Browsing: Crime and Justice

Governor Evers signed a budget passed by the Legislature that includes a more than 30% starting pay raise for assistant district attorneys and assistant public defenders and more flexibility for merit-based pay raises for attorneys currently in those roles. This makes the compensation for these roles more competitive and should reduce the high rates of turnover currently existing in District Attorney and public defender offices. 

Wisconsinites clearly got some wins in the 2023-2025 biennel budget. Now the task at hand is consolidate and expand those moving forward.

A deal that allows both the City of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County to raise sales taxes also requires that 25 police officers be placed back in crime-ridden Milwaukee Public Schools.  

“This is a great victory for all the good kids in MPS schools who just want to learn, want to be safe, want a way up,” said Mike Nichols, president of the Badger Institute, which has been pushing for cops in schools for much of the last year.

The Badger Institute on Wednesday praised action by the Legislature’s budget writing committee to raise pay for prosecutors and public defenders, a move the Institute has been advocating for nearly a year.

Progressive city councils across the country are being forced by violence in and near their public schools to rethink their bans on stationing police officers on those campuses.

Assembly Republicans have proposed a sales tax plan for the city of Milwaukee that would put police officers back in Milwaukee Public Schools for the first time since 2016. The plan would allow the financially hobbled city to levy a local 2% sales tax with the promise of state shared revenue to help pay down on its ballooning pension debt.

Public safety is a foundational requirement for prosperity in our communities. This means that fully funding the various systems that ensure public safety is a requirement, not a political preference. That’s why individuals from the most progressive to the most conservative agree these agencies should function effectively.

Milwaukee is significantly less safe than it was a short time ago. In fact, compared to 2019, overall crime in Milwaukee is up 22.6%, with violent crime up 15.6% and property crime up 26% from three years ago.

A spokesman for Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson has told the Badger Institute it is “likely that Milwaukee police officers will have a renewed presence in some Milwaukee Public Schools in 2023.” Should Milwaukee Public Schools and the Milwaukee Police Department follow through, it would be the first time officers have been posted in schools since 2016. The School Board allowed officers to patrol around schools for four years after that but voted unanimously to prohibit that as well in June 2020 after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Know what puts a crimp in any effort to fight crime? Not being able to do anything with suspects once the cops catch them.

Students in Milwaukee’s public high schools who want a better life and know that school is their only way up are being battered, assaulted and exposed to gunfire or other reckless conduct on a daily basis. The school board ignores that and listens to activists, who think cops are bullies.

Wisconsin’s criminal justice system must first and foremost work to reduce crime, improve public safety and achieve justice for victims.

The Badger State remains, on the whole, a safe place that’s been getting safer. But Wisconsinites who live and work in Milwaukee have seen dramatic increases in homicide, auto theft and aggravated assault. For some specific offenses, other Wisconsin cities are also seeing worsening trends.

The cops have had enough, says Kennedy, and the long lines that have stretched across generations in some families, grandfathers to fathers to sons who all were eager to serve and sacrifice – are being severed.

It now takes, on average, more than 15 months to fully resolve, from arrest to closed case, a homicide charge in Wisconsin. Armed robbery takes a year and sexual assault cases average 14 months.

Of the convicted criminals Wisconsin imprisons, most will serve a sentence and be released. Then what?

Milwaukee is among the cities that have repeatedly cut law enforcement positions in recent years.

Not only has the city reduced the number of authorized police positions, it has fewer officers to fill them, leading to higher vacancy rates. This inability to fill what remaining positions the city is funding includes leadership ranks: The Milwaukee Police Department is facing a damaging loss of institutional knowledge and practical skills, a loss that could worsen policing just when Milwaukee needs its force to perform at its peak.

Wisconsin’s court system is plagued by massive delays and a growing backlog of criminal cases. It now takes more than a year for a court to resolve an armed robbery charge, 14 months to resolve a sexual assault case and more than 15 months to resolve an allegation that someone committed a murder.

Wisconsin’s crime trends in essence reveal two different states: the city of Milwaukee (and other select urban areas) and the “Rest of Wisconsin.” While most of the state is relatively safe in comparison to five years ago, troubling trends in Milwaukee — one of the primary economic engines of the Badger State and home to 10% of its citizens — are undermining the health and safety of the state in general.

The Badger Institute today released four new reports as part of a Mandate for Madison crime and public safety package.

For the people who need it most — poor residents of Milwaukee, families and victims of particularly violent crimes like homicide and aggravated assault throughout the state, children in schools where politicians won’t allow police, and almost anyone awaiting a verdict — Wisconsin’s criminal justice system is failing.