"Justice for Jude, Justice for all." That's what Ald. Michael McGee, Jr., said today when a TV reporter asked him for a comment as he left jail, having paid bail of $600 after being arrested in court for allegedly threatening a woman who claims to be pregnant with his child. Then McGee's father, Michael Sr., went on his WNOV morning radio show and said he wanted to go down to the halls of justice and "mess up a bunch of them."

The most high profile police brutality case since the James Schaumperlein beating on the South Side in the mid-80s has become a miasma of McGees.

Just two days before the McGees made their comments, I was writing that I hoped to find a new angle to help keep the Frank Jude, Jr., case in the spotlight — hoping that somehow the issue of Ald. Michael McGee would not raise its fool head to obscure the problem of police brutality in Milwaukee and what Justice for Jude organizing may be able to do about it.

Those turned out to be vain hopes, as the front page of the Thursday morning Journal-Sentinel revealed that McGee had been arrested again — this time at a restraining order hearing.

I then considered that one of the reasons the larger community of Milwaukee has stuck its head in the sand on police brutality — for generations — may have something to do with the chasms between the white and black community, space that McGee is all too eager to operate in.

McGee, in his own way, just like the cops who mauled and tormented Frank Jude, like Jude himself, is emblematic of larger problems in Milwaukee, of deep rifts between black and white that have never healed and only sometimes seem to grow wider and deeper. At a time when the overall outrage over the Jude case touched all communities in the area, the McGees seem out to make sure that no solution will be found but more rage. Milwaukee is tired of rage, the faces of malicious, racist cops and inadequete community leaders.

Rage? McGees, Bartlett, Masarik, Spengler and Jude, and now Glover and Prado — Theirs are faces of abject normalcy, in a way, a poverty of being average to below average in a rust belt economy where aldermen and cops and male strippers consider themselves lucky to have their jobs. These are angry, post-industrial souls in a city that has failed to find an economic place for African-American males.

It's a city too often filled with despair.

And it's a city that must end its tolerance of police brutality and work to improve police-community relations. But we can't get there from here in Milwaukee, not with leaders whose goal is clearly to throw fire into our longstanding racial divide.

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