Residents keep asking the same question in our comments: why has the Racine County Sheriff’s Office become so dysfunctional? H.O.T.’s answer, after a year of records requests, court files and reporting, is leadership. In three years, four deputies or investigators have been arrested, disciplined for misusing police databases, or placed on leave over their connection to a criminal case. In several of those cases, warning signs reached supervisors early and were handled informally, kept in-house, or never written down.
The pattern is not that one person did one bad thing. It is that the office’s leaders built a system that keeps problems quiet: a sheriff and a lieutenant with outside businesses, one lieutenant who runs internal affairs and also speaks for the office to the press, and a county legal office that releases what helps and withholds the rest as privileged. Residents see a cover-up. County Board supervisors who talk to us describe a lack of transparency. Either way, the result is the same: the public learns about problems from court files and outside agencies, not from its own Sheriff’s Office.
This analysis lays out what is documented, what good leadership could have caught early, and what remains unproven. Everyone named is presumed innocent of any charge not proven in court.
Divided attention at the top
A sheriff is a full-time elected official responsible for the county jail, patrol, investigations and policing for communities that contract with the office, including Union Grove. Two of the people at the top of the office have had business interests outside it.
Sheriff Christopher Schmaling. Schmaling took office in January 2011 and retires at the end of 2026 after four terms. Collier County, Florida property records show two Marco Island purchases while he was in office: one on North Collier Boulevard on May 30, 2023, for $800,000, and one on Anglers Cove on Oct. 15, 2024, for $390,000. Kenosha County Eye reported both from the Collier County Property Appraiser. It also reported that he is “reportedly” a Florida real estate agent and that a Racine security company, Shield Protective Services, operating since 2015, is “associated with” him. Kenosha County Eye said it had not verified his license, his ownership of the security firm, or any hours worked outside Wisconsin. H.O.T. has not verified them either. Schmaling did not answer that outlet’s questions.
Lt. Michael J. Luell. Luell is a licensed attorney and a former Racine County assistant district attorney. At the Sheriff’s Office he runs the Professional Standards Unit (internal affairs), serves as the public information officer, and manages legal risk, liability and policy, according to a court filing in H.O.T.’s files. He also founded and owns Legacy Law Enforcement Analysis, LLC, which sells expert analysis to law enforcement agencies on internal affairs, employee discipline, open records, use of force and civil-rights lawsuits.
Owning a business is not misconduct. The leadership problem is concentration. The same lieutenant investigates deputies, decides what the public hears about those investigations, manages the county’s legal exposure from them, and sells consulting on the same subjects. When one office both investigates and speaks, there is no internal check on what gets written down or released.
Questions H.O.T. is asking: Does Racine County have written approval for Lt. Luell’s outside business under its own outside-employment policy? Did the Sheriff disclose any Florida real estate or security-business income on his annual Statement of Economic Interests, if he is required to file one?
A pattern, not a run of bad luck
Any large office will have employees who break the law. What tells you about leadership is how early the office notices, what it writes down, and who it calls. Read in order, the Sheriff’s Office’s last three years show the same reflex each time: keep it in-house, keep it informal, and let someone outside the office find it.
It started with warnings no one wrote down. In 2022 and 2023, deputies received unsolicited explicit photos from Deputy Preston Kite. One deputy told a captain, in her office, that “someone who commits sexual harassment” was being considered for the department’s LGBTQ liaison post. Supervisors later told a Kenosha detective “there were complaints” about Kite’s conduct toward other deputies. The response was a request to a supervisor to “talk to Kite.” No complaint form, no file, no call to Human Resources, though the office’s own policy requires all three. Human Resources now certifies it has no record of any complaint about Kite before his arrest.
The arrest came from outside. On Feb. 3, 2024, a man called Racine County dispatch at 4:57 p.m. to report that an on-duty deputy had exposed himself to him at a truck stop. A Sheriff’s Office sergeant later told the Kenosha County detective who investigated the case that no call for service was created. The case was built by an outside agency. Kite was convicted on 21 counts.
Then the questions were narrowed. At his February 2025 sentencing, Kite described, in open court, sexual relationships with two deputies and a supervisor in his department and with a prosecutor from a neighboring county. No outside agency was asked to look into it; DA Hanson confirmed in writing that her office made no referral. Instead, the County hired a municipal-defense lawyer, Samuel Hall, to review one captain’s handling of the complaints. Hall’s review cost $31,828.38. The Sheriff disciplined that captain with a 10-day suspension, although his own complaint said “supervisory staff” (plural) had known.
The same reflex showed up with the next cases. Internal affairs found that Deputy Emil Ortiz had used the Flock license-plate cameras and other police databases to track a private person in his personal life. He was demoted and suspended for 10 days. The internal-affairs memo cites no criminal statute and makes no referral to an outside agency. On June 1, 2026, DA Hanson declined to charge him. The matter was handled as discipline, start to finish, inside the office.
The exception proves the rule. Investigator Jonathan Bechman was charged and convicted of attempted misconduct in office and two domestic batteries in 2026. That happened because Mount Pleasant police investigated and Hanson’s office handed the case to a Milwaukee County special prosecutor. When an outside agency held the file, the system worked.
And the latest case followed the better path. In November 2026, when information connected to the Union Grove school administrator’s arrest reached the Sheriff, he referred it to the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Office and placed Capt. Madrigal on leave pending review. Officials said she is not the subject of the criminal investigation. That is how the Kite warnings should have been handled in 2023.
The club
The Kite questions landed in the middle of an election, and the people responsible for answering them were all on one side of it.
The District Attorney ran the campaign. DA Patricia Hanson told Racine County Eye she and Madrigal have been “colleagues and friends for 20 years” and that she was “the co-manager of the campaign if I had to give it a title.” She was the billing contact on the campaign’s advertising with that outlet. The public Facebook listing for Madrigal’s June 17, 2026 fundraiser named “Cary Madrigal and Tricia Hanson” as its hosts.
At the same time, Hanson was the prosecutor deciding questions about the Sheriff’s Office. On June 1, 2026, she declined to charge Deputy Ortiz. On June 18, she wrote to H.O.T. defending how the Kite warnings were handled, the same warnings her candidate had been disciplined over, and confirming that her office had made no outside referrals. Her office stepped aside from the Kite prosecution and from the Bechman case. It did not step aside from questions about the Kite warnings, which touched her own candidate.
The June 3 invitation. At 10:57 a.m. on June 3, 2026, Madrigal sent a group text to 18 women at the Sheriff’s Office inviting them to that Hanson-hosted fundraiser, writing that she wanted to send it “before I return to work at 11am.” When H.O.T.’s Harry Wait questioned it that afternoon, Madrigal replied from her campaign email and copied DA Hanson at a personal address. Her afternoon reply said she had been off for a doctor’s appointment until 11. A timestamped screenshot of the county roster taken at 12:57 p.m. that day showed her on regular duty from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Six weeks later the County produced a different June 3 roster, showing command vacation from 8 to 11 a.m., and later an audit entry for that vacation. H.O.T. has never been given the complete scheduling records for that day and questions whether what the County produced tells the whole story (see Racine Sheriff: On the Clock). A second question does not depend on her schedule at all: the invitation reached 18 county employees during their working day, and Wisconsin law restricts soliciting campaign contributions from public employees while they are on duty. H.O.T. has not established whether the text came from a county-issued phone; we requested the device records and have not received them. No agency has examined the question. The prosecutor who would ordinarily review it was the event’s host and a recipient of Madrigal’s explanation.
The endorsements stacked up. Madrigal’s own campaign advertising, “Authorized & Paid for by Friends To Elect Cary Madrigal,” listed four endorsers under the slogan “Leaders We Trust”: Racine County Executive Ralph Malicki, Sheriff Chris Schmaling, District Attorney Tricia Hanson, and former Sheriff and County Executive Bill “Mac” McReynolds. That is the county’s top elected official, the Sheriff who had disciplined Madrigal over the Kite warnings, and the prosecutor who decides whether anyone in the Sheriff’s Office gets charged. Kenosha County Eye reported that Kenosha County Sheriff David Zoerner and the Union Grove school board president backed her as well. Her yard signs were everywhere. In H.O.T.’s view, this did not look like a county choosing the best candidate. It looked like a club protecting one of its own, and residents saw it for what it was.
The County Said “Privileged.” Residents Connected the Dots.
H.O.T. raised Hanson’s conflict publicly. Kevin Mathewson raised it in a court filing in June, and the Racine County Democratic Party cited it in October when it took a complaint about Madrigal’s campaign activity to the state DOJ instead of local authorities. No official body ever ruled on it. So when H.O.T. asked for the Hall Report and the County answered “privileged,” residents connected the dots themselves. The officials who controlled the records were the officials backing the candidate the records were about. Whether or not anyone intended a cover-up, that is what it looked like from the outside, and appearances are a leadership responsibility.
What professionalism would have looked like. A district attorney who co-manages a candidate’s campaign can recuse herself from every matter involving that candidate’s department and say so publicly. A sheriff who endorses a subordinate can hand any question about her to an outside agency, as Schmaling finally did in November. Neither step costs anything. Without them, professionalism left both the DA’s office and the Sheriff’s Office, at least in how the public sees them, and offices that depend on public trust cannot afford that. There is a lot to fix.
The Hall Report: release what helps, withhold the rest
The Hall Report is the clearest example of how the County controls the story.
After Kite’s arrest, the County paid Attorney Samuel C. Hall Jr. $31,828.38 to review how supervisors handled the warnings. The public has never seen his report. In February 2025, Sheriff Schmaling released his own six-page summary of it, which he used to discipline one captain. Racine County Eye found bracketed notes in that summary in which the Sheriff disagrees with his own investigator. In one, he moved the date of a key conversation to produce the finding that Madrigal was warned “in the summer and fall of 2023.” Madrigal told Racine County Eye she has never seen the full report either.
When H.O.T. asked for the report on Aug. 6, 2026, Corporation Counsel refused everything in five days, on primary election day, calling it “privileged legal analysis” protected by attorney-client and attorney work-product privilege. It also withheld its own written analysis of whether to release the report, an analysis the County had told a judge it performs in every case.
Earlier County answers to H.O.T. show what sits behind that privilege:
- The referral question was considered. The County withheld, as privileged, its communications with the Sheriff about commissioning Hall’s review instead of referring Kite to the state DOJ, the FBI or the state law-enforcement standards board, and a legal opinion on whether Madrigal’s conduct triggered criminal-referral obligations. The records exist. The reasoning is sealed.
- No document defines Hall’s assignment. Asked for the scope letter, the County said it “does not have such a named document.”
- No paper trail for the discipline. Human Resources has no records of complaints about Kite before his arrest, and no records of how the Sheriff chose a 10-day suspension instead of termination.
- The Sheriff’s Office itself has never answered. Three requests sent directly to it since June 8, 2026, including one by certified mail, have produced no records and no written denial.
Corporation Counsel’s job is to protect the County, and attorney-client privilege is real. But the privilege belongs to the County, and the County Board can waive it. Supervisor Ernie Rossi told H.O.T. that the Sheriff’s public summary opened the report for release. When an office publishes the parts of a report that support its decision and calls the rest privileged, the public is left with the County’s version only.
The contrast is Kenosha. The Kenosha agency holding the criminal file on Kite produced 117 pages two days after H.O.T. asked.
What good leadership would have done
None of these problems required hindsight. At each point, the Sheriff’s Office’s own written policies or ordinary practice pointed to a better path.
| Warning sign | What the office did | What good leadership does |
|---|---|---|
| 2022–2023: deputies report explicit photos from Kite, and a deputy says “someone who commits sexual harassment” is up for the LGBTQ liaison post | A captain asked a supervisor to “talk to Kite” informally. No complaint form, no file, no HR contact. | Office policy 1009 requires supervisors to start a complaint on any report of possible misconduct and to contact HR on sexual-harassment allegations. A written file creates a record the next supervisor can see. |
| Feb. 3, 2024: a recorded call to county dispatch reports an on-duty deputy exposing himself | No call for service was created. | Every call becomes an incident record, especially one naming an officer. |
| Feb. 28, 2025: Kite names, by role, people inside the department in open court | No referral to the state DOJ or FBI. The County’s referral analysis is sealed as privileged. | Refer to an outside agency immediately, and say publicly that you did. The Sheriff did exactly this with the Johnson matter in November 2026. |
| Dec. 2024: the outside review | No written scope. Witnesses’ claims went unchecked. No emails or texts collected. | Put the assignment in writing, check what witnesses say, and release the report with lawful redactions. |
| Feb. 2025: discipline | One captain suspended, though the Sheriff’s own complaint says “supervisory staff” (plural) knew. No written reason for the penalty. | Explain the decision in writing and address every supervisor the findings reach. |
| Apr. 2025: a deputy’s domestic arrest; Aug.–Oct. 2025: the same deputy’s database searches | Handled administratively. The DA says no agency referred the database case to her. | Send database misuse to an outside agency, as the Sheriff’s Office itself did when, according to news reports of the charging complaint, it investigated a Kenosha deputy for the same conduct in 2026. |
| Flock cameras county-wide | Audits, supervisor-only searches and training adopted after misuse came to light. | Audit from day one. |
| H.O.T.’s records requests since June 2026 | No records and no written denial from the Sheriff’s Office. | Wisconsin law requires a written answer or a written denial with reasons. |
| One lieutenant runs internal affairs, press, legal risk and policy | The same person investigates, decides what is released and speaks for the office. | Separate internal affairs from the spokesman role so each checks the other. |
Credit where it is due. When the Johnson information reached him, Sheriff Schmaling referred it to the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Office “to protect the investigation’s integrity,” and placed a captain on leave pending review. That is how the Kite warnings should have been handled two years earlier.
What the record does not show
H.O.T. holds itself to what documents prove. The record does not show:
- that anyone in the Sheriff’s Office knew Kite was abusing children before his arrest. The 2022–2023 complaints were about adults;
- a criminal network operating inside the Sheriff’s Office;
- any connection between Capt. Madrigal and the Johnson case beyond the Sheriff’s Office’s own statement that she is not its subject. Kenosha County Eye reported claims attributed to Johnson about contact with the Sheriff’s Office; those are unverified;
- that the Sheriff’s Florida real estate or any outside business took time away from his county duties. That is a question, not a finding;
- the identity of anyone Kite described in court. H.O.T. does not speculate about it;
- whether Madrigal was on duty when she sent the June 3 invitation, or whether it came from a county phone. A same-day roster screenshot showed her on regular duty; a roster the County produced six weeks later showed her on vacation until 11 a.m. H.O.T. has not received the complete scheduling records or the device records, and questions the completeness of what was produced;
- that DA Hanson broke any rule by co-managing the campaign. No official body has ruled on it. The issue raised here is the appearance of independence, not a finding of misconduct.
Where this stands
Residents are asking questions, and so are the Milwaukee and Racine news outlets. That is what accountability looks like. A new sheriff takes office in January, and he campaigned on outside reviews of command-staff misconduct and full cooperation with records requests.
H.O.T.’s Kite File remains open. More records on the Madrigal, Kite and Johnson matters are expected, and H.O.T. will report them when they arrive. Our asks are unchanged:
- The County Board should waive privilege and release the Hall Report with lawful redactions.
- The Sheriff’s Office should answer every outstanding records request in writing.
- The Kite courtroom statement should be referred to the state DOJ or FBI.
- The incoming sheriff should separate internal affairs from the spokesman role and publish Flock audit results.
Meanwhile, H.O.T. is turning more of its attention to other investigations, including the Property Pipeline. Residents with information can reach us anonymously through the tip line at hotgovernment.com.
Sources
News coverage
- FOX6: Racine County Sheriff’s captain placed on administrative leave (Nov. 7, 2026)
- WPR: Union Grove superintendent faces child pornography charges
- TMJ4: Former Racine County Sheriff’s Office deputy sentenced (Aug. 21, 2026)
- FOX6: Sheriff’s Office Flock misuse, investigator suspended 10 days
- Kenosha County Eye: Outgoing Sheriff Schmaling and his Florida real estate (Nov. 9, 2026; opinion and reporting mixed)
- Kenosha County Eye: Madrigal placed on leave (Nov. 7, 2026)
- Kenosha County Eye: Deputy arrested in domestic incident in Somers (Apr. 13, 2025)
- Kenosha County Eye: Madrigal lost court fight over records (May 17, 2026)
- Racine County Eye, “Voters are hearing a lot about Cary Madrigal. Here’s what the records show,” Aug. 8, 2026
- Racine County Eye / WRJN voter guide, Racine County Sheriff race
Campaign, court and government records
- Friends To Elect Cary Madrigal, campaign advertisement “Endorsed By” (Malicki, Schmaling, Hanson, McReynolds)
- Facebook event listing, June 17, 2026 fundraiser, “Event by Cary Madrigal for Racine County Sheriff, Cary Madrigal and Tricia Hanson”
- Madrigal group text to Sheriff’s Office employees, June 3, 2026, 10:57 a.m., and her 4:06 p.m. email reply to Harry Wait copying DA Hanson
- Racine County roster and scheduling records for June 3, 2026, as produced to H.O.T.; see Racine Sheriff: On the Clock
- Racine County Democratic Party, complaint to the Wisconsin DOJ over campaign activity during county business hours, Oct. 23, 2026
- Mathewson filing raising Hanson’s conflict, Ortiz John Doe proceeding, June 11, 2026
- RASO Internal File 25DC20, Sheriff’s complaint against Capt. Madrigal, Feb. 19, 2025
- Racine County Corporation Counsel letters to H.O.T., July 29, Aug. 3 and Aug. 11, 2026
- DA Patricia Hanson letter to H.O.T., June 18, 2026; Hanson letter to the court, June 1, 2026 (Racine County Case 2026JD000001)
- Kenosha County investigative report 24-304801 (Kenosha Joint Services production, July 2026)
- State v. Bechman, Racine County Case 2026CM000769
- Madrigal v. Racine County, Racine County Case 2026CV000280
- State v. Kite, Racine County Case Nos. 2024CF000164 and 2024CF000247
- Court filing describing Lt. Luell’s duties and Legacy Law Enforcement Analysis, LLC
This is analysis and opinion by H.O.T. Government based on public records and published reporting. H.O.T. Government is nonpartisan. Questions and corrections: use our tip line.