Why Do Cavalier Johnson and Republicans Want Cops in MPS Schools?
When Republicans in the legislature are saying the same stuff as a “liberal” Milwaukee mayor, you know you’re in for a bad time. It’s what led to an unfair, exploitative shared revenue deal that’s starving Milwaukee. It’s what’s led to massive public financing for the Milwaukee Bucks’ Fiserv Forum and the Milwaukee Brewers’ American Family Field nee Miller Park (meanwhile, the sort-of-publicly-owned Lambeau Field hasn’t needed public funding since 2003. Huh!) Both of these things take public tax revenue away from Milwaukeeans and use them for… at best, questionable ends.1
And now Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson is aligning with a Republican Senator from Watertown to force Milwaukee Public Schools to bring cops back into our public schools. This is, in large part, in reaction to an unfortunate act of violence that did not actually happen on MPS school grounds.
The evidence is fairly conclusive on the effect of so-called “school resource officers” on students: more students are suspended and brought into our often-fatal or permanently damaging criminal justice system without a corresponding reduction in violence in their schools. Students feel, understandably, that they’re being treated as threats. Cop-loving people are happy because they see the presence of police as an end in itself, one that never really needs to be justified by evidence or data. Cops are good, and cops are now present, so that’s good.
All of this is adjacent to the concept of security theater: a rough theory that cops in schools, forced shoe removal at airports, metal detectors at baseball games… all of it is more-or-less for show. It doesn’t make us safer, not really, but it makes some of us –those with the most wealth to lose, maybe– feel safer, and that’s enough to justify it. It’s a working, unproven theory, but one that lines up with the facts of the ongoing situation in Milwaukee: Milwaukee Public Schools haven’t had cops in schools since 2016, and haven’t had cops “protecting” them on grounds since 2020. The latter practice ended after George Floyd’s murder, in a rare act of responsiveness to public pressure against policing.
Has Mayor Johnson shown that violence in MPS schools has gotten worse post 2016? Is there evidence of violence that cops in MPS schools prevented pre-2016? Even anecdotal evidence?
Again, Mayor Johnson and his Republican friends in the legislature are reacting to three teens attacking three adults outside of school grounds. The place where police could have, presumably, stopped the assault/battery if that was the kind of thing they actually do (note: it’s not.)
It’s a little hard to parse Mayor Johnson’s thinking here… does he think having cops in MPS schools will prevent kids from having bad thoughts and doing bad things elsewhere? What’s the intended effect of putting armed, non-teacher adults into schools, if not to intimidate kids into passivity? How does he actually think that more cops in schools will prevent teens from doing bad things outside of schools, as a practical matter?
The Milwaukee Police Association thinks it has an answer. They recently filed a data request that showed police responded to 3000+ calls from MPS schools in 2023. Wow, that’s a lot of calls! It’s also terrible evidence if you’re trying to show that the police actually resolve these kind of problems, that our limited resources can’t be put towards better, non-carceral, restorative solutions, or that having more cops in schools does anything useful. Remember: the security theater theory posits that things like “calling the police” make us feel safer without actually being safer. None of this disproves that.
Not everything is a culture war, but also… well, politics is always about culture, and culture is always to some extent shaped by politics. Superstructure, Gramsci, Pete Buttigieg’s dad, etc. This is pretty obviously an example of Mayor Johnson joining the general reactionary turn on cops “post-pandemic.” There are a few possible motivations here: maybe he’s planning to seek higher office and is trying to shore up his law and order bonafides. Maybe he’s pissed at the MPS board for defying terms of the terrible revenue deal he struck with Republicans in the legislature (something akin to a sunk cost fallacy, where someone places too much value on something they’ve already “sunk” time/energy/resources into. That’s right, Cujo went to college!) Maybe Mayor Johnson really believes that forcing MPS to keep 25 cops around will do something positive when it will actually just scare students.
More likely, though, Mayor Johnson is making a cynical calculus that is unfortunately typical with liberals: that tacking to the right’s benefits outweigh the political costs. He’s doing what the Milwaukee Police Association and Republican legislators want, maybe gaining him a bit of credibility with Wisconsin’s power structure –but losing only a few principled, abolitionist voters/elected officials/organizations/etc in the process. People and organizations that were already not a key part of his base.
Forcing Milwaukee Public Schools to keep armed agents of the state around is either cynical or foolish and in either case remains a terrible idea. If Mayor Johnson is more comfortable working with Senator John Jagler than local, principled, evidence-focused police critics, he’s barely a liberal at all.
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Public investment in Miller Park/American Family Field easily tops $1 billion, if you add up the $600M estimate from this article and the $500M recently signed into law by Governor Tony Evers. Public investment in Fiserv has been more like $250M, but there’s at least one good argument that the deal was structured to take in net revenue for the state. But pay attention to the comment that points out that the author isn’t taking into account county and city contributions… anyway, it’s complicated.
