Council releases public safety plan

After a summer packed with special meetings, appearances by more than a dozen local and state officials, and hours of testimony on the issue of crime and public safety, Milwaukee Common Council members Tuesday held a hastily called news conference to announce they were now ready to begin discussions with the public.

The move came a day after the Journal Sentinel reported that a plan put together by the council's Public Safety Committee had been held from its scheduled release. The "Public Safety Action Plan," as it was titled, called for dramatic increases in law enforcement personnel, more time behind bars for offenders and so-called boot camps for at-risk youths.

"This is just a document to start the conversation. This is not something that the entire council has endorsed," Council President Ashanti Hamilton said Tuesday. "What we're endorsing is a process."

The draft public safety report had been scheduled to be released at 4 p.m. Monday, but that didn't happen. Several officials said privately they considered the document tone deaf, particularly in the wake of violent unrest in the Sherman Park area this month.

"It's because people wanted to have a little more time to digest and give some input," Hamilton said. "But we can do that publicly. We can do it in a way that we're not calling each other names."

Notably, the document released Tuesday contained last-minute changes from the draft obtained by the Journal Sentinel. The order of recommendations for the city had been adjusted, with improving police-community relations as the new top recommendation, rather than increasing police staffing back to 2008 levels.

"If you take a look at the list now, you know, this is probably where we have the most consensus down to there is dying consensus," Hamilton said.

Hamilton said the next step would be a pair of community meetings on the city's north and south sides to get public input on the plan.

"What we want to be able to do at this stage — now that we have something written down — that we can start moving toward a concrete platform for us to be able to continue this conversation," Hamilton said. "You have to start the conversation. We cannot be afraid of actually putting something down on paper."

Hamilton was joined by four other aldermen Tuesday — Bob Donovan, Mark Borkowski, Chantia Lewis and Chevy Johnson. Hamilton stressed that the new plan was just one part of a multipronged approach to improve public safety in Milwaukee, which includes working with churches and community groups. That effort was unveiled in June.

And Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said his administration was already launching its own plan in September. That plan, Barrett said, "has been in the works for quite some time."

The effort will be led by the mayor's Office of Violence Prevention, which is housed within the city Health Department. The Prevention Institute, based in Oakland, Calif., is helping with the planning process, the mayor said in a statement.

Indeed, Milwaukee leaders for years have called for violence to be treated with a public health model that focuses on root causes and stops the spread of violence.

"As I've said repeatedly, law enforcement is an important part of the public safety equation but not the only piece," Barrett said. "If we have learned anything from the events over the past two weeks, it is imperative that we all work together to address the factors that we know drive crime and disorder in communities."

Host of ideas

The council's report is the result of an effort this summer by the city's Public Safety Committee, headed by Donovan. The committee summoned area law enforcement, corrections officials, prosecutors, judges and youth advocates to a series of special meetings about crime after seeing increases in homicides and nonfatal shootings last year.

Among the recommendations:

• Improving community and police relations.
• Promoting economic development and public safety in targeted districts.
• Adding seasonal officers.
• Emphasizing traffic enforcement.
• Hiring 280 more police officers over the next two years, in addition to the ongoing recruitment to replace an expected surge in retirements.
• Re-evaluating the Milwaukee Police Department’s pursuit policy. (Donovan has been a longtime critic of the department's policy.)

The plan also provides recommendations for the county agencies as well as the State of Wisconsin — even though the city has no control over them. Those recommendations include:

• Expanding the county detention center.
• Reducing the use of electronic monitoring for both juveniles and adults. 
• Creating a boot-camp or boarding school facility in the county for at-risk youth.
• Adding 150 more sheriff’s deputies to patrol the county parks.
• Increasing Milwaukee County assistant district attorney salaries.
• Constructing a regional, secure detention alternative to Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls.

The recommendations advocating for less electronic monitoring would likely lead to more detention time, and come at a time when Milwaukee has faced criticism specifically over its incarceration rates, especially of African-American men.

Hamilton acknowledged concerns about high rates of incarceration — he held aloft a book detailing the subject, "The New Jim Crow," during the news conference — but said it is possible to increase police without increasing prison time. The safety action plan points to New York City as a successful example of that.

Chris Ahmuty, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, called the plan "predictable, gratuitous and out of touch."

But he applauded the decision to hold listening sessions about the plan, something his group and others had requested.

There’s no itemized or total dollar amount attached to the proposals in the draft, but Hamilton acknowledged it would be significant.

"That's a big price tag," he said. "We didn't put it together with the mindset that we would be paying for everything that was in it."

But he stressed nothing was set in stone, calling it a "working document."