Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm is not running for reelection this November. He’s been the county's DA since 2007.
However, Chisholm's deputy chief district attorney, Kent Lovern, is running — unopposed.
Chisholm says he decided that now is a good time for him to move on, and for someone else to take the reins. Ahead of his departure, Chisholm sat down with WUWM's Teran Powell to reflect on the role.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What does a district attorney do?
In the state of Wisconsin, the district attorney is the person who leads an office that is responsible for handling any criminal offenses that occur within the county. And so that would be misdemeanor, which is generally an offense that exposes you to less than a year in jail, and all felonies, which would potentially expose you to over a year in the prison system. So that's how we bifurcate everything in the state of Wisconsin — misdemeanor, felony. And the prosecutor in each respective county — there's 72 counties —each prosecutor is elected at the county level and is responsible for processing all the cases that arise in that county.
What's been the most challenging part of the job?
Well, everything is challenging. It's probably, when you look at it — at least being the district attorney of Milwaukee County, is it puts you in a position to make really important decisions over more people than almost any other elected position in the state, and there's a handful of other ones that you might have more influence over them. But the prosecutors are all the district attorney's role at the end of the day is to really focus that lens of state authority, state power on an individual and when you do that you have to balance that person's civil rights, their ability to live in a free society and exercise those rights with the need for making sure that we keep the community safe as well. So that's the job — you're balancing that all the time and when you make a decision, the police can arrest everybody they want to arrest, you know, at the end of the day nobody stays in the system unless the prosecutor makes a decision to initiate formal criminal proceedings against them. And so that's a unique privilege, a unique power of the prosecutor and it's got to be exercised with restraint. It's got to be exercised, again, in a principled way. And again, it's got to be, there's got to be a purpose behind it and that purpose ideally should be to keep your community safe, ideally create conditions that make it healthier and then therefore allow people to prosper in that community. So, you're trying always to maintain the social compact.
As you reflect on your time as the Milwaukee County district attorney, what are you most proud of?
It's always the people. So, the reality is in this position, I've been privileged to bring, you know, several hundred people over the last 18 years into the profession and that's both the support staff and assistant DAs to serve the community and what I look for is just a good person that is actually committed to doing the job in an ethical way, doing the job in a committed and passionate way, and somebody that's going to treat the people who come to us with dignity and respect and compassion, but be appropriately firm and disciplined when that's required as well. So, I'm looking for good people and I've been privileged to work with a lot of really, really good people.
What do you want your legacy to be?
I'm always reticent to speak about Legacy because I think that this is just a fad of elected office and that is one minute you're out of the office, you will be forgotten and that's way it should be in a democracy. You should just move on and allow the next person up to serve and imprint their vision and idea of how the organization should run. Ultimately, it would be that I really ran for the job originally and accepted the job for one major reason and that was that I believed really, really strongly in the ethos of the office that really imprinted on each one of us that our job was to the best of our ability do the right thing. In other words, make sure that you didn't charge people if you couldn't prove it.
Do you have any advice for your successor, Kent Lovern?
I like to refer to Kent as as an upgrade. I'm like Windows 98 and he is coming in as an upgrade, but look Kent and I have worked together, almost nonstop since I started the firearms enforcement unit back in late 1999 and he was one of the first assistant DAs assigned to my unit at that time. And so we've been working very closely with one another. So I don't really have to give him a lot of advice. I've taken a lot of advice from him over the years and that's been incredibly valuable to me as well. But what I would say is that it is different when when it's your name on every decision. It really is. And so the the only practical advice I can give him his just to be prepared for basically everything being your responsibility during this time. And I know he is and he's going to do an awesome job.
