MILWAUKEE — Over 14 months after Wisconsin’s Act 12 went into effect and a series of court dates for a lawsuit ensued, school resource officers returned to Milwaukee Public Schools on Monday.
The City of Milwaukee met its latest court-ordered deadline of March 15 by getting 38 Milwaukee Police Department officers trained via the National Association of School Resource Officers last week. 25 of them are now stationed across 11 high schools.
According to court documents, the officers are working in pairs at: Riverside University High School, Bradley Technology and Trade School, North Division High School, Milwaukee High School of the Arts, Hamilton High School, Washington High School, Vincent High School, Madison High School, Rufus King High School, Obama School of Career and Technical Education and Milwaukee Marshall High School.
On Monday, Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge David Borowski erased a $1,000 per day fine against the city and vacated a contempt of court order. He agreed to dismiss the case, but under a stipulation that any subsequent noncompliance or lawsuits would reopen in his court only.
“It would be completley inappropriate for this to go in front of somebody else in June if this somehow falls apart,” he said.
Judge Borowski again showed his support for SROs and challenged opposition to police in schools.
“There is still a narrative out there from some people that putting police in schools is this big, horrible, awful thing… [but] the police are in the schools every single day. The difference here is they’re not being called and pulled off of patrol duty or called and pulled off of an investigation.”
According to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report, MPD responds to about 3,700 calls from MPS each year. 31% of those calls come from just 11 schools, some of which are the same schools that SROs arrived at on Monday.
The re-implementation of an SRO program comes after the Wisconsin State Assembly passed a bill on Thursday threatening their own penalties for further noncompliance with Act 12. It would withhold 10% of state funding for Milwaukee and 20% of school aid payments for MPS.
“Any law… that doesn’t include some consequences for breaking that law isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on,” the bill’s author Rep. Bob Donovan told Wisconsin’s Afternoon News. “And I think for 440 days MPS and the City of Milwaukee prove my point.”
