DA Who Prosecuted Jeffrey Dahmer Downplays Police Racism, Homophobia In Failure To Catch Serial Killer

January 31, 1992: District attorney Michael McCann points to the list of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims in court. | Source: Curt Borgwardt / Getty

Netflix’s new 10-part drama series, DAHMER—Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, has been the center of a lot of controversy since its premiere, especially since family members of Dahmer’s victims have denounced the series as “retraumatizing,” but one thing people who have watched the show have been pretty solid on is the exposure of racial and homophobic bias on the part of the police officers who time and time again let Dahmer slip through their fingers and go on to commit more horrific murders of mostly gay Black men. In short: Systemic racism and prejudice enabled Dahmer to keep killing.

Well, it turns out the former Milwaukee district attorney who prosecuted Dahmer, Michael McCann, really wants us to believe that, in the ’80s and early ’90s, no kind of racial or sexual orientation-based prejudice played a part in why police were so slow to catch on to the fact that arguably the most infamous serial killer in American history was operating right under their noses.

From TMZ:

The true crime drama is getting a lot of buzz right now, and while McCann says he hasn’t seen it yet … he’s aware of how Netflix and co. are playing things — very anti-cop and leaning into perceived racial and homophobic bias throughout the episodes.

McCann is flatly denying that characterization, saying neither race nor sexual orientation had influenced how police investigated Dahmer. He insists if they’d known they had a serial killer in their midst, they would’ve moved in immediately to put a stop to it … regardless of the victims’ backgrounds.

For the record: McCann is an 86-year-old presumably straight white man—meaning he wouldn’t know systemic racism or prejudice if they were smudges he needed to clean off of his reading glasses. How TF would he know definitively that racism or homophobic ignorance had nothing to do with police officers repeatedly allowing Dahmer to skate and move on to his next victim? Especially when his victims looked like this:

https://twitter.com/sicssorluv/status/1572548111343710208

It’s also convenient that McCann admits he hasn’t watched the series but is still going out of his way to dismiss it as false and anti-police. One might get the idea that he’s really just an ex-law enforcement official reflexively backing the blue against allegations of racism. And, I mean, it’s not like we’ve ever seen that before, right?

If he had watched the series, he’d know that episode 3 featured a real-life recording between Glenda Cleveland—the Black woman played by Niecy Nash who called the police over and over again on Dahmer—and an officer who allowed Dahmer to go back into his apartment with a visibly drugged 14-year-old Dahmer called his boyfriend. In the call, the officer, who was apparently easily convinced that the child was an adult, can be heard mentioning the “lifestyle” of what he erroneously perceived as a couple, even though Cleveland never mentioned anything about sexual orientation. Does that not sound like homophobic bias? Is it not possible that the adultification of Black and brown children we’ve seen so often had something to do with why a white cop thought a brown child was grown?

But fine, this octogenarian white ex-D.A. doesn’t think the victims being mostly Black and Dahmer being a boy-next-door-looking white man had anything to do with him not being caught sooner. So why does McCann think it took so long for Dahmer to be brought to justice?