Madison Police Chief John Patterson filed into the community learning center at the Northport Apartment Complex June 3 for the last in a series of evening town halls he launched this spring.

Paintings and drawings in the style of Jean-Michel Basquiat, rendered by the center’s young artists, hang on the walls, gazing at the community members and nearly dozen police officers assembled.

Patterson has his presentation down pat: an introduction to police personnel, a recruitment pitch, a list of his department’s priorities, requests for the upcoming budget, and then questions. He’s asked about homelessness and affordable housing — things not under the purview of the police department — and something more contemplative, from Ald. Carmella Glenn: What would the chief have said two decades ago if asked to reflect on policing’s problems?

“I think if you asked all of us, we’d say we wish we had used our discretion more early on,” he said, hunched forward. “Over time, you see how many of the people who end up in the criminal justice system are facing significant challenges in their lives, and how unforgiving that system can be.

“It’s been a continuously evolving relationship with the community,” he added. “I won’t say we’re perfect now, but we are trying to learn from the way things were done in the past, and improve.”

Nearly two weeks later, on June 15, Glenn is standing beside Independent Police Monitor Aeiramique Glass outside the City-County Building. Glass is the interim head of an office created by the city council in 2020 to be a police department watchdog, and she’s called a press conference to announce a new investigative report into the December 2024 death of Richard Lee Johnson.

An independent analysis from a medical examiner, who has since been hired at the Dane County Medical Examiner’s Office, has concluded that the way police restrained Johnson contributed to his death. The report from Glass also finds that officers ignored health symptoms on the way to the jail, when Johnson kicked and thrashed and “groaned continuously” before becoming unresponsive by the end of the ride. He was pronounced dead at a hospital the next day.

The three officers involved have been cleared of wrongdoing by an internal department probe and by the Department of Justice’s Division of Criminal Investigation. The death was ruled accidental by the Dane County Medical Examiner’s office and District Attorney Ismael Ozanne has declined to prosecute.

But the monitor’s report questions those decisions and recommends, among other things, a new review of Johnson’s death. Glenn directs her remarks to the head of the police department, who she says has “shown willingness to engage with this office.”

“But I want to be honest by what that means now,” she adds. “These findings are on the record. The police has them. The family has them. This community is watching what happens next. Good intentions and open doors are not enough anymore. What accountability looks like from MPD leadership in the coming weeks and months, whether these policy changes are implemented, and whether these recommendations are acted on…That is the test. Not words, action.”

Gauntlet thrown down.

John Patterson, or “JP” to many, grew up in Green Bay. He moved to Madison in 1994 to attend UW, thinking he might study to become a Spanish teacher. Then he interned with the Madison Police Department, where he was assigned to the department’s Forensic Services Unit, learning the ropes from an investigator named Pia Kinney-James. Among other things, she taught him how to develop crime scene photos in the darkroom, before the department had digital cameras.

Kinney-James, who encountered numerous barriers as the department’s first Black woman police officer after being hired in 1975, was candid with Patterson about how her time as an officer had changed over time. Her approach made Patterson feel “like I was in the right place.” 

“He was just a kid with open eyes, like he was in a candy store, ready to learn,” says Kinney-James, now retired. Kinney-James says she was “very upfront” about the importance of community policing, where police and residents get to know each other.

In that early experience, Patterson says he was struck by the department’s “unique culture of learning,” and its “commitment to trying to better oneself and better the agency.”

After graduation, Patterson was hired as a patrol officer in the North District, working his way up to lieutenant downtown and in the West District, and then to captain of the South District. He became assistant chief in 2019 and acting chief in February 2025, when Shon Barnes left for Seattle. At the time he was finishing up a master’s degree in organizational leadership and change from Edgewood College.

Patterson was sworn in as permanent chief last October, at the site of what he remembers from his early policing days as a “very troubled gas station” and what is now the Black Business Hub on South Park Street. There, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway held up two pocket versions of the United States Constitution (one in English, one in Spanish) for Patterson to renew his oath. While the decision to hire Patterson wasn’t up to her — that decision is made by the statutorily-mandated Police and Fire Commission — the mayor said Patterson is “more than up for the job.”

In his speech, Patterson thanked his colleagues and mentors. He also thanked his family, including his wife, Melanie, his two daughters, one in high school and the other in college, and his son, who has special needs: “Even though you’ve never spoken a word, you have taught me more about empathy, compassion and patience,” said Patterson, addressing his son. “You’ve taught me that equity and inclusion must be fought for, and fiercely defended. Your diversity enriches everything, and you’ve enriched my life.”

Former police chief Noble Wray, who led the department from 2004 to 2014, calls it the “moment of truth” — the officer-involved shooting or other high-profile incident that every chief faces. It’s the one that tells the organization and the community what you’re about.

The only way to handle it, Wray says, is to be proactive. “You try and make decisions that are in the best interests of everyone, and the only way that you could ever do that is if you have gone out and talked to people, and listened to people. The advantage that John has is that he’s a great listener.” Without, Wray adds, “ego investment.”

Soon after the police monitor’s press conference on June 15, Patterson released his own statement on the death of Richard Johnson, saying he supports the decision to return the three officers to full duty.

“I also support the officers involved who did everything that we train them to do and expect them to do in a situation like this one involving Mr. Johnson,” added Patterson, disputing a key finding of the monitor’s report. “We have not seen any evidence suggesting that a knee was placed on Mr. Johnson’s neck as was suggested.” He says the knee was placed on Johnson’s shoulder blades, a technique outlined under state training standards.

Patterson also said that the profanity that was used by one of the officers — heard in a video clip of Johnson being restrained — was not identified as a policy violation by department investigators but has “since been addressed.” (“We’ve had some very clear discussions as to what the expectations are,” Patterson says.) Patterson says he’s still reviewing the report, and has asked to schedule a meeting with the monitor and medical examiner.

Jim Palmer, head of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, has defended the officers involved in Johnson’s arrest and criticized the monitor’s report, saying it “repeatedly presents disputed interpretations of evidence as settled fact while dismissing the conclusions reached by investigators, prosecutors, medical professionals.”

City council president Sabrina Madison, in a blog post on June 16, urged a review of the official cause and manner of Johnson’s death, along with a review of the monitor’s recommendations, adding that it could be an “opportunity to advance new police procedures” that could become a new statewide standard.

Accountability, Madison wrote, means improving processes to prevent future harm: “Reexamining evidence, revisiting decisions, and improving processes should not be viewed as signs of weakness. They are signs of integrity. They are how trust is built and maintained.”

A few weeks before, on May 19, interim police monitor Glass had delivered her agency’s annual update to the city council. Glass told the council that she has a “really good relationship” with the police chief and is in “constant communication” with his office.

But she noted that her report reveals some troubling data, including that the city’s rate of disorderly conduct charges is three times the national average, and that Black youth get cited for it more than five times the rate of their white peers.

Patterson, who presented his own report that night, responded that Wisconsin’s disorderly conduct statute is broad, and that it’s not an “apples-to-apples comparison” to other cities, and that all youth with municipal tickets are referred to a county restorative court. But he said that it’s “something we need to take a closer and deeper look at,” and promised to get “much more surgical” with the data soon. (Later, Patterson tells me he felt the report misrepresented the process: police haven’t issued disorderly conduct tickets to 12-16 year olds in five years; instead they get a referral to the YWCA.)

Why not get surgical now? That would require data crunchers and the department has been without its top two data analyst positions for about a year. Hiring is underway; Patterson expects they’ll be hired this summer.

While Patterson says he’s “not a data wonk,” he has “a lot of ideas” for how to use quantitative evidence. He points to a statistic in the department’s own 2025 annual report: 890 adults, less than 1% of Madison’s population, accounted for 55% of the department’s 5,460 physical arrests in 2025. Patterson wants to know who those people are. “What are we not doing well as a system to help these individuals? Because clearly, there’s probably unmet needs for some that are driving decisions, driving them to intersect with us. That’s a conversation I really feel like is way overdue.”

Data also underpins an approach implemented under Barnes: it’s called “stratified policing.” Under the framework, high visibility police patrols are directed to places where there have been the most calls for service. Officers also use data to drill down to underlying issues that could be facilitating crime.

Patterson says that once the new data analysts are on board the department will be able to use data that’s “much more intentional.” He confirms there are guardrails in place to avoid creating feedback loops, where police use their own data to justify future enforcement activity.

Data also is a check on officers within the department. More than half of all officers — 271 — have been hired since 2020. “Now, more than ever, we have to emphasize the basics of our culture and who we are,” says Patterson.

Those basics include “procedural justice,” the idea that officers should slow down and explain their actions to people they apprehend. They also include an internal culture of encouraging officers to ask questions and push back on decisions.

Patterson is also investing in mental health and professional development, and adding supervisory staff. In March, the city council approved a request to shift six police officer positions to sergeants, at a cost of $69,000 absorbed into the current operating budget.

“With a younger workforce, “ he says, “we just kind of felt like we need to do something now.”

The city of Madison has discussed outfitting its police officers with body cameras for a decade. Patterson wants to finally make it happen.

His 2027 capital budget request proposes purchasing 220 cameras over three years at a cost of $79,664 in 2027, $120,570 in 2028, and $214,550 in 2029.

The costs associated with operating the cameras, including their impact on records requests, are a separate matter. Patterson says he won’t include any additional money for staff positions to support body cameras this round. There’s little room to work with: operating budget requests are due from city agencies in mid-July, and Mayor Rhodes-Conway has instructed agency heads to cut costs by 2%. Plus, Patterson wants a year to gain a “more educated understanding” of how cameras will impact staffing and workload, and prepare an accurate request for 2028’s budget.

He says his phased approach is “more reasonable” than trying to outfit the entire department in one year, and one that “hopefully others who make decisions agree with — we’ll see.”

It will ultimately be up to the city council, which has over the years convened an advisory committee and a study to consider the technology. A 90-day pilot program, launched in summer 2024, was analyzed by both the Madison Police Department and its watchdog.

The interim police monitor supports full implementation, but wants more policies to ensure accountability. “This community has been waiting long enough,” Glass wrote in her annual report, adding, “The data is in. The pilot is done. The path forward is clear. What is needed now is not another study. Not another pilot. Not another conversation about whether. What is needed is a decision — a real one, backed by a budget, a timeline, and the political will to see it through.”

At a June 2 city budget engagement session on justice and public safety, a majority of alders appeared cautiously poised to go along with the phased plan. Ald. Yannette Figueroa-Cole said it’s “too early to tell” what the council will ultimately do, but said Patterson’s strategy of “scaling up” over a few years is the “right idea.”

At nearly every one of the six town halls hosted by Patterson this past spring, whether in a church, a coffee shop, or a community center, one issue rose to the top: unsafe driving. Residents wanted to know what the department was doing about speeding and cars running red lights.

“It’s the number one concern from the community,” Assistant Chief Matt Tye told alders at the May 19 city council meeting. “We know it’s important,” he added, noting that the city’s traffic engineers and other staffers are involved in solutions.

Patterson says traffic safety has been a “consistent theme” in his nearly 30 years; given budget reductions, he’s “not anticipating” adding a new traffic enforcement team.

In February, teenager Sasha Rosen was killed by a driver while crossing Park Street, and the department stepped up traffic enforcement along Park Street— but that required overtime hours for officers in addition to grant funding. Just days into a targeted traffic summer enforcement initiative at the start of June, a pedestrian was killed on East Washington Avenue, another road where police are ramping up enforcement based on data showing crashes and dangerous driving. Other hotspots include the Beltline, Mineral Point Road, and the Gammon-Watts Road intersection.

The department is looking to target “hazardous moving violations,” rather than registration or equipment violations. Yet enforcement comes as the independent monitor’s office has also identified disparities in penalties meted out to Black and white drivers. White drivers are 45% more likely to receive a warning rather than a citation, a statistic that, according to the report, “cannot be explained by driving behavior or car value (a proxy for socioeconomic status).”

Gloria Johnson, who lost her “baby boy” in December 2024, is still waiting for the unredacted report on the death of her son. She has also retained a lawyer named Andrea Farrell.

Farrell is responsible for two major cases against the police department: a $2.3 million settlement in the death of Paul Heenan, and a $7 million verdict in the fatal police shooting of Ashley DiPiazza. She says she’s waiting to file another lawsuit against the police department, because the monitor’s report could spark new information and she’s conducting her own investigation. She’s “not in a rush” to file: the statute of limitations expires in December 2027.

Heenan was shot and killed by a Madison police officer in 2012. DiPiazza was shot and killed by Madison police in 2014. The police killing of Tony Robinson in 2015 prompted massive protests, calls for officer Matt Kenny to resign, a $3.35 million civil rights settlement from the city, and the launch of a review of the department’s policies and procedures by an external consultant.

That review, conducted nearly a decade ago by an outside consultant, found a department that had a “well-deserved reputation” as a “cradle of progressive, problem-oriented policing” built on the legacy of criminologist Herman Goldstein and former Madison Chief David Couper, with a “stated adherence to lofty principles.”

The same report also found a “paucity of data about what officers are actually doing in the field,” and described a “gap that sometimes exists within MPD between high ideals and everyday realities.”

Is Patterson prepared for all that he’s inherited? He says he is. “I’m ready now. Not a year from now, but right now,” he pledged in his finalist interview last August.

He also promised he was in it for the long haul: “There isn’t a greener pasture out there for me. For me, it’s always been Madison, and Madison is it.”