[8] He returned to Massachusetts in January 2003, when then-governor Mitt Romney appointed him as secretary of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, the parent agency of the state police, department of correction, the National Guard, the department of fire services, office of the chief medical examiner, parole board, and the emergency management agency.
He was criticized by elected officials in Springfield, including mayor Charles Ryan and city councilor and mayor-elect Domenic Sarno for seeking a job.
[18][needs update] In 2012, it was revealed that complaints were filed against seven Milwaukee police officers and a sergeant alleging that they performed unauthorized rectal searches during traffic stops.
[19][needs update] In May 2012, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker joined state and city officials in calling for an independent audit of Milwaukee police crime data,[20][needs update] after a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigative report alleged that more than 500 cases of beatings, stabbings, and child abuse cases were mischaracterised in the city's violent crime rate data between 2009 and 2012, and so were misreported by the Milwaukee Police Department to the FBI as minor assaults.
[10][22][23] In response to these allegations, he was quoted as saying "I have done my wife and family a great wrong, and I profoundly regret the hurt I have inflicted on them and others affected by my conduct [...]".
Initial claims by Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (MJS)—who pens a "Watchdog column" covering Wisconsin government entitled "No Quarter"[24]—that the affair was ongoing or coincident with a McBride story on the police chief have been rebutted by Milwaukee Magazine editor Bruce Murphy.
[25] Such coincidence would have implied conflict of interest, and so an issue of journalistic ethics, and Murphy, who edited the 5,400-word profile that McBride had written on Flynn, presented evidence to the contrary, and accused Bice of selective reporting of the facts of the Flynn-McBride case.
[25][26] Murphy, who terms Bice's MJS coverage of the Flynn-McBride affair a "hatchet job,"[25] further reports having removed negative content regarding Flynn from early drafts of the McBride piece (in order to shorten it), and otherwise argues that representation of the piece using terms such as "glowing" by Bice and other follow-on reporters since news of the affair broke is a misrepresentation—stating instead, of the McBride profile, thatOn balance, the story [on Flynn, in Milwaukee Magazine, by McBride] was positive, but in the storied career of Flynn, which had generated nothing but adulatory press, it was the toughest profile any reporter had ever done.
[1] Susan has remained in Virginia while Flynn has worked in Massachusetts and Wisconsin due to her career and desire to stay close to family.