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A police officer forced out of a suburban Milwaukee department for appearing to skip a lot of work and claiming many questionable comp days is now working for a small-town department in Waukesha County.

Amanda Lang resigned from the Glendale Police Department in 2021 after an internal investigation found she had more than 230 paid hours unaccounted for between 2019 and 2021. At her wage of $40 an hour, those hours added up to $9,300, the investigation noted.

“Based on the discovery of leaving early, along with the substantial number of full shifts not accounted for, one can only wonder how many other times she has left significantly early without documentation,” then-Captain Rhett Fugman wrote in his investigation, which The Badger Project obtained in a records request.

The captain recommended Lang be fired, and she resigned in April of 2021.

She worked for Glendale in the Milwaukee suburbs for more than 13 years, rising to the level of sergeant, before her resignation.

“As a sergeant, additional responsibility and trust was provided to Sgt. Lang,” Fugman wrote. “Her actions and inactions displayed regarding leaving early and posting off time over the last two plus years have displayed a lack of integrity, honesty and trustworthiness.”

“These characteristics are the foundation of what we are as police officers,” he continued.

Lang was hired by the Lannon Police Department later in 2021 and has worked there since.

Lannon Police Chief Daniel Bell said his department “follows rigorous background checks and screening procedures for all new hires to ensure they align with the standards and integrity expected of our officers,” including for Lang.

“During the interview process, we were satisfied with her explanation of the situation,” Bell said of her resignation.

Lang is “consistently demonstrating professionalism, dedication and a strong commitment to community policing,” he added.

She has been promoted to lieutenant, the second in command of the 12-officer department.

Another officer employed by the Lannon Police Department, Nathaniel Schweitzer, was forced out of the police department in the town of Waterford in Racine County late last year. Like Lang, he “resigned prior to the completion of an internal investigation,” according to the Wisconsin Department of Justice’s database on officers who left a law enforcement position under negative circumstances.

Number of wandering officers in Wisconsin continues to rise

The total number of law enforcement officers in Wisconsin has dropped for years and now sits at near record lows as chiefs and sheriffs say they struggle to fill positions in an industry less attractive to people than it once was.

Unsurprisingly, the number of wandering officers, those who were fired or forced out from a previous job in law enforcement, continues to rise. Nearly 400 officers in Wisconsin currently employed were fired or forced out of previous jobs in law enforcement in the state, almost double the amount from 2021. And that doesn’t include officers who were pushed out of law enforcement jobs outside of the state and who came to Wisconsin to work.

Chiefs and sheriffs can be incentivized to hire wandering officers, experts say. Hiring someone new to law enforcement means the police department or sheriff’s office has to pay for recruits’ academy training and then wait for them to finish before they can start putting new hires on the schedule.

A wandering officer already has certification and can start working immediately.

Nearly 2,400 officers in the state have been flagged by their former law enforcement employers as having a “negative separation” since the state DOJ launched its database in 2017.

Most are simply young officers who did not succeed in a new job during their probationary period, when the bar to fire them is very low, experts say. But some have more serious reasons for being pushed out.

Law enforcement agencies can look up job applicants in that database to get more insight into their work history. And a law enacted in 2021 in Wisconsin bans law enforcement officers from sealing their personnel files and work histories, a previously common tactic for officers with a black mark on their record.

About 13,400 law enforcement officers are currently employed in Wisconsin, excluding those who primarily work in a corrections facility, according to the Wisconsin Department of Justice. Wandering officers make up nearly 3% of the total.

At least one major study published in the Yale Law Journal has found that wandering officers are more likely to receive a complaint for a moral character violation, compared to new officers and veterans who haven’t been fired or forced out from a previous position in law enforcement.

Sammie Garrity contributed to this report.

This article first appeared on The Badger Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.

Milwaukee-area cop quit last police job after appearing to miss 200+ work hours is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Since 1954, women in Waupaca and the surrounding areas could give birth at the local hospital.

No longer.

Last year, the health care system Thedacare that runs the hospital merged with another system, Froedtert Health. Last month, that newly formed health care system closed the delivery unit there.

The closest birthing center to Waupaca is now more than 30 miles to the northwest in Stevens Point. But many pregnant women will have to go even farther — to the Fox Valley to the east — to reach a hospital that accepts their insurance, said Dr. Russell Butkiewicz, who worked as a family physician at the Waupaca hospital for more than 30 years, including over a decade of delivering babies in the now-closed birthing center, before retiring from medicine last year.

“There’s going to be a delay in care,” he said. “And that delay in care could result in an adverse outcome. It could mean harm to the mother. It could mean harm to the fetus.”

Closures are common after mergers, and a particularly sticky problem in more rural communities, which have fewer people and thus make less financial sense for profit-driven organizations, said Peter Carstensen, a professor emeritus in the UW-Madison Law School who focuses on competition policy. When competitors merge, they look for areas to reduce cost.

“It almost always means eliminating some overlapping activities,” he said.

In Waupaca, that means goodbye to the delivery unit. And that’s a problem for folks in the area. One that has repeated itself across the state and country.

The community tried to offer solutions to the health care system and keep the birthing center open, Butkiewicz said. The Waupaca City Council asked the health care system in December to reconsider the closure.

The health care system told the press it was struggling to recruit physicians and other specialists for the unit and said that most women in Waupaca were already delivering their babies in urban hospitals. But they also did not show data to back up those assertions, according to news reports.

The health care system did not respond to messages from The Badger Project seeking comment.

The past and the future

For more than 70 years, the community’s babies were born at the hospital in Waupaca. Thedacare took control of the hospital in 2006, but kept on delivering. Until the merger.

While the newly formed health care system is technically nonprofit, it is still driven by making money, Carstensen said. High-level employees must still be compensated competitively by nonprofit organizations.

“They’re really run in the interest of the executives and doctors, who are the managers, the owners of the not-for-profit,” he continued. “The goal is to increase your profits and lower your costs.”

Butkiewicz and others worry the Thedacare delivery unit in Waupaca won’t be the only casualty of the merger.

They also fear the closing of the birthing center at the Thedacare medical center in nearby small-town Berlin, with its relative proximity to larger hospitals in Oshkosh and Fond du Lac, could be next.

A closure there would again increase the size of the territory in central Wisconsin without a birthing center, Butkiewicz noted, further extending drive times and escalating the dangers of problematic deliveries.

The health care system did not respond to questions about Berlin or anything else.

The problem of profit-centered health care, the dominant model in the U.S., not wanting to serve less-profitable areas is a consistent problem; solutions do exist.

When the free market does not fill a need, the government can step in to help, Carstensen said.

That can take the form of direct payments to a health care system to help provide the needed care, or a government promise that the organization will have a monopoly in the area as long as they offer certain services to the public.

Something similar is happening in the state regarding high-speed internet. Across rural Wisconsin and also much of the rural United States, for-profit telecommunications providers mostly have been uninterested in making the necessary investments to bring fast internet access to the thinly populated customers here. Republicans controlling Wisconsin state government initially gave very little funding toward the problem. But after Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, was elected in 2018, he and the GOP-controlled state Legislature massively increased the amount of grants for internet providers to rural areas in the state.

The idea of government stepping in to subsidize the free market is generally one more appealing to Democrats than the GOP.

State Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, a Republican from Appleton who represents Waupaca and also runs her own health care practice as a nurse practitioner, has some other ideas for helping health care thrive, or at least survive, in rural areas.

“Patients deserve access, but first we need to make sure providers — particularly in high-demand areas like nursing — are incentivized to provide these critical services in needed areas,” she said via email. “This includes cutting unneeded red tape in the health care industry, especially for primary care providers.”

To specifically tackle this shortage of health care providers, particularly in rural areas, she argued for allowing them more independence to offer more services, enhancing investments in nursing student recruitment and retention, and supporting a tax credit for nurse educators.

State Rep. Kevin Petersen, a Republican who also represents the area, did not respond to messages seeking solutions.

Whatever happens, rural health care will need some help from somewhere, or much of it might go away, experts say.

“It’s going to involve a lot more regulatory oversight,” Carstensen said. “It’s the only way we’re going to get the results I think are essential.”

Former President Joe Biden’s administration had been very aggressive on business competition issues for the past four years, including challenging many attempts by large companies and nonprofits to merge, often arguing the results would be worse for consumers. It remains to be seen how strongly President Donald Trump’s administration will enforce antitrust law in his second term, though early moves have been promising, Carstenen noted.

This article first appeared on The Badger Project and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.

Two health care systems merged, then closed the only birthing center for miles is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.