Chisholm Reflects on Time as Milwaukee’s Top Prosecutor

John Chisholm. Photo from Milwaukee County.

Next year at this time, there will be a new Milwaukee County District Attorney, and John Chisholm will no longer be running the state’s criminal prosecutions from a corner office in the county’s antiquated Safety Building on W. State Street. By then he will have shut the door to the DA’s office for the last time as the state’s top prosecutor in Milwaukee.

Chisholm, 60, recently announced he would not seek reelection in 2024 to the office he has held for the past 17 years. In a statement released to the media, Chisholm said it was time for “new endeavors” for him and for a new district attorney for the people of Milwaukee County.

Chisholm joined the DA’s office in 1994, hired by his predecessor E. Michael McCann. Now, at the end of his career as a prosecutor, some of the cases from the beginning of his career are what stick out in his mind. He began his career in Milwaukee amid a crime wave and the crack epidemic. “Those days in the gun unit were kind of heady days, because you had the freedom just to focus on like the worst, most violent offenders in the city,” Chisholm said in an interview with Urban Milwaukee.

Chisholm ran for DA in 2006, following McCann’s decision not to run for office again. He started as DA in 2007, in the wake of the vicious beating of Frank Jude by Milwaukee Police Officers, who were acquitted by a local jury and later found guilty when prosecuted in federal court. “That was a low point in the public’s trust of police and prosecutors,” Chisholm said

‘Pre-Progressive Prosecutor’

When Chisholm was elected he was widely considered a criminal justice reform candidate. “I was a pre-‘progressive prosecutor’,” he said, meaning a progressive prosecutor before a national movement arose of reform-minded district attorneys.

Early into his tenure Chisholm invited the Vera Institute of Justice to examine the office’s use of prosecutorial discretion for racial bias. The study found prosecutors were more likely to charge Black suspects than white suspects for a range of crimes, including drug possession, prostitution and resisting or obstructing and officer.

Chisholm said he would have to be “numb to the world” not to notice that most of the people he prosecuted were Black. “Why is it that this young man is here for a gun and drug offense? And he’s always 17 years old. And, you know, he’s already got two or three convictions in juvenile court,” he said.

Chisholm has championed drug treatment courts and deferred prosecutions that direct non-violent and first-time offenders away from the criminal justice system.

“Sometimes I get accused of being soft on crime — nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. “I’ve always made the distinction: I think people that hurt other people, they should be treated differently from people who are primarily hurting themselves.”

He accepts that some of the crimes he’s referring to still involve victims of property damage, theft and other “nuisance offenses,” but maintains that attention should be paid to the “root cause” of the criminal behavior, adding, “And, ideally, it’s done outside the criminal justice system.”

For many people, the DA’s office is both the agency of last resort and first resort, Chisholm said. “If you have inadequate public health sources, resources for the mentally ill, for the drug addicted, for people in horrible health conditions, for people that have been exposed to ungodly amounts of trauma, abuse and sexual assault, then you can’t expect that all of these problems are going to be magically solved just by arresting people and pushing them through the criminal justice system. And the model that too much of the country has adopted is exactly that.”

Prosecutors have a “very important role” to play in society, Chisholm said. “People that are using firearms to hurt other people, people that are sexually violent, people that are driving insanely and hurting other people,” Chisholm said, those are people that deserve to have the “full lens of state power” trained on them.

“But we could do it so much better if we were adequately paired with those community-based resources that would help us do our job better.” 

John Doe

Chisholm’s involvement in the investigation and prosecution of corruption cases focused on the administration of Scott Walker during his time as Milwaukee County Executive and then for campaign law violations during his first run for governor and later recall election brought unprecedented attention and partisan attacks on the district attorney.

The cases, known as John Doe 1 and John Doe 2, were not both successful. John Doe cases are confidential investigations overseen by a judge. The first case was a success and ended with the conviction of six Walker aides. The second, which was an investigation into illegal coordination between Walker’s campaign for governor and outside groups like the Wisconsin Club for Growth, was shut down by a Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling in 2015. (An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court failed.) After John Doe 2 was scuttled, state Republican lawmakers passed new laws limiting the practice.

John Doe 2 was conducted with Walker in the governor’s mansion, and “that moved it out of Milwaukee County’s jurisdiction,” Chisholm said. A special prosecutor was appointed to the case. But Chisholm nonetheless faced intense partisan attacks for his role in the investigation and was accused of leading a partisan witch hunt.

Criticism Over Charging Decisions

As district attorney, Chisholm often found himself under fire from all sides, especially for his charging decisions in cases of police killings and police misconduct.

Chisholm has faced considerable criticism for declining to charge the police officer Christopher Manney who shot and killed Dontre Hamilton, a black man suffering from mental health issues, in Red Arrow Park in downtown Milwaukee. And again for not charging former Wauwatosa Police Officer Joseph Mensah in the killings of three men, Antonio Gonzalez, Jay Anderson Jr. and Alvin Cole.

But Chisholm has brought charges against some police officers. In 2013, his office secured convictions of four police officers on charges related to illegal body cavity searches. He also brought charges against former Milwaukee police officer Dominique Heaggan-Brown in the 2015 shooting of Sylville Smith, which led to rioting in the Sherman Park neighborhood. A jury acquitted Heaggan-Brown.

“Somebody is always going to be upset with your decision,” Chisholm said. “If you charge a police officer, you’re gonna have a lot of upset police officers… you don’t charge a case, you have a lot of upset family members, and oftentimes an entire community that’s very upset by that as well.”

Chisholm said his office has an obligation to stick to the principle of not issuing charges if they cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

In 2021, Chisholm came under intense scrutiny after Darrell E. Brooks killed six people driving through the Waukesha Christmas Parade. Brooks had been released from jail on a $1,000 bond. The bail was set by a court commissioner on request from an assistant district attorney. Chisholm said the prosecutor had “made a mistake.”

Chisholm told Urban Milwaukee that he had long advocated for the state to change the bail laws in order to allow judges to consider the risk posed by defendants. Under the cash bail system, prosecutors use cash as a proxy for risk, asking for higher amounts to keep high-risk offenders in detention. “The [state] constitutional amendment [approved in 2023] that allows for the assessment of risk, I think it’s a good thing,” Chisholm said.

Homicides and Gun Violence

Chisholm’s career in the DA’s office has been bookended by two historic spikes in violent crime and homicides: the rise of homicides and violent crime associated with the crack epidemic in the 90s and the surge in homicides following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

When the pandemic hit, Milwaukee began to blow past the annual homicide numbers.

“That tells you how deep the impact of the pandemic shutdowns has been,” Chisholm said. “But in the end, it also tells you that things have changed. With the amount of firepower that’s available on the streets, the means of communication have radically changed.”

Chisholm noted that automatic weapons were fairly rare when he first began his career. Now, with new devices called auto-sears, or switches, that can render a semi-automatic firearm fully automatic, “MPD is pulling fully automatic guns off the street every day,” he said.

Chisholm also sees repealing the ban on carrying a concealed weapon as a contributor to rising violence and homicides in recent years. In 2011, former Gov. Walker signed legislation allowing concealed carry in Wisconsin. Prior to the concealed carry law, “I spent as much time prosecuting [carrying a concealed weapon] as I did violent felony, felony possession and felony offenders. Why? Because you could actually send the message to people that you can’t carry a concealed weapon without having a consequence.”

Since concealed carry became legal, it’s become difficult to secure convictions for concealed carry when all someone has to do is get a permit. “So that increases the proliferation of firearms,” Chisholm said.

What’s Next?

Chisholm’s decision not to run for re-election stems from “a combination of different factors” he said, “ but not the least of which is that I’ve done this now for 30 years.”

It seems, Chisholm said, that Milwaukee is coming out of a very difficult time period, and developments have occurred that will lend stability to the DA’s office and the community.

A major change was the recent increase in pay for assistant DAs and the passage of an additional 0.4% county sales tax, which gives the county more funding to pay the county employees that make up the support staff in the DA’s office. His office has been working its way through the backlog of criminal cases that stacked up during the pandemic. It has cleared the misdemeanor backlog and continues working through the felony backlog.

“And it’s a good opportunity for Milwaukee and the community just to turn another leaf and move forward,” he said.

Chisholm doesn’t have any specific plans for what he will do next. There is a range of possibilities, he said, including working in academia, in the non-profit sector and even returning to government service, he said. “It will not be as a prosecutor.”