I have contended that a community benefits from a vigorous press, one that is willing to question incumbent politicians and bureaucrats. It’s one of the ways that the press in Whitewater, Wisconsin fails the community: asking hard questions of officials seems like treason.
To someone in Chicago or Atlanta, that’s absurd; newspapers, television, and radio in those cities routinely investigate public officials, and routinely criticize official actions.
Here, in our small town, a few particularly small people have convinced a few hundred others that criticism is a betrayal of Whitewater. They think only of themselves, and conflate their own positions with the very city, itself.
I have been a critic of police leadership in this town, and to be as much one need only criticize mediocrity, vanity, and shameless self-promotion. Chief Jim Coan, whose folksy moniker Chief is the only folksy thing about him, has left those immediately below him clueless to everything except the collection of flimsy awards.
One knows as much, when his leaders venture to speak on their own. They share the singular gift that Coan seems to possess – saying the wrong thing because they do not seem to consider the right things.
Consider Lt Lisa Otterbacher, one who might once have seemed – and perhaps still might be – the heiress apparent to Coan, himself.
(For admirers of Coan, those words must be hard to read; someday, the great man will retire, and relinquish his place on the city payroll. As for those admirers, I have often thought that if they collectively stepped across the city line for only a moment, the per capita intelligence of those remaining within Whitewater would double during the interval.)
Lt Otterbacher gave an interview last week to the Royal Purple, in which she commented on efforts to help identify a hit and run driver:
“We’ve been searching and destroying all of our records trying to find a partial plate and see if we can’t connect it that way,” said Lt. Lisa Otterbacher of the City of Whitewater Police Department. “We would appreciate any assistance with this.”
Too funny. Presumably, Otterbacher does not mean that she has been destroying any records, or that the department needs help in that regard. One would assume she is trying to say that she’s working diligently to find the records, and sort them.
See, UW-Whitewater student struck on Main Street.
What’s odd is that we are, after all, the city that faced – and settled for six figures – a lawsuit that alleged, among other things, violations of Fourth Amendment search and seizure provisions. For more information on that case, see Clear Information on the Lawsuit Against Larry Meyer.
I am surprised, too, that Lt Otterbacher – someone I believe received recognition as accreditation manager for Whitewater’s Police Department, would – even for a moment – speak so erroneously. After all, was not accreditation and re-accreditation, with its hundreds of details, proof of our police leadership’s astonishing excellence? Hard to believe, really, that one so lauded for that effort might ever make a mistake.
(For an assessment of the flimsy spectacle that is accreditation, see Whitewater Police Department Re-Accreditation.)
Abandoning a focus on core principles for peripheral details leaves one unprepared to speak, or perhaps even think, clearly.