Common Council Recruits Trump Supporters to Police Milwaukee
Donald Trump is a racist, and a fascist. He wants to deport protesters. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, he asked to have police shoot us. He wants to use the 1807 Insurrection Act to deploy troops against people of color in urban areas. In the next few years, we should expect him to use whatever means he can to silence and suppress dissent. Under the coming Trump regime, there will be protests, and police will respond. They will terrorize urban communities, and defend and enforce white supremacist policies even more than they already do. It is their job.
Milwaukee politicians are working to facilitate Trump’s repression and white supremacist violence. They are recruiting Trump supporters to help them. On Tuesday, December 17 Milwaukee Common Council voted to approve $10,000 bonuses for police officers to transfer from other counties and join the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD). This deal is going to be most attractive to cops in neighboring counties, who skewed heavily for fascists in the November election (Washington County by 86%, Waukesha 70%, Ozaukee 60%, and Racine 56%).
As we have covered before, Milwaukee police have always been racist and violent, especially against Black Milwaukeeans. Recruiting cops from outside the city will surely make this worse. The Milwaukee Police Association endorsed Trump and supported other racist candidates. Cops being reactionary is nothing new. Generally, cops tend to vote Republican and support white supremacist policies.
It is cops from conservative suburban areas like the WOW counties who participate in violent Republican events like the failed coup on January 6, 2021. Wisconsin Republicans have been feeding a politics of resentment to exaggerate a rural-urban divide in this state, and to stoke hatred of Milwaukee residents, especially our residents of color. MPD Chief Jeffery Norman is trying to fill his department with officers who have been stewed in this Republican villianization of our city. Mayor Cavalier Johnson and a majority of Common Council members gave that plan a green light last month.
Eight alders voted for this policy, five against, one abstained. Peter Burgelis championed it, but Larresa Taylor, Lamont Westmoreland, DiAndre Jackson, Sharlen Moore, Russell Stamper, JoCasta Zamarripa, and Scott Spiker got on board. Those are the common Council members helping Mayor Johnson and Chief Norman give people from the suburbs authority over the people of our city. They want more suburbanites to have near impunity to assault and murder us.
Milwaukee aldermanic district map highlighting those who voted in favor of $10,000 bonuses (Taylor in 9, Westmoreland in 5, Jackson in 7, Moore in 10, Stamper in 15, Zamarippa in 8, Burgelis in 11, Spiker in 13), those against (Chambers in 2, Pratt in 1, Bauman in 4, Perez in 12, Dimitrijevic in 14). District 3 is vacant, Coggs (district 6) abstained from the vote.
In 2020, hundreds of Milwaukeeans took to the streets, engaging in the kind of protest that led Trump to ask for live ammo. In 2025, Trump’s populist promises are already evaporating, while he prepares to act on his most racist goals. Also, the police murders that provoked those protests have not stopped. Protests across the US will surely come. The City of Milwaukee is preparing for those protests by recruiting police from populations that voted in favor of shooting protesters. This is not only stupid and dangerous, it is willful participation in the maintenance of white supremacy. Alderperson Peter Burgelis convinced a majority on the Common Council to betray the people they were elected to represent.
Some of them might argue that the bonuses are needed to fulfill the police hiring demands of Act 12, a shared revenue scheme Tony Evers negotiated to benefit the rest of the state at Milwaukee’s expense. The problem with this argument is that it is the police who are bankrupting the city. In the long run, Act 12 makes that problem worse by forcing us to hire more officers, while it also provides far less revenue than expected. The police hiring requirement in Act 12 came from Republican “fund the police” legislation, originally proposed in direct reaction to the 2020 protest demands. It was passed for the purpose of ruining our city, and signed by a Governor who takes us for granted. Everyone knew Act 12 was a raw deal for Milwaukee, but Mayor Johnson and County Executive David Crowley shilled hard for it, and demanded other elected officials sign on, under threat of bankrupting the city.
The school board is smart enough to recognize this. They have been resisting the Act 12 requirement to put cops back in MPS schools. When Republicans from around the state work to overrule the demands of Milwaukee residents, our School Board stands up to them. Mayor Johnson and Common Council respond by throwing Republicans $10,000 bonuses to come repress us..
Democrats who don’t stand up to fascism are not our leaders. These Democrats are not our allies. They are enablers of our enemies. Milwaukee residents need to get serious about defending ourselves, not only against Trump and his fascist goons, but against most of our own elected representatives.
There is a storm coming, and these people cannot be trusted to do anything but enable and exacerbate it.
