Hate Crimes: Waking in Oak Creek
July 2014 
Voiceover: Beat Intro
00:00	
This is the Beat—a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing 
topics facing our nation.
Nazmia Alqadi
00:07	
Hello and welcome. My name is Nazmia Alqadi, and on behalf of the COPS Office, I would like to 
introduce you to Police Chief John Edwards and retired Lieutenant Brian Murphy.  Chief Edwards is a 
police chief in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, and Lieutenant Brian Murphy retired from the Oak Creek Police 
Department in 2013 after 23 years in law enforcement. Today, Chief Edwards and Lieutenant Murphy 
are here to discuss the August 2012 shooting at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin and the aftermath for 
the community of Oak Creek. Welcome! 
Chief Edwards and Lieutenant Murphy, please tell us about the fateful events the morning of August 
5, 2012. 
Lieutenant Brian Murphy
00:44	
August 5, 2012 was a sunny, pleasant day. It was a very ordinary day as far as calls for service for the 
city. 
At 10:25 [a.m.], we got the call about a possible fight at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek. As we started to 
respond, it got upgraded to possible shots fired. Then, definite shots were being fired inside the 
temple. I was the first to arrive. I drove into the parking lot and saw two gentlemen who were later 
identified as brothers, one laying on top of the other. I went to check on them, and, immediately 
after, Wade Michael Page came out of the front of the temple. He and I engaged in a gun battle where 
I was struck 15 times in total, 12 in my body. Officer Sam Lenda of the Oak Creek Police Department 
arrived on the scene, engaged Wade Michael Page, and shot him. Subsequently, Mr. Page killed 
himself. I was taken to Froedtert Memorial Hospital and was able to recover mostly from my wounds. 
Police Chief John Edwards
02:04
As far as that day when I was involved in it, I don’t live too far where the temple itself is. Brian said it 
was a real beautiful day on a Sunday, warm, in the 90s. I was actually taking one of my daughters—she 
had just gotten an apartment, and I was taking her down the road to get some furniture, and we 
happened to be going past the temple. 
I came past—the Milwaukee County Sheriff squad blocked the roadway in front of the temple. It 
piqued my interest as to why this was happening in my city, and I was being blocked by a sheriff. I 
immediately called dispatch, devised what happened. I could tell there was a lot of concern, and we 
had somebody shot. They put me right through to the ambulance and talked to an officer who was 
with Brian in the ambulance and asked the status of what was going on. He filled me in on Brian’s 
injuries. Brian was awake and talking. I could hear people in the background talking to him. Then the 
officer—I let him go, and they were heading to the hospital. 
I immediately went in and was the pretty much the first commander on scene. I did have a sergeant 
who showed up, was off duty, heard it, came in, and had taken over the inner perimeter where the 
squads were in that parking lot itself. There was already a staging area setting up with all kinds of 
responders showing up in a parking lot across the street. I went up and looked at that sergeant and 
told him I would take command, he has inner perimeter. He looked at me very relieved and said 
thanks because he was getting pulled in all kinds of directions with everything that was going on. 
Back to the command area and it was a lot of chaos. There was a lot of chaos going on. We had a lot of 
people who were self-reporting. We had done a mutual aid response. We have in the Milwaukee area 
another adjourning county of Waukesha; we have something that is called the SMARTS, Suburban 
Mutual Aid Response Teams. It was developed 20 years ago by the chiefs in the area. I don’t think they 
understood the value that it was going to have when they put this together. It’s a very simple way of 
calling in mutual aid without having to listen for what’s going on, telling the dispatcher to call the 
neighboring jurisdiction. 
Basically, every level that you get, you call, you get five responding officers from another agency. We 
had done a level seven, which gives us 35 officers. Our officers know they have 35 cops coming within 
minutes to help. It ended up, when it was all said and done with what we counted, over 440 law 
enforcement. That doesn’t include all the fire. Media was already setting up. So there was a lot of 
chaos. There were federal agencies and state agencies. Every three letter agency acronym you could 
think of, whether it was state or federal. There was a lot of chaos on our end as far as getting this 
together. 
Initially, we had reports that there were four to five shooters, and up to 20 to 40 people dead were 
the reports coming in. The officers on the scene who responded knew different. They were the ones 
there, and they could see what was going on in the inner perimeter. We were still getting calls from 
family member of the Sikh community telling us different. There was a lot of confusion. A lot of the 
Sikh members were sending out texts to the media as they were in the temple. So it was making a lot 
of communication confusion. There was a lot of confusion on what was going on. 
The officers who responded, we had seven respond from our day shift that day, including Brian and I 
[were] the only supervisor. So that supervisor was out of the equation pretty quickly. And if he had 
been there that day in a different role, he would have been the person that I would have put in charge 
or in command because that’s his expertise: to Management Incident Command is what Brian knows. 
Those officers responded, took care of the problem, and they did excellent police work that day. I say 
that everywhere I go. What really happened that day was cops doing what they were supposed to do, 
handling the problem, thinking over what they needed to, not worrying about we need approval for 
this and that. They were empowered with being able to do what they needed to do to handle that 
situation. 
There was about six minutes between the times of the call, to when the officer who arrived on the 
scene, Sam Lenda, shot the suspect. It was excellent police work and actually solved our problem. All 
the rest was a lot of chaos and confusion that we had to get a handle on. That’s pretty much how the 
rest of the day went for us until we got a pretty good handle on how many shooters—that we only 
had one shooter down, and that was it. The chaos continued for quite a while. 
Nazmia
06:24
Thank you. Chief Edwards, how did you work with the Sikh community, residents, local town leaders, 
community partners, and other law enforcement agencies to address the shooting and prevent rising 
tensions in the community?
Edwards
06:36
One of the things we did fairly quickly, we had a press conference that Monday morning [when the 
news went] national. The situation for us was this shooting became international very quickly. The Sikh 
community having been petitioning the [Federal Bureau of Investigations] for a number of years to be 
put on the [Uniform Crime Reporting] forms as a religion and, for whatever reasons, [was] denied 
over the years. The minute this came out, it became international very quick. It was an election year, 
presidential, governor, in our state we had a recall going. There were all kinds of elections, so there 
were a lot of lobbyists who got really quick, and this became international very quickly as far as the 
Sikh community. 
We had our press conference that Monday, and one of the things we did, the mayor and I, Steve 
Scaffidi—we’ve know each other for 35 years, longer than we’ve both been in any public service. We 
have a very good working relationship. We had one meeting before the press conference. He has a 
degree in communications; that’s what he does. He asked me what he needed from me. I told him 
you need to go first. You need to show the city that they have a strong mayor at your police 
department. Then I told him I would go out and let them know that they’re safe and what the officers 
did at the scene plus afterwards to make sure there were no more threats. He looked at me, said, 
“Got it.” We never had to talk again. We’ve done a lot of press conferences together and meetings, 
and we always have that same message.
 At that press conference, we promised the Sikh community a private meeting after with no media. 
We did meet with them, and they asked us a lot of tough questions about what happened that day. It 
was the mayor and I and assemblymen from our district and the elders from the church. We made 
promises about security for them so they could feel comfortable to go back. We followed through on 
those promises. 
Everything we told them has come to fruition as far as security and safety of their gurdwara. The first 
thing that happened, that Tuesday we had a National Night Out. We incorporated a vigil, a candlelight 
vigil, that had thousands and thousands of people attend. It was amazing to see the entire community 
came out. One of things we found from the message we gave out at the press conference—it was a 
good strong message, and it told the community everyone was safe. And it was true. They all did come 
out. 
We had planned for a copycat. We planned for retaliation from the white supremacists. Nothing 
happened, and everybody came out with no fear. It really showed that we got the message out to the 
community, to the Sikh community, and that we [were] going to take care of them and make sure we 
were going to follow through on our promises. 
Nazmia
09:19
Thank you. Lieutenant Murphy, can you tell us about the response you got from the Sikh community 
and how you reacted?
Murphy
09:26	
The support from the Sikh community started, and it never stopped. Immediately after the incident, 
there were members and leaders from the Sikh temple who came to the hospital to visit me there and 
just thousands upon thousands of letters and banners. This type of reaction was something that I 
definitely wasn’t used to. I can remember laying in the hospital bed waiting for them to come and clear 
out my trachea tube and feeling somewhat overwhelmed. Looking up, my brother-in-law had taken 
some of the letters and pictures that were done for me by children and neighbors in the community 
and posted them in my hospital room. Whenever I was having a bad moment I could look up at those 
pictures and draw strength from them. 
The community hasn’t stopped as far as providing emotional support and just being there for me even 
to this moment. Last week, a gentleman by the name of Kwan Singh from Toronto drove down with 
this family and presented both Sam Lenda and I with a portrait he had done which was phenomenal. 
Again, by having that support behind you, it’s just overwhelming to understand how many people out 
there were affected by this. I was released from the hospital and opened my e-mail at home. There 
were over 2,200 e-mails from the Sikh community all over the world. Again, it is extremely 
overwhelming, and it does help you. It definitely helped me in my time of need. Now I have a 
tremendous amount of friends and, again, the support from the community, which helps bolster 
relationships not only with my family and I but with the city of Oak Creek in general. 
Nazmia
11:40
Thank you. So Chief Edwards, how were you able to engage and unite the community?
Edwards
11:47	
Well, some of the things we talked about. Working with the mayor, he did appoint a member of the 
Sikh community to our community development committee, which is one of the most important 
things in the city as far as future development. I actually invited [Mr. Dulai] to Washington, and we 
spoke on a couple of panel discussions with Homeland Security on safety and security in churches, 
schools, things like that. He gave his perspective, and I gave ours and what we’ve done and what 
we’ve helped them do afterwards and how to engage the private sector doing those things. We met 
with Napolitano, who was on the panel, and we gave our input on those things. 
We continue to look at ways. We are building a new city hall and library in the city of Oak Creek. One of 
things we’re doing there is there’s going to be a kiosk with all the different groups in Oak Creek. We 
have many different churches. We have the Egyptian Coptic Church in our city. We have a Korean 
church. We have Baptist church. We have Methodists. We’re going to put kiosks with flyers of the 
different groups and what they are all about and the information they need to show the diversity of 
the city. We’re working with that. 
The portraits that were painted of Sam and Brian, they’ve graciously donated them to the city. At the 
new city hall, they’re going to hang in an area, and we’re also to put the artists’ photograph with that 
with a plaque and a little of him and the painting he did. 
One of the things that I continue to do when I go out and talk to the law enforcement community is 
tell them that in every city, there are people you don’t know about. You know they’re there. 
Sometimes it’s easier to say they are there, but there are no issues. I made that mistake. I didn’t know 
much about the Sikh community till after this. Brian knew more from his military days of the Sikh 
community. And that was my fault. I should have known more. I might have been able to push a little 
harder as far as offering them more security to them that they didn’t want at the time they came in. I 
tell people go find out about them and know what they are about.  You might head off some things or 
some issues if you just learn about the people in your community. We push that as much as possible. 
Nazmia
13:58
Finally, Chief Edwards and Lieutenant Murphy, looking back at the shooting and the events that 
followed, what are the challenges on working on hate crime cases? What advice would you give to 
other departments and preventing and responding to similar situations?
Edwards
14:11
That’s a tough one.  In law enforcement, when we have this type of a case, we don’t start off as a hate 
crime. Not like, “Oh we have a hate crime.” What we had here is we had an officer who was shot 
multiple times by a suspect, and he’s now . . . another officer engaged him. So we’re treating it as an 
active shooter, officer down, and an officer-involved shooting with the officer shooting that suspect. 
The hate part of it comes in much later for law enforcement. It’s a lot different than in the community 
that they say this is a hate crime. We don’t start there. Usually in the penalty phase, it’s an enhancer. It 
enhances the penalty, going to prison. We have to look that, and we can add that on to it. 
It’s almost like working in reverse. Once you find out that it is, you go back and try and find out where 
it started or what you can do to prevent it in the future. In our case, the white supremacist did not pick 
the Sikh because they were Sikh. He picked them because they were different, and they weren’t, in 
his words, the white race, or in his beliefs, the white race. So it could have been anyone. It could have 
been our Egyptian Coptic Church. It could have been the Korean Church. It wouldn’t have mattered. 
They were different, and that’s why he picked them. That’s a very difficult one to wrap your hands 
around—how you prevent those other than documenting and making sure we look at cases, any 
crimes, any bullying, anything we might get and making sure we’re not overlooking that as a possibility 
that it’s more than just disorderly conduct or battery. It might be something more to it. 
I worked with a former white supremacist that’s been at a lot of our talks into a panel discussion. He’s 
been at a lot of the Oak Creek events that we’ve had regarding the Sikh temple and some of the 
anniversary dates. He is one of our most powerful messages to get out there and talk about how he 
had the hate in him and now it’s turned around, how you can get sucked into this. So he’s a big 
proponent of that. 
It’s a difficult one to get your hands around because a lot of the time, it’s underlying, and it’s difficult 
to prove it in some instances. This one was easy. He hated anyone who wasn’t white; that was given. 
It was a no-brainer. They’re not all as easy, but you gotta keep looking for it. 
Murphy
16:21
The importance of the reporting and the hate crime forms though shows patternization and 
victimology. So it does make police departments more aware of specific threats against specific 
groups. The idea that the Sikh community religion was not of the forms was an absolute oversight on 
the part of the federal government, being the fifth largest religion in the world. 
To that, I agree with the chief that it’s incumbent on the police department and the community to be 
aware of everyone who belongs and who doesn’t belong on church property or any of those things, to 
understand bullying or any ethnic that comes in whatsoever should be taken seriously. 
And again, in this situation, what we had was a person acting completely alone. Those are something 
that you can’t really prepare for, necessarily. They’re just going to happen, and you need to respond 
as best you can, which I think we did. 
Nazmia
17:28
Thank you, Chief Edwards and Lieutenant Murphy, for providing us with your expertise and time 
today, and thank you for your service to the community as well. 
This podcast is part of series of podcasts related to the COPS Office project with Not in Our Town. For 
more information and additional resources, including Waking in Oak Creek, a movie featuring both 
Chief Edwards and Lieutenant Murphy, please visit the NIOT and COPS Office joint web page. 
Voiceover: Beat Exit
17:55	
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18:11	
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