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Home Breaking News The Collins Agreement: How The ACLU Lawsuit Destroyed Proactive Policing in Milwaukee

The Collins Agreement: How The ACLU Lawsuit Destroyed Proactive Policing in Milwaukee

Collins Agreement Milwaukee Police
Top Facts
  • Since the 2017 ACLU lawsuit that resulted in the Collins Agreement against the Milwaukee Police Department, field interviews conducted by Milwaukee police officers have decreased 90%.
  • Since 2012, the year after a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel expose started putting the pressure on by implying police were racist, field interviews, also known as “subject stops,” plummeted a shocking 98%.
  • Field interviews are now so rare that MPD only did 41 of them in December 2022. In 2012, MPD conducted 71,659 field interviews.
  • Traffic stops decreased 79% since the ACLU lawsuit against MPD.
  • Reckless driving has become a crisis. Homicide numbers exploded.
  • Retired and current Milwaukee police officers described a nightmarish scenario of retribution, plummeting morale, and stifling rules that have all but stalled proactive policing in the city.

In all of the hand-wringing over Milwaukee’s skyrocketing crime numbers, one major factor is left out of the conversation by the media and city leaders: The impact of the ACLU lawsuit and subsequent 2018 “stop-and-frisk” settlement against Milwaukee police. It’s been disastrous.

“Why be the only variable in the broken justice system who cares, only to our own personal detriment? I’m just counting the days to retirement. Then they can pay me to stay away until I die,” a Milwaukee police officer told us.

Field interviews have ground almost entirely to a halt, data obtained by Wisconsin Right Now shows. They dropped 90 percent in 2022 since 2017, the year before the Collins Agreement into the ACLU’s claims that the department engaged in unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policies. Since 2012, field interviews, also known as “subject stops,” plummeted a shocking 98%.

Traffic stops have plunged dramatically; they were down 79% in 2022 from 2017. Traffic stops dropped 84% in the past 10 years. Not only have we not seen these numbers reported anywhere, they were tough to come by and had to be cobbled together from MPD use-of-force reports.

Collins agreement

At the same time, reckless driving and violent crime, especially homicide, have escalated in recent years. This created more victims and, in Milwaukee, blacks are disparately victimized.

More than 80 percent of Milwaukee County’s homicide victims in 2022 were black, according to the medical examiner, most in the city (Copy of Homicide Deaths by Year and Cause 2022). Perhaps, rather than being racist, more aggressive Milwaukee police policies were saving black lives by concentrating on the neighborhoods with the highest crime disparities.

As reckless driving soars, costing lives, we set out to gather statistics and the voices of Milwaukee police officers on the topic. These are voices left out of the conversation. We spoke to numerous patrol officers and commanders, retired and currently on the job.

“I used to be very proactive,” one officer told us. “Now, I act like a fireman. I sit and wait for a call, go take that call, then go back to waiting for the next call. I, and most cops, no longer do ANY proactive policing.”

The cumbersome, redundant, and ultimately unworkable Collins Agreement, officers said, is preventing Milwaukee police from conducting proactive policing, namely the field interviews and traffic stops.

Officers believe the Collins Agreement is imperiling homicide investigations, crushing morale, endangering cops, resulting in witnesses not being interviewed, causing more victims, and increasing crime. It’s tying up officers and supervisors for lengthy periods of time reviewing body camera videos and filling out reports.

It’s worth reading their comments to the end because we guarantee you’ve never heard officers this candid in the media before about a policy or this frustrated. They give voice to the numbers.

“It’s my opinion that this agreement is one of the five or so reasons violent crime is so out of control,” an officer told us. “It has really caused the demise of a lot of aggressive and proactive patrol tactics and strategies often used to target and combat violent crime areas simply because cops don’t want to deal with all of the ‘extra’ work and ridicule…I believe that is by design and very intentional.”

Yet the media have ignored this connection, choosing to largely blame COVID for continuing crime spikes and continuing to paint the police as racist. The oversight agency’s research into the Collins Agreement fixates on the percentage of officers still not complying with the laborious documentation requirements.

We aren’t saying the ACLU lawsuit is the only cause of crime explosions; we are suggesting that it’s a factor. Officers who deal with it, day-in and day-out, believe it’s a major one. We think the depleted number of officers on the force and the court backlogs are among other factors driving up crime, although some categories are finally starting to tick back down.

Officers stressed their desire to do proactive policing but feel they can no longer risk it. The Collins Agreement resulted in officers going strictly from call-to-call if they weren’t tied up in endless med runs. This marks a return to the squad-bound 1960s-style policing that Broken Windows was meant to upend. It marked the end of “Broken Windows” policing in Milwaukee, the philosophy that intervening in lower-level disorder will stop major crimes from occurring and get guns and drugs off the streets. It didn’t always result in ticketing. It was about intervention and visibility; it was about keeping the pressure on the criminals.

Field interviews are an important point of contact for officers in preventing and investigating criminal activities. They stop crimes, develop intelligence, and find people with guns and drugs on them. It IS violence prevention; it deters crime. Yet they have ground to an almost halt.

The ACLU touts the Collins Agreement on its website, claiming it was sparked by the Police Department’s “vast and unconstitutional stop-and-frisk program” and alleged rampant racial profiling. The city paid the ACLU $3.4 million as a result of its so-called “stop-and-frisk” policy.

Chief Jeffrey Norman “has continued to stress that compliance with the Collins Agreement and providing high-quality constitutional policing is one of MPD’s highest priorities,” Milwaukee police wrote in a 2021 press release.

The result, officers say: Crime exploded. Morale plunged. Proactive policing screeched to a near halt. More blacks have become victims. No one is willing to talk about that.

The pressure from the media is all in the other direction: “Milwaukee police stop & frisk numbers are down, but not enough,” blared a WISN-TV headline on the topic.


Officers Speak Out

The officers’ comments are stunning. It’s our hope that the Collins Agreement becomes part of the crime discussion in Milwaukee, and that the practical impact on the streets – and on proactive policing – becomes part of the conversation.

“The ACLU (Collins Agreement) has destroyed proactivity within the department, which the crime stats show in my opinion,” a former MPD officer told WRN. “I now work in a suburban department out of Milwaukee County, and let me say it’s a night-and-day difference. We get to be police officers and catch the bad guys.”

Another officer told us: “The citizens of Milwaukee would be blown away by the amount of time police officers are spending behind computer screens dealing with these Collins’ related forms (which are redundant anyways) and not being the watchmen (and watchwomen) they need.”

And yet another officer said: “Violent crime has grown dramatically since the Collins Agreement, and we are scrutinized more drastically. Why can’t we search a car that has the odor of fresh marijuana? Why couldn’t we in prior years pull over cars for not being registered? Why is it an SOP that we cannot pursue a stolen vehicle if we know it is being driven by a juvenile? – which is a large reason the Kia kids exist. How come when we arrest Kia kids, they are out of custody the same day? Why are we arresting the same kid for stealing cars 5 or 10 times?”

This is coming at a time when the Milwaukee police force has already been decimated by at least 18% since 1995.

“The department targets tens of thousands of people without reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, the legal requirement for a police stop,” the ACLU claims. Its class action lawsuit showed “significant disparities between police stop rates for white people and for black and Latino people,” the ACLU says.

Between 2007 and 2015, the ACLU says, the MPD “almost tripled their traffic and pedestrian stops, from around 66,000 to around 196,000.” What the ACLU fails to mention, of course, is that key crime categories also plummeted during that time frame. It was the deployment of Broken Windows policing.

“Most officers I know listen to their radio and respond to what they are sent to. Very few people want to be proactive because of Collins,” an officer told us. “We are very capable of lowering crime, but the city, the Department, Collins, the DA’s office, etc. don’t seem to want that. They push their own agenda or go with the flow, which has allowed this to happen.”

The foundation for the ACLU lawsuit was, in part, a 2011 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story documenting racial disparities in traffic stops and field interviews. In that story, police explained that racial disparities were due to a focus on neighborhoods with higher victimization and offender rates.

The approach derived from a famous strategy pioneered by a Milwaukeean, George Kelling, who wanted to free officers from squad cars to hit beats and do proactive policing. It was used in New York City with great fanfare and success years ago. In Milwaukee, it resulted in dramatic crime decreases.

The goal was to intervene to drive down crime, and that was working. Today, the city’s approach to violence prevention is funneling millions of dollars into an office that doles out T-shirts and holds virtual summits.

However, aggressive policies provoke controversies, and no one is arguing the police were always perfect.

“A black Milwaukee driver is seven times as likely to be stopped by city police as a white resident driver,” the Journal Sentinel wrote.

In 2018, the city reached a settlement in the lawsuit, which is known as the Collins Agreement. A federal court entered an order adopting it.

The order requires, among other things, that officers “document every stop and every frisk conducted by officers, the reason for the encounter, and related demographic information, regardless of the outcome of the stop,” as well as additional “auditing of officers on stop and frisk and racial profiling issues, and provide for discipline of officers who conduct improper stops or fail to document those stops.”

The Collins Agreement was to be in force for “at least the next five years.” It is “being monitored by Plaintiffs’ counsel.”


Proactive Policing at a Standstill

After we publicly asked officers for their opinions, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel rushed out a story on the topic just days later. Predictably, that story spun the issue AGAINST police, implying, again, that they are racist, and arguing the agreement is not fully being met.

Left out of the story: The perceptions of average cops.

“Why would I want to risk my job and how I provide for my family just to stop a car? It’s sad, like I said before a lot of us still want to help our community but aren’t willing to risk being proactive for it,” an officer told us.A lot of us just say screw it, let dispatch send us hitch-to-hitch.”

The Crime and Justice Institute writes annual reports on the Collins Agreement. This year’s report says, “The Defendants focused more intently this year on the annual data analysis proscribed by the Settlement Agreement, which continues to conclude that there are racial and ethnic disparities in encounters between MPD and the public. We applaud the Defendants for trying to find a suitable, additional analysis of the encounter data that will help identify the drivers of these disparities.”

“Our data analysis continues to find racial disparities in stops and searches. People, mostly Black people, continue to be stopped and searched without cause. Racial and ethnic disparities in police stops continue to occur.”

“Finally, we again find convincing evidence of significant racial and ethnic disparities in police encounters in Milwaukee. Unfortunately, we do not see progress in reducing disparities in police encounters specifically for Black residents of Milwaukee as compared to white residents.”

The media dutifully picked up this narrative without bothering to study the other side of the coin.

Who runs the Crime and Justice Institute?

Spurgeon Kennedy, the vice president, has focused his career on “helping adult justice systems implement fair, legal, and effective practices that respect the rights of justice-involved individuals and the safety of local communities,” his bio says. He’s worked on bail issues and “alternatives to incarceration.”

Other team leaders have focused their careers on “criminal justice reform.”

The annual report states: “Police encounter reports are required to include the following information per the Settlement Agreement:”

• Subject’s demographic information
• Location of encounter
• Time and date of the encounter
• Legal justification for the encounter
• Whether frisk and/or search was conducted and resulted in seized contraband, the type of contraband, and the legal justification for the frisk or search
• Legal justification if the use of force was used and type/level of force
• Outcome of the encounter
• Relevant suspect description
• Names and identifying numbers of all officers on the scene

Here’s what officers say the practical effect is on Milwaukee policing:


Officers Unload

Officer #1: ‘It’s been a disaster’

“It’s been a disaster!! What we found on the drug units was that we couldn’t find officers on the streets to do traffic stops for us because they either didn’t want to do the reports or couldn’t articulate the reason for the stops.

We had a real hard time identifying the mobile drug dealers because of the reluctance to do the stops for identification. The cases took much much longer and harder to seize the drugs because of the rate at which they change cars and use rentals. They definitely went mobile after the no pursuit policy. But back then, we still had the uniform cop buy in and they would attempt the stop and be willing to pursue.

After Collins, the uniform cops didn’t want to take the chance of getting the NDC, (non-disciplinary counseling). And, of course, the undercovers couldn’t make the stops so we eventually began using outside agencies to make the stops.

Frustrating. Caused some animosity between patrol and the specialty units. And mistrust between the two.

Not to mention the safety issues I saw watching bodycam and cops afraid to search suspects because they felt they were going to violate the agreement. On bodycams, I watched cops put shooting and homicide suspects in the back of squads not searched. And they were afraid to hold on to witnesses of homicides too long and would let them leave never to be seen again because of the agreement.

Lots of unsolved homicides because of lack of witnesses. When we watched surveillance cameras, we would see cops with witnesses and just letting them go.”


Officer #2: ‘Now I Act Like a Fireman’

“I’m a Milwaukee police officer, and I have pulled only a few traffic stops and field interviews since the ACLU agreement.

It’s self preservation really. The extra reporting, if not filled out correctly, is a one way ticket to IAD (internal affairs division).

I used to be very proactive. Now, I act like a fireman. I sit and wait for a call, go take that call, then go back to waiting for the next call. I, and most cops, no longer do ANY proactive policing.

The ACLU wants us to leave black people alone. OK. So… Don’t b*tch about 194 homicides. If we could police like we used to, without excessive scrutiny, we’d clean up the streets.

But there are so many forces seeing that we don’t do our job anymore. The ACLU, MPD, the DA’s office, and liberal judges.

Why be the only variable in the broken justice system who cares, only to our own personal detriment? I’m just counting the days to retirement. Then they can pay me to stay away until I die.

The ACLU is hurting the specific people they are claiming they are protecting, solely to control and shakedown our department for years or until they deem we are ‘successful.’

It’s all about control rather than fighting for the few aggrieved.”


Officer #3: “Most Proactive Police Work Has Gone Out the Window”

“Since the ACLU got involved, most proactive police work has gone out the window. The main reason behind this is this. If you do a traffic stop and or FI stop, FI means field interview, you now have to fill out these forms. Now you might think these forms are easy and only take a few seconds to do. Wrong, these forms have a lot of detail, but that’s not even the issue.

The issue is if you fill out the forms wrong as in don’t word them the way they want, or miss even 1 little bit of information, you get written up. If you get written up a few times for the same thing, it turns into an internal investigation with possible suspension days from it.

So most cops now are not going to risk getting a suspension for filling out forms correctly, but then they find 1 error that’s really not an error, and you get written up for it. It’s mainly the newer cops with little to no time on that are doing anything proactive on this job. In fact, since they started this, I have done almost no traffic/FI stops since then.

Not to mention, we are extremely short-staffed due to defunding us by not hiring cops for multiple years. So we are extremely busy every day with really no downtime. This is the short version of this issue. The ACLU settlement really hurt Milwaukee and the increase of crime is the cause of it. It hurts the neighborhoods that the ACLU wants to help. They don’t see it that way.”


Officer #4: “Hyper Micro-Manage…Street Cops From Doing ANY Proactive work”

“Regarding the Fubar ACLU-Collins agreement… From the start, everybody involved with accepting this knew it would severely handicap MPD. The whole point of the agreement is to hyper micro-manage any policy from the street cops from doing ANY proactive work. I was a street cop under this policy then a street supervisor, so I saw both sides. I do not know any cop or supervisor that said the agreement was a great idea or would help MPD in any way.

The agreement’s purpose was to strongly discourage street cops from being proactive. The agreement created tons more documentation regarding traffic stops, person stops and arrests. This unnecessary documentation tied up cops and supervisors for hours of their shift, thus keeping them off the street. As a supervisor, myself and many other bosses would contact the Inspections Division, which oversaw the policy. Cops and supervisors wanted to correctly follow the policy but the rules seemed to change daily and were extremely unclear.

Nobody seemed to know what the rule of the day was. I knew some street supervisors that would spend nearly their entire shift attempting to review all of the documentation. Street supervisors should be on the street monitoring everything and assisting the cops. Eventually, cops showed they were not doing proactive work because they didn’t want to get reprimanded or transferred.

Initially, when the agreement started, the top brass stated there would be no penalty for making honest mistakes. But after a few years, cops and supervisors were getting reprimanded and/or transferred. Since nobody wanted to get reprimanded, many of the officers extremely slowed their proactivity because they realized the whole point of the agreement was to make them jump through an extra thousand hoops to perform their job and, if one hoop was missed, there would be consequences.

The ACLU knows that proactivity slows crime, and many more offenders will be arrested. The same exact thing is happening in Chicago and other cities that are under agreements. We both know the crime rates in these cities. MPD is controlled by the WOKE MOB and shame on those who allow it to happen!!!”


Officer #5: “The Mass Confusion Began”

“I worked for MPD. When I graduated from the academy before a lot of the ACLU stuff took effect, I loved doing traffic stops. I loved being a cop and making stops and being proactive. Then the mass confusion began.

We had sergeants calling us in to the district to fix past forms. I personally spent two days inside the district fixing these contact summary forms for prior traffic stops. Then after working on those, the sergeants said they were done wrong. Because the 7th floor (command staff) and inspections and the academy weren’t communicating about what was needed.

I’ve sat through multiple in service training sessions in which the ACLU agreement took most of our training time. We would be taught one thing about these FI CARDS and contact summaries and six months later be told forget that, this is actually how it is supposed to be.

Before I left, it got to the point that you would have multiple supervisors review a FI stop (Terry stop) report, and they would fight about what needed to be put. The ACLU (Collins Agreement) has destroyed proactivity within the department, which the crime stats show in my opinion.

I now work in a suburban department out of Milwaukee County, and let me say it’s a night-and-day difference. We get to be police officers and catch the bad guys.

The department itself is hemorrhaging officers with 10 years and under on the job. Besides myself, one district has lost 5 or 6 officers leaving for lateral transfers for suburban departments.”


Officer #6: “A Minefield Not Worth Crossing”

“The Collins settlement agreement requires very specific reporting for every traffic stop, and Terry Stop (field interview/investigative interview of a citizen suspected of possibly committing a crime or violating city ordinance). This additional reporting is on top of other reports such as the CAD, officer’s police report, and arrest paperwork, as well as citations or warnings that may be issued, that have historically been the way interactions were documented.

This additional required ‘contact summary’ report for traffic stops, and ‘field interview’ report for Terry Stops, is redundant and regurgitates information that would be contained in a CAD, police report or arrest report. These additional reports required by the agreement add an additional 15-30 min worth of paperwork to the officer’s laundry list of other required documentation. These forms also require the officers to review their body cameras of the stop to make sure they didn’t miss anything or misreport their actions. Depending on the length of the stop, this could be a 15-30 minute video.

In addition, the officer’s body camera typically takes a period of time to download to the server, prior to the officer being able to watch the video. These tasks are all required to be completed prior to the officer going home for their shift. You can imagine that this increase in officer inactivity on the street, and mundane redundant reporting of facts, and review of video can cost officers of anywhere between 30-60 minutes per interaction. This is time that could be spent responding to calls, patrolling, or conducting further police contacts.

Further, the additional forms required by the agreement, are required to be typo and error-free. Unlike other police reports and documentation, which are not scrutinized to this level and take into consideration human error, these reports are declared non-compliant if simple errors are made.

These errors result in NDCA’s or Non Disciplinary Corrective Actions. These NDCA reports must be filed by supervisors (which typically take 30-45 minutes), and require a thorough examination of body cameras as well. These NDCA’s are tracked by Internal Affairs Division, and continued NDCA’s have the threat of internal investigation/discipline behind them.

This fear by officers that they may fill the form out wrong or make an error on the report, which could lead to an internal investigation, puts many officers in the mindset that it is a minefield not worth crossing, and they avoid the reporting requirement altogether by simply not making stops. Additionally, some supervisors have encouraged officers that the best way to not get NDCA’s is to not make stops.

You can see how a police force that lacks the desire to do proactive stops, leads to fewer police interactions, and can directly influence crime numbers.

Lastly, these forms require supervisor approval, and supervisors to review all body cameras from each interaction involving traffic stops and Terry Stops, even though the officers have already reviewed their own cameras. This doubles already existing redundancy and takes supervisors off the street where they could be supervising officers in the field.

The citizens of Milwaukee would be blown away by the amount of time police officers are spending behind computer screens dealing with these Collins’ related forms (which are redundant anyways) and not being the watchmen (and watchwomen) they need. Further, since there are required time frames for when these forms must be submitted and approved by supervision, there has been tons of hours of overtime paid out by the city just so officers and supervisors could complete these redundant reports and fulfill the body camera viewing requirement of the Collins settlement.

The department (which is incredibly shorthanded officer resources) is utilizing officers and supervisors to staff an inspections division whose sole purpose is to ensure compliance prior to the forms being sent to CJI (the woke institution reviewing our compliance to the court order).

What blows my mind is when a simple error is made to a report, officers or supervisors can not go back and correct the error once it is submitted. This is clearly not designed to seek truth, but to be an ‘I got ya’ study into the police department.

The department has also created a full-time position at the office of the chief for a former city attorney to review all of these submitted forms.

Lastly, CJI is the 3rd party company that reviews our compliance on the forms that are submitted and even determines if officers’ justifications of reasonable suspicion for stops, probable cause for searches, and reasonable fear for pat downs (fields that need to be filled out on the required reports) are valid or ‘agreeable.’ CJI is clearly a woke, reform the police organization…one only has to look at their website to see what they support and fight for.

With the blatant political motives gleamed from their website (A mural of George Floyd is prominently displayed right on their homepage) it is clear the Milwaukee Police are submitting these forms to an agency with an anti-police ‘bias.'”


Officer #7: “Being Proactive Comes With Negative Marks”

“After Collins, for traffic stops, we have to fill a field in our traffic stop for ‘how many non black occupants’ were observed in the vehicle. There are no fields to fill out for any other race.

We get a ‘use of force’ ding on our record for having our guns out of our holsters while near someone else that is affecting an arrest, or another ding for not handing out a ‘contact card’ that has the number to our Internal Affairs on the back explaining how to file a complaint on us – but to combat this, the Department gives out what… 50ish awards per year?

So we can get several bad marks on our record per year, but even when you do an outstanding job they won’t give you a positive mark? Why would you do proactive policing? The positive marks protect you from the negative. Being proactive comes with negative marks based on the policies since Collins. But the Department will not protect you with positives.

When you are patrol and take it upon yourself and do proactive activities, you’re going to earn bad marks. That’s the job, you go after homicide, sexual offenders, burglars, etc. You are generally going to be in a use-of-force situation. Do you politely knock on a door of a homicide suspect? Or do you have a gun in your hand knowing they may not want to go to jail for 20 years? Boom. Use of force, a negative hit on your career. All for trying to do the correct and brave thing. You could have sat in your car and not been proactive.

Most officers I know listen to their radio and respond to what they are sent to. Very few people want to be proactive because of Collins. We are very capable of lowering crime, but the city, the Department, Collins, the DA’s office, etc. don’t seem to want that. They push their own agenda or go with the flow, which has allowed this to happen.

Dozens if not a hundred or more left the Department over the past year. Other departments treat their police like police officers. They are paying better with much better work conditions. We’ve had what? Close to 1,000 fatal or nonfatal shootings this year?

Put that to a 25-year career. 25,000 shooting or homicide victims alone per career duration. I don’t know how that averages per officer, but we do the most dangerous job in the state, we are not paid the highest, we do not get awarded appropriately for good work, we are dinged for everything, we see multiple times more horrific things than anyone else that lives in the state, we are in danger when we get in our squad cars, and we are supported by a chief that tells us the thin blue line is racist…”


Officer #8: ‘Punishments Are Getting Worse’

“I work for MPD, and the Collins Agreement is garbage. We all want to police and do our job, but none of us wants to risk putting our job on the line to do traffic stops or field interviews and get NDCA’s.

The ACLU has continuously pushed the line of what they want, first it was this or that, now it’s that or this. It’s gotten so bad that a lot of cops don’t even know how to do just a standard traffic stop because of all the nonsense.

Punishments are getting worse too. We had been told that we could get 4 NDCA’s in a year for the same thing and that if that happened we would get remedial training, if it continues to happen the punishment would progress, including getting an internal, and that it would reset after a year.

Now, just a couple weeks ago, they informed us that the supervisor union and the MPA agreed that if officers get I think 4 NDCA’s for the same thing in THREE YEARS…internal.

Why would I want to risk my job and how I provide for my family just to stop a car? It’s sad, like I said before a lot of us still want to help our community but aren’t willing to risk being proactive for it.

A lot of us just say screw it, let dispatch send us hitch to hitch (which we are so busy and short-staffed that, that’s how a normal day is, almost don’t have time for traffic stops).

A lot of us also feel that the command staff doesn’t have our back. We see more things coming out at roll call targeting the cops instead of trying to assist us in doing our jobs. I mean (Chief Jeffrey) Norman did say that if a cop’s body-worn camera isn’t on, they aren’t credible.

For example: I put in the narrative part of a traffic stop form (not the ticket narrative, some other ridiculous part because of the Collins Agreement): ‘operator disregarded a red traffic signal.’

That would get kicked back because there isn’t enough justification, though a 12-year-old would understand that. They want the direction the car was traveling, the cross streets, all sorts of stuff that have nothing to do with the elements of the crime. It’s pretty wild.

But regardless, without the basic traffic stops and field interviews, I feel that’s why crime is running rampant. Broken windows theory does work. But our city and department leadership doesn’t think so, or care…or both it seems.

Another thing that I was thinking about is how the public doesn’t know what the Collins Agreement is. A lot of people I talk to have never heard of it. It would be nice if some light was shed on it, and how when it started crime started to spike in Milwaukee.”

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