The middle-aged man in jeans ambles through the hotel lobby. His button-down shirt is untucked. The brim of his cowboy hat is embroidered with crossed pistols. His boots are made from the scaly skin of some pale reptile. This is what David A. Clarke Jr., sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, wears when he’s not in uniform, or at least when he goes to the Conservative Political Action Conference, where I caught up with him this spring. At that right-wing Woodstock, he was treated like a rock star, stopped at every turn for selfies and handshakes.
A veteran lawman, Clarke found himself sheriff more than a dozen years ago, when his predecessor resigned. He was a quick study of the political part of his new job. Prepping for his first election campaign, advisers told him to make news once a week to raise his name recognition. “He ended up in the paper nearly every day,” a political fundraiser told Milwaukee Magazine in a 2003 profile.
Black, conservative, Democratic, no-nonsense, and media savvy, Clarke quickly became a unique and notable figure in Milwaukee politics. He ran for mayor in 2004, finishing third out of 10 candidates. The winner of that contest (and mayor ever since), Tom Barrett, has become a perennial foil as Clarke has turned his sheriff’s office into an advocacy platform. For example, Barrett squared off against Clarke on CNN in 2013, criticizing the sheriff for appearing in a public service announcement encouraging citizens to learn to use firearms to make up for a shortage in police. Barrett’s anti-gun side of the argument was backed up by then-CNN host, Piers Morgan, who derided Clarke’s intonation in the ad as something out of a “John Wayne movie.”
Clarke was unfazed: “This is the way I talk,” he deadpanned. “This is my voice.”
I can vouch for that. At few points during our conversation does his tone rise above a smooth baritone or his volume exceed NPR levels. On the occasions that they do, it’s because the conversation has moved to topics he’s passionate about: He vigorously rejects the claim that law enforcement is in a state of crisis in the inner cities, and he forcefully opposes criminal justice reforms being proposed in Congress.
His father, an Army airborne ranger, gave Clarke an old-school upbringing. Not that, as a young man, he didn’t try out the popular poses of rebellion. He laughs, recalling how once he saw a squad car driving past his house and raised a Black Power fist toward the cops. They stopped and backed up.
“And I’m like, ‘Oh sh—.’ I thought they’d keep going,” Clarke says. His father made a timely appearance that day, asking the police whether there was a problem. The officer explained the situation. “My dad looked at the cop and said, ‘I’ll take care of this.’ The cops . . . took off. They knew!”
“Get in the house,” Clarke’s father told him. “We go in the house, and he says, ‘Why are you screwing with the police?’ I said I wasn’t, you know, I was just—He said, ‘Leave the police alone.’ And that was the end of it. Leave. The police. Alone. That was a lesson. It’s why I can tell that story today. Just leave them alone! This car was just doing patrol in our neighborhood. That’s what people want, right?”
Clarke says that the relationship between law-enforcement and black communities isn’t as bad as the Ferguson and Baltimore riots would make you think: “The overwhelming majority of people who live in the ghettos and the slums are good, law-abiding people, and they know they’ve got to have the police.” Cops are there, he says, “to keep the peace, not to screw with people.”
Murder rates have spiked in Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., and even in cities such as Milwaukee, where homicides rose 69 percent from 2014 to 2015. Clarke says those statistics distract from the good news, which is that overall, crime in major cities remains at its lowest rate in decades.
Which means that policing is not as dysfunctional as advertised: “I say it could be better, but it’s not horrible,” Clarke says. He thinks police get a bad rap because there is an effort by activists—including the activist in chief, the president of the United States—to transform policing. “We don’t need to be transformed,” Clarke says.
Clarke has called the Obama administration an adversary of police. He said former attorney general Eric Holder raised a “rallying cry for cop-haters across America” and that he ran a Justice Department full of “hostility towards local law enforcement.”
That helps explain Clarke’s own hostility toward the bipartisan congressional push for criminal justice reform, which he sees as a vanity legacy-project for President Barack Obama.
“Conservatives, they own the law and order message. Why do they want to give this away to the left? Because Obama wants it?” Clarke asks. “I’m looking at these Republicans, and I’m thinking, this guy does nothing but kick you in your ass every day, and now you want to give him a feather on the way out the door? You should look at Obama and go, ‘F— you, man. You’ve been kicking us in our ass for eight years. We’re not giving you anything.’ ”
Clarke is critical of GOP senators, such as Utah’s Mike Lee, who have joined in the criminal justice reform effort. Lee’s office says in a statement that the senator is just trying to help law enforcement, noting that the Senate bill has the support of the International Association of Chiefs of Police: “Sen. Lee has the utmost respect for Sheriff Clarke, and our legislation is specifically designed to make his job, and the job of every law enforcement officer, safer.”
Engaged as he is on national issues, is Clarke angling to climb the political ladder? He’s behind a PAC that bears his nickname, “The People’s Sheriff,” which has reported taking in less than $100,000 since it was formed last year. Its goal? To challenge “the leftist media.” He has a weekly podcast distributed by Glenn Beck’s media outlet, TheBlaze. He even said recently that he’d be open to serving in a Donald Trump administration, perhaps as secretary of homeland security.
But for now, Milwaukee suits him fine: “I’m in a good place, where I can do the things I want to do in terms of messaging, in terms of helping other people,” Clarke says. “And if I can do it from here, I’m cool.”
Chris Deaton is a deputy online editor at The Weekly Standard.
