Milwaukee’s Budget Fight
Since 2019, many Milwaukeeans have been trying to prevent our politicians from dumping half of our city and county budgets into the black hole of policing. We want to shift our budgets toward funding human needs and actual public safety. Mayor Cavalier Johnson is not listening.
Johnson released his 2025 proposed budget Tuesday. He wants to raise fees and taxes and hire 65 new police officers, the maximum number the academy can train. Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) requested $311 million, which is 44% of the total budget. County Executive Crowley will release his proposed budget by October 1. The Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) has requested $62 million, a $2.9 million increase over last year, which was the highest budget in MCSO history.
I know. It’s been four years since 2020 and we’re not supposed to talk about defunding police anymore. We’ve all been inundated with fake news about rising crime rates. Reactionary centrists have pushed the phrase out of acceptable discourse. The “national conversation” is apparently over? Most Democrats have moved on to Obama nostalgia and celebrating the possibility of electing the first former state attorney general since Bill Clinton to the US presidency. (We all know what he did for the incarceration rate.)
The trouble is, while we're distracted, police violence has increased nationally, and statewide. A white supremacist backlash to the 2020 uprising has seized our politics, empowering area racists, including those in law enforcement.
Fortunately, local activists have not given up on the fight. The African American Roundtable (AART) showed up and disrupted Mayor Johnson’s budget announcement. The roundtable has been leading the charge to reduce police funding and invest in human needs for years. Milwaukee’s Black sheriff, police chief, mayor, and county leaders might help the business community and some white liberals feel better about shoveling so much money into violent repression, but AART reminds us that these officials do not adequately represent or speak for Milwaukee's Black community.
Who leads the fight against the police?
The events of 2020 were not merely a protest, but a militant national uprising. Part of calming that rebellion was a lot of public talk about systemic racism and defunding or even abolishing the police. The local manifestation of this rebellion painted it in ten foot letters on the street outside city hall.
Many might dismiss this demand as just local people jumping on a national trend, but it wasn't. It was a mass mobilization behind authentic community demands that existed prior to 2020, and persist to this day. Nationally, Angela Davis first published the case for abolition in 2003, but anti-police organizing dates back decades prior, with the work of Ida B Wells, Lucy Parsons, then the Deacons for Defense, the Black Panthers, and many others. Women of color founded specifically abolitionist organizations Critical Resistance and INCITE! in 1997 and 2001. Some Critical Resistance organizers came to Milwaukee in 2016 to pitch starting a chapter.
That chapter didn't form, but instead, The African American Roundtable (AART) stepped up to take on part of this work. For this article, I interviewed Devin Anderson, the LiberateMKE campaign director from AART. He explained their history like this: “AART started in 2012 as a roundtable of nonprofit workers, then they found their own bucket of work around police accountability and the Fire and Police Commission. Starting on Juneteenth of 2019 we launched the Liberatemke campaign.” Since then, AART has been pushing on the city’s budget process. Hundreds of people testified at the public hearings demanding a budget that serves the people, not just police and business interests, but the mayor and the common council largely ignored them, raising police budgets year after year instead.
As frustrating as that non-response has been, Anderson says the efforts were not entirely in vain. “In the years since launching,” he explained, “we’ve seen a massive increase in investment in young people through the city’s earn and learn program and things like the expansion in library hours, we are really proud of. Also, one thing that is hard to calculate as much, but that I think is important is just the way we've changed the conversation around police and policing.”
AART focuses only on the city budget and not the county, because they don’t have capacity to do both well. Others took up the fight at the county level. Every year he was in office, Supervisor Ryan Clancy introduced dozens of amendments to fund residents’ needs by cutting sheriff office funding (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023). Clancy’s amendments were met with public support, and fierce opposition by other board members and the sheriff. Despite that, a few of the amendments were successfully adopted.
This year, Clancy has left the county board to focus on his work at the state assembly. The backlash to 2020 helped defeat his endorsed successor, Ron Jansen, who lost the seat to a corporate tech bro named Jack Eckblad. Ron Jansen had been attending county budget and committee meetings for years, he ran on a very clear budget focused campaign, speaking directly and honestly about the need to reduce MCSO funding in order to meet human needs. Eckblad said he “will provide the leadership needed to build the diverse coalition” and that “focusing on those core everyday issues will be my primary focus” without actually explaining where the money to both overfund MCSO and address core everyday issues would come from. Unfortunately, Eckblad narrowly won, I guess when you have about twice as much money you can win on vague word salad and empty promises.
Without a strong advocate in district 4, it is unclear whether anyone on the board will stand up for human needs over MCSO greed. Last week, supervisors Justin Bielinski and Juan Miguel Martinez proposed spending leftover American Rescue Plan money on keeping people out of jail rather than throwing it into the bottomless pit of MCSO’s budget deficit. That effort failed, but with pressure from the public, they or other supervisors could get similar amendments passed in the regular budget process.
How to get involved
There are a few steps where politicians are required by law to hear public input. This input is often ignored, but this year, both bodies are taking an especially minimalist approach. Last year, the county executive held four budget town halls, and posted video to his Youtube channel. This year he only held three, and left no record of them. The Mayor held his on August 8, only giving 6 days advance notice, which is less forewarning than previous years. When I asked Devin Anderson from AART about this, he said, “I think the city wants to limit engagement. Part of the reason they gave was because of the RNC, but it's just disappointing that there wasn't more awareness and engagement on the budget earlier this summer, like it had been in some of the past years.” All of these public hearings were also english-only.
The next step is public hearings and town halls (see calendar at the end of this article) where residents can testify about where they want to see money spent. Finally, finance committees at the common council and the county board members will propose amendments and adopt final budgets. At that stage, the public can attend, but testimony is not allowed.
In addition to these public hearings and events, residents can contact their county supervisors and alderpeople directly (look yours up here). Prepare your own story about why we need them to propose and introduce budget amendments that fund human needs by redirecting wasteful spending away from MPD and MCSO budgets.
Following AART is a great way to engage with the city budget. Share the video of their action at Mayor Johnson’s budget announcement, or their work discussing real public safety with northside residents. Check out their liberateMKE toolkit and public testimony training for ways to get involved and voice your support.
Budget Calendar
Monday, September 30, 10am: City Finance and Personnel Committee
Public testimony opportunity!
Tuesday Oct 1: County Executive releases proposed county budget
Monday, October 7, 6:30pm: City joint public hearing
Public testimony opportunity!
Monday, October 7, 6pm: County Supervisor Justin Bielinski’s Budget Town Hall
Thursday, October 10: County Supervisors Steve Shea and Jack Eckblad’s Budget Town Hall (details TBA)
Monday, October 14, 5:30-7:30pm: County Supervisor Caroline Gomez-Tom’s Budget Town Hall, Koscuiszko Community Center
There will be more events that we will add here as we gather them.
