The Officer Nobody Can Use:

🚨In September 2024, the Milwaukee County District Attorney's office released a list of law enforcement officers flagged for credibility concerns.

The list was supposed to help prosecutors make better decisions about who to put on the witness stand. Instead, what followed was a news cycle that exposed something most of us in public safety have quietly feared: the systems we built to catch dishonesty don't always work.

When reporters reviewed the Brady list, they found officers listed as deceased. Officers described as involved in custody deaths when they weren't. Officers listed with the wrong agency. Officers whose criminal cases had been expunged but still appeared on the record.

The errors weren't small. And they weren't isolated.

A few months later, a statewide investigation in New Mexico found nearly 100 officers flagged by prosecutors for credibility issues. But that number was likely incomplete. Some prosecutor districts maintained detailed records. Others kept spreadsheets. Some kept nothing searchable at all—just folders and informal notes about officers prosecutors didn't trust.

For many of us in Internal Affairs, these stories felt like watching someone else's accident and thinking, That could have been us.

Because it could have.

The real story in Milwaukee started long before reporters began digging into the Brady list.

The story started with a system—or rather, the lack of one.

When Milwaukee County District Attorney Kent Lovern's office decided to publicly release its Brady list for the first time in September 2024, no one expected problems. But reporters immediately found them.

An officer described as involved in a custody death—except he wasn't.

Another officer listed for a criminal case that had already been expunged.

Officers listed with the wrong agency.

Officers who had moved to other jurisdictions or retired, but were still on the active list.

A handful of deceased officers.

The obvious reaction is: How did this happen? But that's the wrong question. The right question is: Why wasn't anyone checking?

When Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporters asked 23 law enforcement agencies in the county to provide their written policies on how they handle Brady notifications, only seven agencies responded with a document.

Seventy percent of agencies in Milwaukee County—home to the largest prosecutor's office in the state—had no written policy for notifying prosecutors when their own Internal Affairs investigations found credibility problems.

No timeline. No assigned responsibility. No documentation requirement. No follow-up mechanism.

Just an assumption that someone, somewhere, would make sure prosecutors knew about officers who had lied.

The investigation also revealed something that prosecutors and defense attorneys have been dealing with quietly for years: the criteria for listing officers was too narrow. The DA's office only added officers if they had a pending criminal charge, a past conviction, or an internal investigation that explicitly "brought into question the officer's integrity."

But what about an officer a judge had explicitly found "not credible" in court? Sometimes excluded.

An officer who had cost the city millions in misconduct settlements because of credibility issues? Often omitted.

An officer with a history of false reports? Depended on how the department classified the findings.

The system wasn't just broken. It was inconsistently broken. And no one was checking the inconsistencies.

New Mexico told a different story. While Milwaukee's problem was inconsistent application within a single jurisdiction, New Mexico revealed what happens when you don't have a single system at all.

Searchlight New Mexico investigated credibility tracking across the state's prosecutor offices. They found nearly 100 officers flagged for credibility issues. But the documentation was all over the map.

Bernalillo County maintained a published list with supporting documentation. Professional. Public-facing. Auditable.

Other districts kept one-line spreadsheets.

Some maintained correspondence between prosecutors and police supervisors—informal notes about officers they didn't trust.

Some had nothing searchable.

One prosecutor might flag an officer for sustained dishonesty. Another prosecutor, reviewing the same evidence, might conclude it doesn't meet Brady threshold. An officer could be on one district's internal list and completely absent from another's, despite identical conduct.

The result was predictable: some defendants got the information they were entitled to. Others didn't.

Not because anyone was trying to hide anything. But because there was no system ensuring consistency.

If you're running Internal Affairs, this isn't academic.

When prosecutors can't reliably track which officers have credibility problems, the burden falls on your investigation. Your documentation. Your communication with prosecutors. Your institutional memory.

And here's the part that keeps IA commanders awake at night: that investigation file is going to be reviewed by someone you can't predict.

Maybe a prosecutor. Maybe a defense attorney. Maybe a judge. Maybe a civil litigant. Maybe a reporter.

You're not going to know when it happens or what they're looking for. But they will be looking for answers to these questions:

Did you identify the credibility concern? Was your investigation thorough? Was your finding supported by evidence? Did you notify the prosecutor? When? How? Is the documentation clear enough that I can understand exactly what happened? Did you have a process? Did you follow it?

These aren't prosecutor questions. They're not attorney questions. They're Internal Affairs questions. And you need to be able to answer them.

Step 1: Look at Your Last Five Years of Credibility Cases

Pull every investigation you closed involving dishonesty, false reporting, evidence integrity, or bias. Don't overthink the definition. If it involved an officer's truthfulness or integrity, include it.

For each case, answer these questions:

This audit will likely reveal gaps. Don't panic. You're identifying problems before external scrutiny finds them.

Step 2: Create a Written Brady Notification Policy

If your agency doesn't have one, you need one immediately. If you have an old one, revise it.

The policy needs to answer these specific questions:

Have your prosecutor's office review it. They're your partner in this. They probably want better communication from you anyway.

Step 3: Build a Simple Tracking System

You don't need anything sophisticated. A spreadsheet is fine.

Track these fields:

Use this for quarterly management reviews and annual accuracy audits.

Step 4: Require Real Documentation

This is where most agencies miss the opportunity.

When you document a credibility finding, don't write: "Officer Jones was untruthful."

Write: "Officer Jones stated in his report that he never entered the evidence room. Electronic access records show Officer Jones accessed the room at 14:28 hours on [date]. Surveillance footage from [timestamp] confirms his presence. Witness statements from [names] corroborate the access. When confronted with physical evidence, Officer Jones acknowledged making a false statement."

The first version creates questions. The second creates clarity.

When your file gets reviewed—and it will—clarity is the difference between someone saying "This was handled properly" and someone saying "What exactly happened here?"

1. Can we identify every sustained credibility finding from the last five years without digging through multiple systems?

If it takes more than 30 minutes, you have a system problem.

2. Do we have a written Brady notification policy that everyone involved actually knows about?

A policy nobody follows is worse than no policy.

3. Is our documentation detailed enough that an outside reviewer—prosecutor, judge, attorney, journalist—could understand exactly what happened and why we reached our conclusion?

If there are questions about what actually occurred, your documentation isn't good enough.

4. How long does it take us to close a credibility investigation from allegation to final decision?

Months-long investigations create gaps. Where's your bottleneck?

5. Could we defend this process in public if we had to?

Not just defend it legally. Could you explain it to an officer, a community member, or a reporter and have them understand it's fair and thorough?

Your honest answers to these questions reveal more about your organizational risk than any policy manual.

The Milwaukee and New Mexico stories weren't really about Brady lists.

They were about whether the systems Internal Affairs builds—the investigations, the documentation, the communication, the process—can actually do what they're supposed to do.

And they were about trust.

When an agency has a credibility system, people assume it works. Prosecutors assume it works. Defense attorneys assume it works. The public assumes it works.

When that system doesn't work—when officers are listed incorrectly, when documentation is inadequate, when communication fails—the problem isn't just the specific error.

The problem is that the system itself becomes unreliable. And once a system becomes unreliable, people stop trusting it.

That loss of trust extends beyond Brady lists. It affects confidence in Internal Affairs. It affects confidence in discipline. It affects confidence in the agency's willingness and ability to hold itself accountable.

The agencies that adapted early to these lessons—the ones that built real systems, real documentation, real communication protocols—they're the ones that will maintain trust when external scrutiny arrives.

And external scrutiny will arrive.

It always does.

Your investigation file is going to be reviewed by someone you don't know, at a time you don't control, for reasons you can't predict.

The question isn't whether that happens.

The question is whether your systems, your documentation, your processes, and your communication will withstand that scrutiny when it does.

The agencies that built the strongest Brady systems didn't do it because prosecutors asked them to. They did it because they understood something fundamental: transparency, consistency, and clear documentation aren't just best practices.

They're the foundation of trust.

Start this week. Audit your recent cases. Build your policy. Establish your system.

Because in today's environment, the investigation isn't the end of the story.

It's where the story begins.

If you found value in this information then we ask that you help us grow the community by sharing this post.