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(Photo by Edgar Mendez)
Devin Anderson is the lead organizer for the African American Roundtable, and Rick Banks serves as political director of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, or BLOC, an affiliate of the Center for Popular Democracy. They say Milwaukee should reduce the police department’s budget and use the funds to invest more in the community.
At Mayor Tom Barrett’s state of the city address earlier this year, he said: “The city budget will remain very very tight” and he expressed concerns “that the entire city property tax levy is not enough to cover the police department budget. And now, it’s not even enough to cover 94% of our police budget.”
His acknowledgment has been without action. Over the past five years, the police budget has increased close to 25%, or about $70 million, while every other department has had to figure out how to provide the same services with less money.
The Milwaukee Police Department request for 2020 is more of the same. MPD has requested nearly $312 million, which is about $13 million more than it was allocated last year, nearly 47 percent of the city’s “general city purposes” fund. In other words, nearly half of Milwaukee’s general fund is putting resources into a police department that has not, in many cases, protected residents — and has even, on occasion, jeopardized their safety.
Compared with other cities across the country, Milwaukee spends the largest portion of its general fund on policing. The Center for Popular Democracy, along with Law for Black Lives and Black Youth Project 100, analyzed budgets in 10 cities and two counties and found that most of the cities profiled devoted 25 percent to 40 percent of their general fund expenditures to policing.
Such spending will only widen a yawning gap between Black and White communities. According to a report released in 2018 by the financial website 24/7 Wall Street, Milwaukee is the second worst city in the country for Black Americans to live.
The median income for Black households in the city is just 42 percent of median White income, and unemployment for Blacks in Milwaukee is 12.4 percent, nearly triple the rate of 3.3 percent for Whites in the city. More damningly, the website found the Black incarceration rate for the state of Wisconsin is 2,542 for every 100,000 Black residents, more than 10 times the rate for Whites.
Milwaukee should be addressing this gross inequality and investing in community services that actually improve the lives of its Black population, such as education, workforce development training, youth employment programs, non-police violence prevention and ensuring families can afford quality housing.
It is time for Milwaukee to rethink its priorities and the city should seize this opportunity to address the deep inequity between Milwaukee’s Black and White communities.
In our country, safety has been synonymous with policing and incarceration. We’ve seen that the dysfunction and brutality of Milwaukee’s police department cost the city tens of millions of dollars it can’t afford. We’ve also seen that investing in punitive systems is not making us safer. Alderman Michael Murphy recently said: “Most research will tell you that investing in prevention is generally a much better way to address any problem.”
It is time for the city to begin to rein in its spending on the police by divesting $25 million from the department and investing that money into the community. It’s time to reimagine what community safety really means and re-evaluate how we get there.
A point of view that lifts up a way that the Mayor, Common Council and we can claim a vision for Milwaukee that strengthens the community by investing in the neighborhoods. The business community seems deeply committed to put money (venture capital) into all sorts of risky projects. Investing in most everything including city neighborhoods will be a risk. But having neighborhood people and its parks, schools, stores etc. receiving the benefit of a comprehensive plan could have a huge payoff. The whole idea of ‘safe’ neighborhoods could include some of the work of MICAH, Safe and Sound, Urban Underground perhaps empowered by facilitated conversation from the Zeidler Center. The ball is in place. It needs a push to roll ahead. This article challenges us to start pushing.
Stop giving money to the same old inner city progrms that are not working. City needs to open up to new ideas to address and clean up inner city blight. The mayor and common council are just not willing to try anything new…
Definition of insanity…doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result…it’s time for a serious change in elected leadership…?
It’s hard for the “same old inner city programs” to work when they are chronically underfunded, don’t have the capacity to work together for collective impact, and are constantly pushing up against a system that works against people who are marginalized and living with poverty.
“Blight” is a negative stereotype that implies there nothing worth anything in the North Side. That just isn’t true. The problem with even saying “inner city” is that it’s been used so long by people who use it as a negative code phrase.
We have to use words that describe the North Side accurately. It’s neighborhoods of people, families, kids, homes, businesses — part of the metro area just like every other place I’ve lived. It is vibrant and wonderful. The words we use are important.
Thank you Dorothy for naming the “code words”. Words matter & people matter.