?
Holmes: For this story, one of the biggest challenges was the fact that no one had ever looked into MAIT this deeply before. So everything I had to do kind of from scratch, and like I said, that decentralized nature of how they are made it a challenge to find records, to make sure we had all the records and etc. And things that I had to do for the reporting, you know, I made a spreadsheet, just for reviewing the death files, I made a spreadsheet that cataloged basic information, case by case, dates, names, what officers were involved, whether they fired, whether they refused a recording interview, whether they were interviewed with a lawyer, every civilian witness that was interacted with in these investigations. And I had a separate Google doc that logged policy violations, times officers were not separated on the scene, and really tried to create ways from scratch to kind of track all of this. Even the open records, I filed dozens of open records requests, I created a whole new spreadsheet just to track that, I had never done that before. So the scale of the project for one, and we were working with a lot of information, some of the information were old depositions from concluded lawsuits, some of it were things we were actively covering, and we really had to make sure that you know, really double check and recheck what we could use and what we couldn’t use publicly.
And also interacting with the police was a difficulty because some of the police departments have very smooth open records practices, some of them did not. Some of them were kind of openly hostile to us looking into this, they were accusatory because of us looking into it, they didn’t want to cooperate with interviews or requests for information. There are still records requests we’re waiting for to this day from certain agencies that I don’t anticipate ever getting. So for all of the kind of chest pumping that the police department does about their how transparent they are and how perfect, and that word has been used in recent days because the same day that we published the story, there was another police shooting in Milwaukee and the police chief there was asked, you know, what do you think about the MAIT team which is handling the investigation of this shooting, given the story that came out. He said this is as perfect as it gets. So when that’s the baseline that you’re interacting with, you know, it becomes this very kind of unnecessarily adversarial engagement.
There were multiple times where open records custodians or legal counsel for open records kind of tried to inquire as to – if you told us what the angle of your story was, we can get your records easier. They would try to do things like that. So, and also making sure information was secured because I was aware of the surveillance aspect and there’s a bit of a knowledge gap in terms of what really the police is fully capable of at a local level and what agencies and task forces may want to do this or that. So, figuring out ways to secure the information and secure the investigation were definitely challenges.
Alvarez: And my last question, do you have any advice for reporters trying to report on police shootings and the police more generally?
Holmes: Well, one of my biggest bits of advice I think is try not to stop at the “this is an ongoing investigation wall.” I think that a lot of police shooting reporting understandably stops at that because, you know, if a police shooting happens, there’s only so much information they’re going to tell you initially. That’s the only information they’re going to tell you. And you’ll have to wait and wait until the investigation is done. You won’t get a notice as to when it’s done, usually. And you may be able to talk to the families. You may be able to get some of their perspectives. I feel like there’s an expectation that you will never really be able to talk to the police officer. I mean, at least here, you hear from police officers that they essentially have rules against interacting with the media on their part, you know, so you have to go through the press sergeant or the press person. And usually you’re just going to get a statement nine times out of ten. You’re not going to talk to the actual person or unofficially. You’re just going to get a statement. So I feel that the process of that kind of discourages further inquiry and investigation, especially if you don’t feel backed by your outlet to do that or you’re going to do all this work and some guy up top who isn’t even a journalist is going to say, well, I don’t think they did anything wrong, so we’re going to kill the story. Don’t stop there. Use all the rules at your disposal. Use open records requests, use social media, go to the activist marches and get a sense of what’s going on. You know, don’t just rely on what the police are willing to tell you.
And also don’t trust everything you hear. When you talk to these families, they’re going to want to try to say things that they honestly believe, but may not necessarily be provable or true. So give it an honest look and use all the tools at your disposal and look for the reporting gaps in your communities where things are not being covered. Even if a case was written about, what else can you do to advance that story? And try to approach both sides with the same level of empathy and understanding. Give the families their credit as human beings. And I feel that right now there’s a lot of focus in our society, particularly in Wisconsin, I can speak for Wisconsin, about basically only acknowledging the police officer’s perspective. And it’s not that that perspective is not valuable, but it’s not the only perspective. So really try to break their expectation of what a reporter is like to interact with. And both sides might think, oh, this person’s kind of cool. We’ll interact with them.
And don’t ever take the first narrative of the story as the way it’s going to be. That’s what happened with the Alvin Cole situation. Alvin Cole was this 17-year-old kid, we’re a very segregated city, we’re one of the most segregated cities in the country. You know, he’s a black kid from a black community coming to a mostly white community to go to the mall. He has a gun on him that he’s not supposed to have. He gets involved with his friends in a verbal argument. The mall cops come and break it up. They all run. And as he’s running away, one of the last cops to show up on the scene and the only one to kill anyone at that department in years, and he killed three in five years, shows up and gets involved in a shooting and this kid dies. There were a lot of beliefs that Alvin Cole shot at the police or that “you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.” There’s a lot of assumptions within the community about that case. And what we were able to find was that the officer who killed him, Joseph Mensah, and another officer, Evan Olson, broke MAIT’s policy about keeping officers separated by sequestering themselves off together. They even drove back to the police department together. And when they talked to MAIT, there was a, neither of them mentioned that they’d interacted with each other like that. Only one officer did because she was told to sit with Mensah first, which would have been in compliance with that policy. But then for some reason, the other officer, Olson, wants to come by and say, no, I’ll sit with him instead, which violates the policy, because Olson was also involved in the shooting. So there are these suspicious things that happen.
And now years later in federal civil court, a judge says, hey, I have no choice but to allow this case to go to trial because all of you are telling different stories. Olson is telling one story about what happened with Alvin Cole. Joseph Mensah is telling another story about what happened to Alvin Cole in regards to where the gun was pointed. And then the officer who was closest to Alvin said the gun wasn’t pointed at all. That guy said that the gun wasn’t pointed and then changed his story and then left Tosa PD. And now he’s an FBI agent and now he’s involved in this civil case. Now he’s reverting back to his original story.
If the case was so straightforward, none of that would be necessary. And unfortunately, it took four years in federal civil court and a judge willing to see that evidence to really acknowledge these officers are contradicting themselves. A jury should decide what happens now. Why didn’t MAIT catch that four years ago? Why didn’t the district attorney catch that four years ago? So never take the first version of the case seriously. Well, take it seriously, but don’t just believe that verbatim. And find creative ways to look into what your police department’s doing. Learn about the task forces, learn about the teams, learn about the technologies they’re using. Talk to the lawyers on both sides. See what may be hanging loose that you can, a thread you can pull that will lead to a bigger thing.