Daniel Bice

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

This story was originally published on Oct. 7, 2016.

David A. Clarke Jr. — Milwaukee County's globetrotting sheriff — says the University of New Haven rescinded his upcoming speaking engagement because of his criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Clarke is now urging people to contact the university president directly or to sign a petition demanding the president of the Connecticut school bring Clarke in for a speech and apologize to him. More than 2,500 people have signed the petition.

"Ask the president for the truth about why my invite was rescinded," Clarke wrote in a blog post Thursday. "Ask him what he knew about this and when he knew it. Ask him if he approved it and — if so — why.

"Tell him Sheriff Clarke sent you."

But university officials say they never reached an agreement or signed a contract with the Milwaukee sheriff, adding that he priced himself out of the engagement by demanding rock-star travel arrangements.

Specifically, they say Clarke, who is spending much of his time on the road, asked for first-class airfare, a presidential hotel suite and transportation from the airport in a black SUV. He did not request a speaking fee.

"He asked for things that we just couldn't do," Karen Grava, spokeswoman for the University of New Haven, said on Thursday night.

"This is a training program for police and students that is about 25 years old," Grava continued. "We work hard to keep the cost down."

Grava said Clarke was notified on Aug. 3 that he would not be speaking at the university. She said she does not know why Clarke, who travels extensively giving talks and acting as a surrogate for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, went public on his website and on social media with the issue just this week.

"That's a good question," Grava said.

According to Clarke's first of three blog posts on the issue on the Patheos website, he said he was contacted by a University of New Haven senior lecturer, Patrick Malloy, earlier this year with a request that the sheriff be the keynote speaker at the 25th annual Markle Symposium on Oct. 24 and 25. The symposium this year is focusing on financial and cyber-crimes.

In an email published by Clarke, Malloy said the university would cover all of his expenses.

Clarke said he accepted the invitation and his assistant began working in July on the hotel and flight arrangements. But then on Aug. 3, Malloy called back to apologize for having to rescind the offer.

"Apparently, the higher-ups did not want me to speak on campus due to my remarks about #BlackLivesMatter," said Clarke, who did not respond to email messages.

Clarke is a frequent critic of the movement, preferring to call it Black Lies Matter in speeches and on Twitter. He said those in the movement "terrorize the police, lie about their true mission (and) promote anarchy."

"So, yeah — I’m going to keep speaking out against #BlackLIESMatter — but apparently that means I’m not going to be speaking about forensics at the University of New Haven anytime soon," Clarke wrote. "This is just the latest example of the assault on different points of view by these fascist, liberal indoctrination factories we call colleges."

But Grava said that was not the issue.

Grava released a statement saying the university explored inviting Clarke to the event but never officially extended an invitation. She said a faculty member learned of Clarke's travel demands during "exploratory discussions" with the sheriff.

According to the statement, university President Steven Kaplan and Henry C. Lee, for whom the university's College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences is named, decided that the school could not meet Clarke's requirements.

"The decision to not extend an invitation to Sheriff Clarke was based on these requests, which the university could not accommodate," Grava said in the statement. "Should the appropriate occasion arise in the future, we would consider inviting him to campus."

Clarke has not responded to the statement.

But the sheriff does like to travel in style.

According to his 2015 ethics disclosures, private groups or individuals paid $51,840 in airfare for Clarke to fly to 25 events, meetings or speaking engagements last year.

That figure included $22,452 in airfare for Clarke to travel to Israel and Russia late last year and another $9,110 for his flight to speak at the 33rd annual Allen & Co. conference — a four-day retreat for moguls and media figures — in Sun Valley, Idaho, in July 2015. Overall, he had 11 flights that cost more than $1,000.

Clarke does not have to report this year's travel expenses until early next year.

Contact Daniel Bice at (414) 224-2135 or dbice@jrn.com. Follow him on Twitter @ DanielBice or on Facebook at fb.me/daniel.bice.