Reports: Progress stalls on stop/frisk reforms
Three and half years in, a courtmandated effort to overhaul the Milwaukee Police Department’s stopand-frisk practices “is not where we hoped it would be,” according to two recent reports from a nonprofit monitoring the effort.
The reports, released in March and April, show mixed results for a police department that is in the throes of a major culture change.
The reports found in the final six months of 2021, the department struggled to build off the progress it made in the first half of the year to ensure that officers are frisking civilians, and documenting those actions, in a constitutional manner.
They also repeated concerns from previous reports that the department’s Patrol Bureau is not matching other levels of command – such as administrators, trainers and inspections staff – in demonstrating a commitment to achieving full compliance.
“It is worth recognizing that achieving full compliance requires a resetting of MPD’s culture and not only changes in actions and operations – a process that takes time,” the March report said.
The reports were written by the Boston-based Crime and Justice Institute, which has been tracking and publishing updates on the Police Department’s compliance with a $3.4 million settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin over stop-and-frisk practices.
In its lawsuit, the ACLU argued that tens of thousands of Black and Latino Milwaukee residents had been stopped by police without reasonable suspicion of criminal activity for years. The settlement, reached in 2018, included a series of requirements for police to restructure how it stops and interacts with civilians, including how those interactions are documented, how officers are supervised and how they’re disciplined for infractions.
The reports released this spring include new data about police interactions between July and December 2021. It shows the department has made continued progress in how officers conduct field interviews and traffic stops. But progress with frisks lagged.
“We’re taking this as serious as ever,” Nick DeSiato, the chief of staff for the Police Department, told a Fire and Police Commission committee Tuesday. “Chief (Jeffrey) Norman, this is one of his highest priorities, along with violent crime and reckless driving.
“We understand that it’s taken years to get to this point. It’s a challenge. The context and landscape currently going with crime in the city and reckless driving is relevant, it’s real, but it doesn’t mean that we can just
eschew our responsibilities here.”
The new 2021 data comes from a sampling of 379 police encounters, out of more than 24,600. Of the sampled encounters, Black civilians were involved in 57%, Hispanic/Latinos 18% and whites 17%.
The report measures how often officers documented the reasonable suspicion behind different kinds of police encounters, including traffic stops, frisks and field interviews. The settlement agreement requires police to document justification for at least 85% of its civilian encounters.
Here are some takeaways from the reports.
Stalled progress with frisks
Of all the police encounters, frisks represent the Police Department’s biggest challenge at reform. In six-month increments from January 2019 through December 2020, the department failed document justification for at least 79% of frisks.
Things improved with a score of 48.8% in the first half of 2021, but the April report showed no progress from there. The department failed to record justification for 53.6% of frisks in the second half of 2021.
Blacks are disproportionately represented among those who are frisked, accounting for 83.3% in the second half of 2021.
Of the department’s seven police districts, only three provided justification for more than half of frisks – Districts Four, Five and Seven. The other four provided justification for frisks between 29.4% and 37.5% of the time.
Reports by the Crime and Justice Institute also look for potential cases of undocumented frisks by examining body camera footage from a sample of incidents where a frisk or search was likely to have occurred, but was not documented. Those incidents include calls for a subject with a gun, shots fired, armed robbery or domestic violence battery, for example.
The April report looked at four such incidents and identified two undocumented frisks.
In total, stretching back to January 2019, the Crime and Justice Institute has examined 50 incidents and found 15 undocumented frisks.
What are the issues with frisks?
Officers are expected to provide two levels of justification for conducting a frisk: why officers thought the civilian has, is or will engage in a crime and why they think that person is armed and dangerous.
The April report pointed out two patterns in the department’s struggle with documenting frisks.
One is a tendency for officers to provide a lack of specific information about why the person is armed and dangerous. This includes nonspecific language, such as noticing a “bulge” in the person’s clothing, or they matched a description of a suspect.
The other pattern is officers will attempt to justify the frisk by placing the civilian in the back seat of a squad car. The report explains that patting someone down before putting them in a squad car is valid, but oftentimes officers do not explain why a “back seat detention” is necessary.
Officers “may be using it as a reason to conduct a frisk when they do not otherwise have (reasons) to justify it,” the report said.
Whenever police find contraband during an unjustified frisk, any criminal prosecution that might follow could be jeopardized. Out of 58 instances where contraband was discovered, the report noted that reasonable suspicion was documented for less than half of those frisks.
However, in general, the rate at which police found contraband during frisks has increased, from a low of 15.8% in the first half of 2020 to 30.2% in the second half of 2021.
The report suggested the higher “hit rate” might be a result of officers “making more discerning decisions about when to frisk individuals during a police encounter.”
Solid track record with traffic stops continues
Of all the different types of police encounters measured by the Crime and Justice Institute’s reports, traffic stops have long been the Police Department’s strength. In the second half of 2021, police failed to record the reasonable suspicion behind an all-time low of 2.9% of traffic stops.
That marks two straight years the department has met the settlement agreement’s standards for documenting reasonable suspicion in traffic stops.
Field interviews see continued improvement
The department nearly met the settlement agreement’s standards in this regard for the second half of 2021, with 17.3% of field interviews lacking justification.
With field interviews, the department has met the agreement’s standard once before, in the second half of 2019, with 8.5% going without justification. In the six months afterwards, it jumped back up to 48.6%.
Since then, the percentage of field interviews without justification has steadily decreased back down to 17.3%.