In February, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Wisconsin released reports saying the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) made more than 350,000 unjustified pedestrian and traffic stops between 2010 and 2017, targeting black and Latino residents. These findings are part of a class action lawsuit that the ACLU filed against the MPD last year, alleging that the department’s stop-and-frisk policy is unconstitutional and racially discriminatory. The ACLU reports come at a time when Milwaukee’s police-community relations are being heavily scrutinized and, many hope, reformed.
In 2015, following the fatal shooting of Dontre Hamilton, then-Police Chief Edward Flynn requested a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) review of the city’s community policing strategies. The review was officially discontinued in 2017, but a draft report of its findings—leaked and obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel—showed a lack of trust between Milwaukee communities and the MPD. While no official assessment was ever released, the DOJ review has had an impact nonetheless, spurring a collective effort among government agencies and community groups to reform the MPD’s approach.
“I think [the DOJ report] truly underscored the challenges that exist in the department,” says Darryl Morin of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). “It accelerated the process of change, which can benefit not just the community but also the police, who are part of the community.”
Collaborative Reform
The U.S. DOJ assessment was part of its Collaborative Reform Initiative—a Barack Obama-era program to help local police departments improve community relations. The program was curtailed under current Attorney General Jeff Sessions last September, ending the Milwaukee review. But the draft report revealed a long list of concerns, including insufficient oversight of pedestrian stops, lack of diversity in the ranks and racial disparities in traffic stops. The report also found that “community building” in the department consisted largely of “one-off” events, with no sustained, department-wide strategy.
Although Flynn has disputed the report’s accuracy, its conclusions echoed the ACLU’s allegations and supported concerns that activists have been raising for years. But without the DOJ’s involvement, there was no plan for how to respond. “There was a lot of wind taken out of the community’s sails when the DOJ decided not to continue with the collaborative reform process,” says Milwaukee Common Council President Ashanti Hamilton. “A number of my colleagues came to me and asked if there was a way to continue the process.”
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Following the release of the draft report, Hamilton says, local organizations began working “to keep the idea of a collaborative process alive.” He reached out to groups like the African American Roundtable, which had begun holding town hall meetings in response to the DOJ report. He also reached out to the Milwaukee mayor’s office, MPD and the Fire and Police Commission (FPC), suggesting they partner with community groups to continue the federal government’s work at the local level.
With this initiative, the Common Council was able to build off of growing momentum toward police reform in Milwaukee. Community partnerships had formed in response to the Dontre Hamilton shooting, fueled by the national conversation around police-community relations. Over the last few years, the Community Coalition for Quality Policing (CC4QP) has brought together more than 20 faith and advocacy groups—including the NAACP Milwaukee branch, LULAC of Wisconsin, the Felmers O. Chaney Advocacy Board and the Milwaukee Jewish Federation—in pursuit of the same goal. “We had an infrastructure and a movement that was already ripe for it,” Hamilton says. “So when the recommendations from the draft report came out, there was already an organized community force trying to implement them.”
Community Feedback
The DOJ report included more than 100 recommendations for how the MPD could build trust with the people they serve. To determine which recommendations to pursue, stakeholders have turned to the people themselves. “We wanted to create a process with more conversation about what was happening in the community from a resident perspective,” Hamilton says.
To lead that conversation, the Common Council formed the Milwaukee Collaborative Community Committee (CCC), which is chaired by Markasa Tucker, director of the African American Roundtable. Earlier this year,, the CCC held a series of “community hubs” for residents to share their own experiences with police, crime and what they needed from the MPD. “We have been tasked with developing safe spaces for community members to come and share their feedback,” Tucker says. In January, the FPC launched a web portal where residents can read and comment on the DOJ’s recommendations. The CCC will determine which recommendations to prioritize, based on in-person and online responses.
R.L. McNeely, chairman of the Felmers O. Chaney Advocacy Board, says that to improve engagement, police have to be receptive to this type of feedback. “There has to be recognition that community members have an expertise that they can share with police,” he says, adding that in the past, MPD had held listening sessions where their representatives did most of the talking rather than hearing what attendees had to say. “That’s not a two-way conversation,” he says.
Tucker says residents are sometimes reluctant to participate in hubs, as they’re used to the “status quo” of attending meetings, sharing their thoughts and seeing no meaningful change. The difference this time, she notes, is that the Common Council, mayor’s office, FPC and the MPD have all affirmed that they want to make public comments a priority. “That’s big, because that’s something we can organize the community around,” she says.
The recommendations from the hubs will be compiled into a report presented to the Common Council, mayor’s office and FPC. Tucker hopes the recommendations from the hubs will lead to policy change that can be included in the next budget. “I would like to believe that the government agencies are tired of hearing the community’s cries,” Tucker says. “This is our opportunity to really show what it looks like to hold elected officials accountable.”
The POP Approach
To help build trust and engagement, CC4QP advocates the use of the “Problem-Oriented Policing” (POP) strategy in Milwaukee. Credited to UW-Madison Professor Herman Goldstein, this strategy allows officers to work with other agencies and local groups to reduce crime by identifying its root causes.
Under the traditional approach, officers are evaluated based on metrics like how many arrests are made, how many people stopped, how many tickets written and so forth. In the DOJ review, officers said they felt pressured to meet a “de facto quota” of two traffic stops per shift. “There’s heavy pressure within police departments to produce the numbers,” says Stan Stojkovic, dean of the Helen Bader School of Social Welfare at UW-Milwaukee. “Large city departments are under a lot of pressure to do something about crime, as though police are the panacea solutions.”
This approach can damage trust between police and residents and lead to the kind of abuses described in the ACLU reports, where individuals are stopped without reasonable suspicion. It also places a heavy, unrealistic burden on officers themselves. “We can’t expect our police officers to solve all of society’s ills,” Morin says. “They’re there to protect and enforce the laws, but too often we expect too much of them. We all need to accept our own responsibilities.”
Rather than pressuring police to prove their effectiveness through stops and arrests, the POP strategy incentivizes collaboration and problem solving. “When the [DOJ] report came out, it stated that there was no department-wide strategy for problem-oriented policing,” says Fred Royal, president of the NAACP Milwaukee branch. “If you’re not evaluating or promoting officers based on how many problems they’re solving, that’s not a department-wide strategy.”
McNeely says the department can show a systematic commitment to the POP strategy by forming meaningful connections with community entities like faith groups, neighborhood associations and schools, and by documenting the effectiveness of problem-solving efforts so that police officers are encouraged to participate in long-term crime reduction.
Culture Change
While much of the local and national coverage of police-community relations focuses on specific incidents and individual officers, Stojkovic notes that police departments must also confront the problem “at the cultural level,” continuing, “I think what a lot of PDs need to do is look inward,” noting the importance of training and oversight to hold both officers and their supervisors accountable for procedurally just policing. While the DOJ report found that this type of accountability was lacking in the MPD, many are optimistic that a cultural shift is underway.
Flynn retired as MPD police chief in January, and in February, the FPC appointed Capt. Alfred Morales as the interim chief. Morin says that Morales has already made an effort to engage community leaders and is committed to making the DOJ report a “blueprint” for reforms. “Interim Chief Morales has put in place some changes that I have not seen in MPD within the history of the department,” says Royal, noting, specifically, “more minority representation on the seventh floor.”
While acknowledging that it will take time for an institution as large as the MPD to change its culture, Royal says he is “hopeful that if we bring forth some genuine dialogue between law enforcement and the community, then we can bridge that gap.” He predicts that if officers act with “procedural justice and legitimacy,” communities will welcome the change.
McNeely says he’s optimistic about the potential for change but adds a word of caution. “We have heard past promises that things would change, and those promises would last a certain period of time and then slip right back to the way the MPD had been operating.” Along those lines, advocates describe problem-oriented policing and culture change not as a finite goal, but as an ongoing process—one they hope all community stakeholders will stay committed to.
“Any collaborative process is going to have some bumps in the road,” Hamilton says. “Having partners staying at the table, dedicated to actually making it happen despite the ups and downs, is a lesson in and of itself.”
