Walker Uses Abused Children As A Political Human Shield

Recently, Scott Walker has shown how deranged and depraved he truly is.  He's been running TV and radio commercials citing a series of reports by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel which claims that the Milwaukee Police Department has been fudging their crime statistics.

I will not foul this site with his vulgar TV ad, but if you must watch it, you can find it here.

There are three major issues with Walker's strategy.

One, and the most depraved reason, is that it is so thoroughly disgusting that Walker would use abused children as a human shield, in order to deflect attention from all of his failings.  With his indictment in Walkergate becoming a question of not if but when, his poor jobs records, the way he torpedoed the state economy and the many attacks on our civil rights, to name but just a few, Walker felt so pressured that he would take these innocent victims of abuse and use them as political pawns to try to get reelected to a position he shouldn't have had in the first place and won't be keeping for long if he were to win.

Secondly, his ad misuses a quote by criminology professor Sam Walker:

The professor believes the governor has misused his quote, saying the "failure of leadership" he referred to has nothing to do with Barrett.

"The governor misrepresented what I said," he said in an interview with The Huffington Post.

"My comment was about the police department strictly," he added. "Mayors don't understand these things. They just accept what their police chiefs and police departments give them. ... The governor was absolutely wrong in saying the mayor was directly responsible for this."

The crime ad was a hot topic at the second and final gubernatorial debate on Thursday. Barrett likened it to the much-criticized "Willie Horton" ad of the 1988 presidential campaign.

Thirdly, Walker holds as much, if not more, responsibility for these incidents of abuse as he falsely claims Barrett does.

First though, a little history.

A couple of children's rights advocacy groups had filed a class action suit against Milwaukee County and the State of Wisconsin, claiming that foster children in Milwaukee County were having their rights violated. The complaint listed the overly long amount of time children went without a permanent plan, the lack of stability as some children were moved from home to home, and being placed in unsafe foster homes where they were revictimized.

An independent audit showed that it wasn't that Milwaukee County was doing a bad job, per se, but that they were extremely underfunded by the Republican controlled state. The Republicans rebuffed this fact and took it upon themselves to cover up their failings.

In 1996, then Governor Tommy Thompson, included a line in the state budget that said that the state would take over the child welfare system of any county with a population of 500,000 or more. This was ramrodded through by Senator Alberta Darling, then Senator Margaret Farrow and then State Assemblyman Scott Walker.

That law still holds effect today.  Thus the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare (BMCW) is controlled by soon-to-be-deposed Scott Walker.

Now, if these children were being abused, or were even thought to be in harm's way, the BMCW should be involved.  Wouldn't it be interesting to see if referrals had been made to the BMCW and what actions they took before the incidents Walker used in his ad took place?  Based on my experience of being a child welfare worker for six and a half years, I would feel that it would be a good bet that Walker's BMCW was aware of these families but did nothing.  All in order to save money of course.

So which is worse? Mislabeling a case of child abuse or allowing the child abuse to happen in the first place?