Incompetent Police and the Blue Code of Silence

Anyone who is squeamish about hearing details of Jeffrey Dahmer's crimes against children, please do not read on.

From the Wikipedia article on Jeffrey Dahmer:


[Dahmer] found an apartment on Milwaukee's West side, closer to his job at the Ambrosia Chocolate Factory. On September 26, 1988, one day after moving into his apartment, he was arrested for drugging and sexually fondling a 13-year-old boy in Milwaukee named Somsack Sinthasomphone. He was sentenced to five years probation and one year in a work release camp. He was required to register as a sex offender. Dahmer was paroled from the work release camp two months early, and he soon moved into a new apartment. Shortly thereafter, he began a string of murders that ended with his arrest in 1991...

In the early morning hours of May 30, 1991, 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone (by chance, the younger brother of the boy whom Dahmer had molested) was discovered on the street, wandering naked, heavily under the influence of drugs and bleeding from his rectum. Two young women from the neighborhood found the dazed boy and called 911. Dahmer chased his victim down and tried to take him away, but the women stopped him. Dahmer told police that Sinthasomphone was his 19-year-old boyfriend, and that they had an argument while drinking. Against the protests of the two women who had called 911, police turned him over to Dahmer. They later reported smelling a strange scent while inside Dahmer's apartment, but did not investigate it. The smell was the body of Tony Hughes, Dahmer's previous victim, decomposing in the bedroom. The two policemen failed to run a background check that would have revealed that Dahmer was a convicted sex offender and child molester still under probation. The officers laughed about the incident, one joking that his partner was "going to get deloused." Later that night, Dahmer killed and dismembered Sinthasomphone, keeping his skull as a souvenir.

John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish, two of the three police officers who returned Sinthasomphone to Dahmer, were fired from the Milwaukee Police Department after their actions were widely publicized, including an audiotape of the officers making homophobic statements to their dispatcher and cracking jokes about having reunited the "lovers". The two officers appealed their termination and were reinstated with back pay. They were named officers of the year by the police union for fighting a "righteous" battle to regain their jobs. Balcerzak was later elected president of the Milwaukee Police Association in May 2005.


Now, I know there's unwritten rules that cops abide by, and a cursory search of the Internet reveals little about how these cops managed this career turnaround, but I find it hard to conceive of a series of events that starts with two cops fucking up a case this badly (and being blatantly biased against homosexuals, though attitudes against that have changed somewhat since 1991) and ends with one of them being president of Milwaukee's Police Association. It's not like Milwaukee is Wazoo, Alabama.

And what about the Sinthasomphone family? How could they possibly feel about this series of events? What set of crazy circumstances led to both of their 13 / 14 year old kids having chance encounters with Jeffrey Dahmer?

Should I have done more research before posting this? Probably. And why was I reading about Jeffrey Dahmer on Wikipedia? Not entirely sure. I was reading the article and read they were "Officers of the Year" and such and it stopped me and made me re-read it.