Mayor answers protests with commission
Advocates frustrated by familiar slow process
When Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett announced a new Commission on Police Accountability and Reform, it sounded familiar.
Very familiar.
Every time civil unrest happens in Milwaukee, residents press for change and propose reform but never see it come to fruition, said Fred Royal, president of the NAACP Milwaukee branch who served on the Community Coalition for Quality Policing and another police reform committee.
“You ask for our voice and our opinion and you ignore it, and then you try to push the reset button as if you haven’t heard us the first time,” he said. “The community is being ignored.”
Over the past six years, community groups, committees and coalitions have proposed hundreds of recommendations to reform the Milwaukee Police Department.
Most of them have not been implemented, getting stuck in the quagmire between the city’s Fire and Police Commission, the Police Department, the Common Council and the mayor’s office.
For his part, Barrett said he takes ownership of the new commission, which will draw from that previous work, and said he, too, has been frustrated by the lack of progress on other reform efforts. He also said he made the decision to focus the commission on use-of-force policies after seeing tear gas and rubber bullets used against crowds in Milwaukee and cities across the country.
“I think this is the time where we bring everything together,” Barrett said Saturday in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “There’s been a number of commissions, they’ve done great work, but we need a catalyst, and I want this to operate as a catalyst.”
Still, for those who have spent countless hours listening to residents’ concerns and ideas and helped shape reports and recommendations, Barrett’s announcement Friday — a week after protests started — of yet another commission was frustrating.
“It makes for a nice sound bite . ... There is no more need to stop and analyze. Now is the time for action,” said Darryl Morin, president of Forward Latino and one of the founders of the Community Coalition for Quality Policing.
He said the priorities from resident discussions dating back to the Sherman Park unrest in 2016 remain relevant and urgent: implement problem-oriented community policing across the Police Department, hire and fill vacant positions at the city’s Fire and Police Commission so it can address residents’ complaints in a timely manner, and review and retrain officers on the department’s use-of-force policy.
Barrett’s move came after a week in which thousands took to the city’s streetsdailyto protest police brutality, and several nights saw tensions mount with the National Guard and Milwaukee police responding to looting, arson and gunfire from scattered groups.
One reason why change is so difficult: No single entity is responsible for reforming the Milwaukee Police Department.
The Fire and Police Commission is in charge of oversight, investigating citizen complaints and hiring the police chief. The department itself is in charge of daily police operations, including training, tactics and strategy. The mayor and Common Council control the police budget and appoint and confirm members of the Fire and Police Commission.
In the interview, Barrett said the new commission will outline specific action steps for each entity and he will use it to inform his city budget recommendations.
“I understand the urgency of the moment,” he said.
In 2017, the Journal Sentinel obtained and published a draft report on MPD from the U.S. Department of Justice that had 55 findings and more than 100 recommendations. Milwaukee’s prior police chief, Edward Flynn, had requested the DOJ review after the fatal police shooting of Dontre Hamilton.
The report was never finished because of a change in presidential administrations, so local leaders created the Milwaukee Collaborative Reform Initiative and the Collaborative Community Committee to continue that work. That local group released a final report in September, echoing many of the same recommendations.
Around the same time, the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin sued the Police Department alleging a pattern of stop-and-frisk targeting African Americans and Latinos. The lawsuit settlement included an independent monitor to make sure police meet certain benchmarks to reform stop-and-search practices, improve data collection and require officers to undergo more training on stops and searches.
The monitor has found progress to be slow and uneven, in part because of cumbersome datasets and technology at the Police Department and staffing turnover at the Fire and Police Commission, the oversight board.
In an update released in February, the monitor found eight of 10 frisks were not properly documented in the first half of 2019, meaning officers’ reports lacked the necessary details to establish reasonable suspicion to justify the search.
More recommendations
The Blueprint for Peace, the city’s violence prevention plan, issued in 2017, also has several recommendations on law enforcement.
The new commission of police accountability will give an update on the progress of implementing recommendations from the Blueprint for Peace and Community Collaborative Committee, according to Barrett.
In addition, it will review the Police
Department’s use-of-force policies and determine if the department is following guidelines from the federal Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Many of the recommendations from the draft Department of Justice report follow standards set by the task force.
Barrett’s news release did not outline who would be on this commission or how it would work but did give it a 90day deadline to report back. In the Saturday interview, he said he was in the middle of working through how large the commission would be and who would be appointed to it, emphasizing the need for communities of color to have a large voice in it.
Asked if the Milwaukee Police Department will be part of the commission, Barrett said he was not sure but said the commission would need to hear from the department in order to understand its perspective on policing practices and policies.
Barrett, who in April won another four-year term, said the new commission was partly in response to a challenge to mayors from My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, a nonprofit organization created by former President Barack Obama.
The organization’s pledge includes eight areas to consider when reviewing use-of-force policies. The Milwaukee Police Department’s use-of-force standard operating procedure already addresses many of them.
The department’s policy was tightened last summer and now requires officers to “hold the highest regard for the sanctity of human life” and makes the use of deadly force “a last resort.”
The Milwaukee policy already required officers to intervene to prevent excessive force and immediately report what they saw to a supervisor. That kind of policy language is being sought across the country after the May 25 death of George Floyd. Three Minneapolis officers watched and did nothing as a fourth officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes, despite pleas from Floyd and bystanders to stop.
“It makes for a nice sound bite . ... There is no more need to stop and analyze. Now is the time for action.”
Darryl Morin president of Forward Latino, one of the founders of Community Coalition for Quality Policing
Contact Ashley Luthern at ashley.luthern@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @aluthern.