Milwaukee Police officers, despite having the toughest law enforcement job in the state, have been forced to go without a pay raise for two years during rising inflation, and their salaries are already less than officers in suburban departments who deal with less danger and lower crime rates, Wisconsin Right Now has documented.

“Cops haven’t had a raise since January 2022,” said Milwaukee Police Association Vice President Joel Moeller in an interview with WRN. The MPA and city are headed to arbitration for the first time in 30 years, he and MPA President Alex Ayala said.

Meanwhile, the Milwaukee police recruitment crisis escalates, with the city unable to fill recruit classes (the civilian and mayoral-appointed Fire and Police Commission is charged with recruitment). The number of sworn officers has been whittled down systematically, starting with the administration of former Mayor Tom Barrett, plummeting by at least 26% since the mid-1990s (the actual number of officers right now is 1,597; in 1996, there were 2,176.) There are 200 vacancies with another academy class nearing retirement eligibility in just a few weeks, according to Ayala and Moeller.

We’ve lost count of how many frustrated and upset Milwaukee Police officers have reached out to us about the stagnant pay and lack of a contract. “No one is happy about the contract. They keep doing this with pay. Making it impossible to get people to apply. Why work here when you can go to another place and make way more money,” one exasperated veteran officer told us. He did not want his name printed for fear of retaliation.

“They keep pushing – they want us to accept a low raise with no back pay. Basically getting away with not giving us a new contract at no cost,” he added.

Officers indicated that they can’t imagine why recruits would choose MPD over suburban departments, which offer more money and support and less risk, save for the rare person who wants more action or a big-city experience, including access to a mounted patrol, SWAT team, and the like. They told WRN that they feel underappreciated and hampered from doing good, proactive police work by the laborious reporting requirements of the Collins Agreement and the FPC’s recent high-profile non-promotion of a popular award-winning officer who did not have any significant disciplinary record.

The MPA agreed to speak with WRN at length on the topic. The city’s spokesman, Jeff Fleming, responded, “Negotiations are in an active phase. The city wants to settle contracts with all the unions. Whether that’s at the bargaining table or in arbitration, our preference is to exchange information exclusively in the negotiating process, not through media channels.”

According to the MPA, the problem is that the city and rank-and-file union have not been able to reach an agreement on a new contract, even though the old contract expired years ago. Ayala and Moeller say they can’t share details of the negotiations, including the contention about back pay, but they also said the MPA and city are now headed to arbitration because of the stalemate.

At any other company, workers treated this way would walk off the job or strike, Ayala and Moeller said, but MPD officers can’t do that. Ayala and Moeller said they wish the police chief, mayor, and executive director of the Fire and Police Commission would take more of an active stance in arguing on behalf of the officers.

“We want the city to realize that officers are worth every penny they earn. They’re the hardest working officers in the state,” said Ayala. Both he and Moeller noted that officers in Milwaukee take a much higher volume of calls. “I want the public to know our officers are working very hard to keep the city safe. They’re not being compensated with a fair wage.”

We obtained data through public records that shows the disparity in pay:

Brookfield: $98,000
Muskego: $90,785
Wauwatosa: $93,153
West Allis: $92,424
New Berlin: $92,798
Menomonee Falls: $93,038
Grafton: $93,931
Milwaukee: $85,020 (officers hired after Act 10); $89,532 (officers hired before Act 10)

The MPD figures are where officers top out after five years on the job. New recruits start at $47,540 and then rise to $63,390 after six months. Officers can get small bumps in pay if they have a bachelor’s or master’s degree.

The contract negotiations stalled for several years. According to Ayala and Moeller, part of the delay related to MPA’s involvement in Act 12, the shared revenue bill which also dealt with shoring up police staffing issues and provided the city with enough funding to ostensibly give officers pay raises.

However, after Act 12 passed, nothing moved forward. The city’s negotiating team has also been in chaos; according to the MPA, one city negotiator left, and the replacement ended up dying tragically of cancer. However, the MPA said the city failed to communicate about this issue for months as the contract negotiations stalled further.

“Once they got the funding, we thought they would take care of cops,” Moeller said.

But that hasn’t happened.