Activists disillusioned after approval of previously rejected COPS grant

Some residents in the City of Milwaukee were left disillusioned after the Common Council reversed its December decision to reject the $9.7 million federal Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grant. The three-year grant, now approved by the council, will add 30 new police officers to the ranks of the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD), allowing more veteran personnel to be repurposed for various task forces.

The decision to accept the grant came after Acting Police Chief Jeffrey Norman and other administrators sent a four-page letter to the Council saying the department was making progress working on “community oriented” policing standards and developing new procedures banning chokeholds and shooting into vehicles “except in life-preserving measures,” among other things.

Still, the decision to take the money was discouraging to Paul Mozina, who has been closely monitoring policing in Milwaukee. “I’m characterizing it as another futile surge in the war on drugs,” Mozina tells Wisconsin Examiner. “That’s really what they’ve accomplished.” He views the COPS grant, which continues Operation Legend, as an offshoot of prior law enforcement programs that led to over-policing in Milwaukee neighborhoods, including Operation Relentless Pursuit.

Operation Legend, which was launched in July 2020, resulted in some 74 arrests in the Milwaukee area. The arrests were announced on Dec. 23, 2020 as one of then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr’s final acts in office.

“We see them roaming around our neighborhoods,” said Julio Gumeta, an activist with the Brown Berets and resident of Milwaukee’s predominantly Latinx south side, “the police and the undercover cops, and, I think, the feds are still here. You see them just kind of walking by, as you go about your day on the south side. You see cars passing by, doing runs down Greenfield and National [avenues]. And these communities are mostly immigrant and undocumented families. So they have a very real fear that they may be assaulted by a police officer, or an ICE officer.”

Gumeta says the apparent suicide in September of a 23-year-old south-side man as DEA agents raided his home is fresh in the neighborhood’s memory. He says without body cam footage, some wonder if the agents’ accounts can be trusted. He adds that relations between the community and the police were further eroded after the police and ICE agents collaborated in the 2019 arrest of José (Alex) de la Cruz-Espinoza. After 70 days in the Dodge County Detention Facility, de la Cruz was released to be reunited with his wife and children in Milwaukee.

Mozina sees the COPS grant as a continuation of policies that disproportionately target Black and brown communities. “It’s like when the weeds come up in the spring, every year the DOJ have their big bust in the spring,” asserts Mozina.

Members of the Common Council also addressed concerns about the grant in a joint statement from Alds. Nikiya Dodd, Ashanti Hamilton, Cavalier Johnson and Mark Borkowski released on Jan. 19.

“Earlier today, a divided Common Council made a difficult decision to accept the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grant from the federal Department of Justice. This grant should never have divided this community as deeply as it did. Public safety is a primary concern for all of us who serve this city and yet, even among ourselves, we disagreed, sometimes vehemently, about taking federal dollars when money from any source is scarce.”

The joint statement emphasized the “antiquated structure” of the grant as a major problem. “The Common Council has already made clear to the department that it must re-imagine policing to better respond to the present moment,” it reads. “Force must not be its first tool, but its last. And it must embrace methods like trauma-informed care, violence prevention, and other forms of early intervention. More to the point, it must also be willing to change the way it uses scarce federal dollars and no longer assume that the hiring and deployment of sworn officers is the best and only answer when outside resources are received.”

Mayor Tom Barrett heavily pushed for the grant, and the final Common Council vote ended in a 9-6 decision to pass it. In December, the vote ended in a 6-8 decision to not accept the grant. However, Dodd moved to reconsider the grant again after the New Year. Ald. Hamilton who, initially voted against the grant and later changed his vote along with Dodd and others, pushed for the MPD to accept the grant under certain conditions.

The seven conditions, which include prioritizing traffic enforcement and rebuilding damaged relations with community members, are meant to steer the department toward better relationship with the communities it serves.

Since May 2020, Milwaukee residents have joined nationwide calls to reallocate funds away from police and toward other services. “Defund the police” became a controversial rallying cry that continues to draw protesters out into the streets.

In December 2020, Markesha Tucker, director of the African-American Roundtable and a community organizer with LiberateMKE, wrote an op-ed in reaction to the grant’s initial rejection. Tucker hoped that voting “no” would allow the council, “to focus on community safety strategies like non-police responses to mental health, a priority we presented in a letter signed by over 80 community organizers and community leaders, with a similar resolution being unanimously adopted by the Common Council.” Come December that didn’t happen, leaving some alders worried that the larger problem was being avoided.

Ald. Milele Coggs highlighted the importance of the department facing the fractured relationship it has with the community. “Regardless of which way this goes,” Coggs told Urban Milwaukee, “the city loses if we do not begin to embark on the much tougher conversations about the future of policing in the City of Milwaukee. I know many of us will breath a sigh of relief when this vote is over, but I do believe that when this vote is over the real work begins.”

Despite the increasing funding for police operations, drug-related deaths are increasing. The city is now entering 2021 after experiencing surges in drug overdoses, homicides and suicides in 2020. From Mozina’s perspective, drug war tactics are part of the problem, not the solution.

“I’m alluding to the collateral damage of the drug war,” Mozina says. He argues that the common council and police department, “won’t admit that the drug war is an utter failure, and is causing more damage. It’s not helping anything. The fact that there’s an illegal street market leads to increased violence on the street, overdoses.”

As residents attempt to reimagine what public safety looks like, activists wonder why leaders won’t heed calls to revamp approaches to public health and safety. Instead of funding more police, he says cities should be creating avenues for community engagement. “They’re so used to having this stuff rubber stamped, that they thought this was going to be a walk in the park,” says Mozina. “What if they asked the community, ‘Where do you want those 30 veterans dedicated?’”

Tucker noted in her op-ed that, “hundreds of voices that spoke at budget hearings over the past two years said they don’t want the COPS grant today, tomorrow or next year! The community wants something else, and it’s not more police.”