Browsing: Law Enforcement

Federal enforcement of cannabis laws in Wisconsin has been minimal in recent years, with only 67 individuals sentenced for federal marijuana crimes since 2017 and none at all in the Western District between 2020 and 2023.

Years after we first reported on daily calls to police from MPS high schools, the Milwaukee Public Schools finally obeyed a judge’s order and placed cops back in the hallways this week.

A Milwaukee County judge lambasted the Milwaukee School Board in a rare broadside aimed at finally getting cops back in MPS high schools.

While Milwaukee continues to struggle putting sworn officers on the streets, the police departments in Wisconsin’s other largest cities are at or fast approaching full staffing.

In the 2023-24 school year, MPS schools called police 1,245 times for help with allegations of everything from armed robbery to sexual assault to felony theft.

MPS may regret its ongoing resistance to the state’s resource officer requirement the next time it comes to the Legislature looking for tax money.

There will be no police officers in Milwaukee Public Schools when classes begin this Tuesday, violating a requirement that is part of the current state budget.

For too long to remember, MPS has been mired in mediocrity, unable to move forward on anything with any sort of urgency. There’s abundant evidence that more money will not produce better outcomes, but even more evidence that MPS typically moves slightly slower than the speed of your average hermit crab race.

There is a real possibility for cannabis reform to result in public safety gains for the Badger State but the tradeoffs that must be accepted are a significant reduction in safety on the state’s highways and roads and an increase in minor property and nuisance crimes near cannabis dispensaries if the state were to establish a commercial market for either medical or adult-use products.

Many counties in Wisconsin have essentially decriminalized the possession or sale of marijuana, or cannabis, as it now often is known, and the relatively few people who are charged criminally in other counties are ever incarcerated.

You know those decals that make your car look like it’s been hit by gunfire?

My family’s car has something like that, only more authentic: a bullet hole in the tailgate.

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.

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.