The Social Development Commission’s property corporation faces a foreclosure lawsuit for owing nearly $3 million in mortgage payments on its North Avenue buildings in Milwaukee, according to court records.
SD Properties Inc. is the tax-exempt corporation that owns the buildings of the Social Development Commission, or SDC.
Forward Community Investments Inc., a community development financial institution with Madison and Milwaukee offices, filed a complaint March 27 against SD Properties and SDC with the Milwaukee County Circuit Court.
SD Properties owes Forward Community Investments approximately $2.3 million in principal and interest for a 2020 construction mortgage and about $679,000 for a 2023 mortgage, for a total of just under $2.98 million, according to the complaint.
“FCI would be thrilled to see the critical services provided by CR-SDC return to the community,” said Ryan Zerwer, president & CEO of Forward Community Investments, in a statement. “However, the past 12 months, communication from SD Properties, Inc. has failed to provide sufficient information on actionable plans to fully resume operations and start meeting their financial obligations.”
William Sulton, SDC’s attorney, confirmed that SD Properties is in default on its mortgage payments.
“SDC has been in discussions with FCI about what kind of remedies they intend to pursue, so I guess it’s not a complete surprise,” Sulton said.
“I think the impact of the foreclosure case is it puts the North Avenue building at risk, and if there is no North Avenue building, then that is the majority of programs that SDC had in ’23.”
SDC also is listed on the lawsuit as a defendant as a guarantor for SD Properties.
Background and timeline
Forward Community Investments has been a lender to SD Properties since 2015 through its Community Development Loan Fund, which provides “financing to nonprofit organizations and community organizations for mission-focused projects that will work to reduce racial and socioeconomic disparities across the state of Wisconsin,” according to the complaint.
SD Properties entered into a construction mortgage on Jan. 22, 2020, of approximately $1.98 million plus interest, and then modified the agreement on July 22, 2020, to increase the total amount to $2.36 million.
In March 2023, SD Properties entered into a separate agreement in which it would owe about $665,000 and interest for a mortgage of five property parcels, which include the main office at 1730 North Ave., a warehouse at 1810 North Ave. and parking lots, according to court documents.
SD Properties defaulted on a “significant loan” in April 2024, according to Zerwer.
SD Properties also defaulted because it did not pay the entire amount of debt and interest owed for 2020 mortgage by the end date, or maturity date, of Dec. 22, 2024, according to the complaint.
Forbearance action stalled
Before the legal filing, Forward Community Investments presented SD Properties in the fall with a forbearance agreement, in which it would refrain from immediately collecting the obligations due from SD Properties, and revised it several times.
However, Zerwer said revisions on the agreement reached an impasse in March.
SDC board members discussed a “time-sensitive” resolution related to SD Properties at an emergency meeting on March 24 and decided to postpone taking action.
“We’ve been doing many strategic moves to prevent the foreclosure of this building and possibly a deficiency judgment against our Teutonia (location),” said Vincent Bobot, an SDC commissioner and chair of the SD Properties board, at the meeting.
“If there’s not a foreclosure, it means it’s still going to be drawn out and still take quite some time, but nevertheless, we want that time,” he said.
Board members planned to return to the item at a later meeting so they could discuss it directly with Sulton, who was not at the meeting.
The forbearance agreement would allow SD Properties to keep the North Avenue main office and the 18th Street warehouse, Sulton said, but SDC’s main issue now is having no funding.
“Even if we win the lawsuit, without any funding, we’ll just end up with another lawsuit down the road,” Sulton said.
Legal proceedings
SD Properties has retained attorneys from Kerkman & Dunn to represent it in the foreclosure case, Sulton said.
SDC and SD Properties have 20 days to respond to the summons and complaint before the case proceeds in court.
“We feel we have been patient and extended every opportunity to the leadership of SD Properties, Inc. to work in partnership with us to resolve the loan default,” Zerwer said. “In fact, we call upon SD Properties, Inc. to once again work with us on a forbearance plan.”
Public hearing Friday on SDC
The Wisconsin Department of Children and Families is hosting a public hearing on SDC’s designation as a community action agency from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Friday, April 4.
The hearing will be held in the Milwaukee State Office Building, 819 N. 6th St., in Conference Rooms 40 and 45 on the first floor.
Members of SEIU and Voces de la Frontera arrive at the Capitol Tuesday | Wisconsin Examiner photo
Online rumors warning of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) patrols around polling places in Milwaukee and Madison appear to be unfounded. The reports circulated on social media claiming that there would be “more than 5,000 ICE agents patrolling the areas” in the two cities, as voters went to the polls to cast ballots in the April 1 election for candidates running for Wisconsin Supreme Court, state superintendent, and referendum questions focusing on voter ID.
Anxieties about ICE activities have been heightened under the Trump Administration. Recent weeks have seen videos showing plain-clothes, masked ICE agents detaining people on the street. Some of the detainees had been arrested after participating in activist activities, such as protests calling for an end to the war in Gaza. Fears of ICE raids have increased in Milwaukee and Madison, as in other cities.
Spokespersons for Milwaukee and Madison city government told Wisconsin Examiner that they have not heard any reports, complaints, or notifications about ICE agents at polling places. A spokesperson for the ICE office in Milwaukee said, “due to our operational tempo and the increased interest in our agency, we are not able to research and respond to rumors or specifics of routine daily operations for ICE.”
Meanwhile, turnout in Milwaukee has been so high that local news outlets are reporting that polling sites across the city have run out of ballots. The city’s Election’s Commission is arranging for fresh ballots to be sent to polling stations. In Tuesday’s election Republican-backed Supreme Court candidate and former Wisconsin attorney general Brad Schimel is facing off against Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, who has the backing of state Democrats. In the state superintendent’s race, incumbent Jill Underly is facing challenger Brittany y Kinser. Wisconsinites will also get to decide whether the state’s constitution should be amended to codify a voter ID requirement.
City of Milwaukee election officials process absentee ballots at one location on Election Day, which sometimes means ballots are still being fed into tabulators late that night or early the next morning. Results are reported once processing finishes.
Conservative Brad Schimel, who faces liberal Susan Crawford in the April 1 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, suggested the late counting was malfeasance, a long-debunked claim.
Schimel on March 18 urged supporters to vote early “so we don’t have to worry that at 11:30 in Milwaukee, they’re going to find bags of ballots that they forgot to put into the machines, like they did in 2018, or in 2024.”
Schimel lost his attorney general re-election bid in 2018. Republican Eric Hovde lost to U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., in the Nov. 5, 2024, election.
State law prohibits municipalities from preparing absentee ballots before Election Day. A bill that would allow an earlier start has stalled.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Some Milwaukee organizations are starting to feel the effects of federal funding cuts, the result of Trump administration efforts to shrink the federal government and make it more efficient.
Although many attempts to roll back funding face legal challenges, and the federal and state budgets are under review, neighborhood and advocacy-focused organizations in Milwaukee are making difficult decisions around staffing, program planning and fundraising as they wait for answers.
“I think the biggest challenge for us is just the uncertainty of the situation,” said Bill Schmitt, executive director of Rooted & Rising, a social service agency based in Washington Park.
Vina Xiong, education and outreach director at HAWA, said 63% of the organization’s budget relies on federal funds.
“We had to do this because a lot of the federal grants covered our staff pay, and without us really knowing if we’re going to be getting the funds, we couldn’t allow to keep anyone on our team without paying them fairly,” Xiong said.
HAWA receives funding to advocate for domestic abuse and sexual assault survivors through the Victims of Crime Act, or VOCA, and other grant programs administered by the state Department of Children and Families or End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin.
Schmitt said the first funding cut to directly impact Rooted & Rising is tied to Section 4, a capacity-building and community development grant program from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The Associated Press and Bloomberg CityLab reported that HUD terminated awards in February to at least two of three national organizations that distribute Section 4 grants to local community organizations, including Local Initiatives Support Corp., or LISC.
LISC Milwaukee distributed $225,000 in Section 4 grants to four local organizations with contracts ending between February and May, according to Theodore Lipscomb, executive director of LISC Milwaukee.
Lipscomb said the grants are foundational to LISC’s efforts to help other organizations become prepared to develop new work and pull in other investments, especially with affordable housing projects.
“It can include a portion of staffing,” Lipscomb said.
“It also can be about organizational capacity, like making sure that you have good, strong financial oversight and governance and that sort of thing to make sure that you’re successful long term.”
Rooted & Rising used its $50,000 community development grant, ending in March, to support neighborhood engagement. Losing that funding would impact the work, Schmitt said, but it is not fully reliant on one grant.
“But if it’s a sign of things to come, it certainly becomes a much bigger problem for us,” Schmitt said.
Supporting projects and programming
VIA CDC, a community development corporation serving the neighborhoods of Silver City, Burnham Park and Layton Park, also received a $50,000 Section 4 grant from LISC Milwaukee that it used to pay staff salaries.
“My fingers are crossed that there will be a resolution that comes forward that allows us to apply for this funding or some version of it,” said JoAnna Bautch, executive director of VIA CDC.
Bautch said she doesn’t think the grant changes will cause VIA to make staffing changes, but it may have to reallocate some other funding.
VIA’s Section 4 contract ended at the end of February, but Bautch said LISC offered support to the organizations for 30 days after the grants were halted.
LISC Milwaukee had planned to distribute another award of $420,000 to extend contracts to four organizations and provide contracts to five additional organizations – all of which are currently suspended, according to Lipscomb.
“Then what that really means is that there’s a project somewhere that’s going to stall because someone’s not going to be working on it,” Lipscomb said.
Thinking about funding alternatives
At HAWA, Xiong said the organization has been able to submit reimbursements to cover pay and services so far this year, but that the organization’s leadership team is thinking about ways to pursue other funding.
“I think this current situation makes us really think about where else we need to look, in terms of more stable funding or funding that can also help support advocacy work that doesn’t rely on federal state funding so much,” Xiong said.
Bautch and Schmitt both said they are working to identify alternative sources of funding.
“I see our philanthropic funders wanting to step up to the plate,” Bautch said. “I had a brief conversation with folks at Zilber Family Foundation who give us a lot of support, and they are trying to strategize on how they can support us.”
How you can help
HAWA, Rooted & Rising and VIA recommend following their social media accounts and newsletters for updates, contacting your senators and representatives, or donating to their programs to show support for their work.
“For the most part, what we’re talking about here are really essential services for our community that are being provided by agencies like ours, that are mission-driven and meeting real needs for the community, and it’s really vital that those programs continue,” Schmitt said.
From 2018 to 2021, nearly 6.25% of children younger than 6 in Milwaukee County tested for lead were considered lead-poisoned, with percentages of children poisoned in some Milwaukee neighborhoods nearing 25%, according to data from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
Lead hazards in paint, water and soil are common throughout many of Milwaukee’s older homes and buildings, contributing to the widespread issue of lead poisoning. Here are some ways that you can identify and manage lead hazards.
One reason why is because lead paint, identified as a leading cause of lead poisoning by the health department, was used often in homes and buildings before it was outlawed in 1978.
“You should always assume that a building has lead paint if it’s older than 1978,” said Michael Mannan, home environmental health director at the health department.
But lead contamination in water can extend beyond the city’s water mains and service lines. Plumbing materials like pipes and faucets inside the building can still contain lead.
Before 1986, interior plumbing materials like pipes and faucets could be made entirely of lead, and plumbing materials made before 2014 may contain higher levels of lead.
Soil is another common source of lead contamination. Paint chips and dust from the exterior of homes built before 1978 can result in high lead levels in soil, and deposits from leaded gasoline and industrial activity also can contaminate soil.
What can you do?
“Make sure that your child gets screened for lead,” Mannan said.
The health department recommends testing all children for lead poisoning at the ages of 12, 18 and 24 months and then once every year until the age of 6.
The health department Lead-Safe Registry also lists properties that have been inspected and verified to be lead-safe. However, at the time of this story, only 18 properties in the city have participated in the registry program.
Milwaukee’s land management system also lists important information about a property, such as past lead orders or permits that would indicate that lead abatement has been completed.
But this only provides information for one point in time, Mannan said. Even if a home has undergone lead abatement in the past, new renovations and construction or further deterioration may introduce lead hazards.
Property owners also are required to disclose any past lead abatement to a tenant at the time of lease. A lead disclosure is also required to be provided to tenants at any building built before 1978.
“If you’re not receiving those documents, that should be a concern,” Mannan said.
Lead-safe practices
It is also important to maintain lead-safe practices, especially if you live in a building built before 1978.
The first step, Mannan said, is to check for flaking or chipping paint, especially around high-movement areas such as windowsills, which can cause toxic lead dust to gather. Areas with deteriorated paint can be a risk and will require professional remediation and repair efforts, such as repainting or sealing an area.
If you see any serious paint hazards, there are a few interim controls you can make to an area before completing more permanent repairs. Before cleaning lead dust, make sure that children are not present.
Mannan recommends using wet cleaning methods, like wiping or mopping, to clean off lead dust, and to make sure to dispose of a mophead or paper towel after wiping an area clean. A HEPA vacuum, which has additional filtration over a typical vacuum, also can be used to clean up lead dust. Free HEPA vacuum rentals from the health department are available to property owners during cleaning or renovation projects.
Covering a paint hazard with tape can help in especially deteriorated areas, but removing the tape afterward can cause more damage to the paint.
While these practices are helpful, “these are just intermediate controls until you can really rectify the paint hazard,” Mannan said.
It also is important to use cold filtered water for drinking and cooking. Using hot water from the tap can cause lead to dissolve more quickly, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Not all filters remove lead, however. Look for a point-of-use filter, such as a pitcher or faucet-mounted filter with the NSF/ANSI 42 and 53 designations, for lead certification. More information is available here.
In some situations, Milwaukee Water Works will provide a voucher for a free water filter at properties when a lead service line replacement is scheduled.
The health department also recommends maintaining other clean practices to help lower lead risks. These recommendations include washing hands regularly, washing children’s toys and removing shoes at the door to prevent tracking in soil with lead dust.
As it moves forward, Columbia’s leadership wants to modernize while continuing to serve Milwaukee’s Black and underserved communities by helping more families own homes in their neighborhoods.
After Milwaukee native Sharon Adams moved back to her parents’ home in Lindsay Heights in 1997, she opened up an account at the nearby savings and loan association at 2020 W. Fond du Lac Ave. with her cousin when they learned its history.
“It’s a bit of a mystery to me that Columbia has survived without a merger throughout these years and it’s still, for me, the place to go and support and I would expect to be supported,” said Adams, who is a founder of Walnut Way Conservation Corp., a nonprofit focused on community-led development in Lindsay Heights.
The Halyards and Columbia’s history
Wilbur and Ardie Clark Halyard founded Columbia Savings & Loan Association in 1924 to help Black people secure home loans when redlining and racial covenants restricted housing options and banks discriminated against Black people.
The Halyards moved from the South to Beloit in 1920, then to Milwaukee in 1923, advocating for the rights of African Americans along the way, according to Clayborn Benson, director of the Wisconsin Black Historical Society, 2620 W. Center St., Milwaukee.
“People wanted to buy their homes, and the Halyards made it possible to be able to do that,” Benson said.
The Halyards worked hard (and without pay for many years) to establish the association, which survived through social, economic and political changes to Milwaukee and the country.
“It’s one of those things where you knew if you needed to get a loan, or you wanted to buy a house, they would work with you, whereas other more traditional institutions might overlook you,” said Steven DeVougas, chairman of the North Avenue Marketplace Business Improvement District 32.
The bank’s lasting impact on Milwaukee can especially be felt in Halyard Park, where the Halyards worked closely with real estate agent Beechie O. Brooks to finance homes in a new development after the construction of Interstate 43.
Modernizing the mission-focused bank
Ernest Jones, the chair/president and CEO of Columbia Savings & Loan Association since 2022, said the bank has stayed true to its mission but needs to modernize.
As a savings and loan association, Columbia offers savings accounts, loans, mortgages and certificates of deposit.
Jones said he understands the limitations of Columbia’s niche market and model — it has no checking or online banking, but has built relationships with customers and partner banks.
“We need money to advance our technology, and it’s going to be a significant investment,” he said.
In addition to pursuing technology updates, Columbia has added new staff and plans to add new board members.
Seeking new deposits
The Republican National Convention Host Committee, Horicon Bank and other banks and institutions have made deposits to Columbia, bringing in new funding to support the bank’s lending efforts to local homebuyers.
The Wisconsin Black Chamber of Commerce committed to depositing $1 million in Columbia Savings & Loan Association in 2023. Ruben Hopkins, the chamber’s chairman and CEO, said the amount is small compared to what other institutions could deposit to support the bank.
“I congratulate them on being around for 100 years, and I’d like for them to be around for 100 more,” Hopkins said. “But again, if they don’t get the resources they need, it’s just something for the history books.”
Still focused on homeownership
Columbia’s mission stays relevant because the ZIP codes around the bank, 53205 and 53206, have some of the highest rates of poverty in the state, and mortgage payments can be more affordable than rent, Jones said.
“A part of our mission is not only to put people in homes, but to educate our community on the value of homeownership,” Jones said. “It extends to everything else economically and financially for people’s lives.”
The entrance to the Ukrainian city of Irpin holds a harsh reminder of the trauma suffered just three years ago.
Next to a newly built structure crossing the icy Irpin River lies the mangled remains of the Romanovsky Bridge that Ukrainian forces intentionally destroyed to block Russian soldiers from advancing to the capital of Kyiv.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began Feb. 24, 2022. Oleksandr Markushyn remembers the moment clearly.
The mayor of Irpin, a Milwaukee sister city, says he received a text on the messaging platform WhatsApp from the Russian military, informing him it would soon invade his town. Markushyn had two choices, according to the text: He could either surrender his city to Russia and remain mayor, or the Russian military would take Irpin by force.
He hugged his 4-year-old son, Mark, close to him during an interview with the Cap Times as he recalled the Russian military threatening to harm his child if he did not surrender.
Markushyn refused their menacing proposal.
“And I wrote, ‘Try to destroy (us),’” he said, proudly.
Russian forces occupied the city for one horrifying month, during which close to 300 civilians were killed, thousands of homes were demolished and 70% of the city’s infrastructure was destroyed.
“Why was Irpin such a key city for the Russians? Because Irpin is only 5 kilometers from Kyiv,” Markushyn said.
The burned and shelled remains of the Irpin, Ukraine, cultural center building are seen through an anti-tank roadblock on Feb. 17, 2025. (Erin McGroarty / The Cap Times)
If Russian troops had advanced to Kyiv, the country likely would have fallen into Russian control altogether. To keep that from happening, Ukrainian troops blew up the only bridge out of Irpin.
The self-destruction might have saved the country, but it meant thousands of civilians had to evacuate through winter mud and the frigid river. Some were able to evacuate by train in the first days of the invasion, but Russia quickly bombed the railways civilians were using to flee and continued to shell the area of the river while civilians escaped on foot.
Markushyn evacuated his own son and thousands of others but stayed back to defend Irpin. In addition to serving as the city’s mayor, he also led the area’s territorial defense squadron.
“When I was appointed as the head of our territorial defense, I had two main decisions,” he said. “The first was to build defensive lines, defensive fortifications for our city, and the second was the evacuation of the population.”
Down the road from Irpin, the neighboring town of Bucha suffered what much of the world considers war crimes. Unarmed civilians were raped and murdered in cold blood. Images of their bodies lining the streets were broadcast around the globe.
Exploding teddy bears
In Irpin, as they retreated at the end of March 2022, occupying Russian soldiers rigged land mines in the rubble of decimated homes and nearby playgrounds. They planted children’s teddy bears with grenades hidden inside, Markushyn said.
“As soon as a child picked up the toy, it would explode,” he said.
Residents of Irpin wanted to return home as soon as the city was liberated, the mayor recalled, but the entire community first had to be carefully de-mined. Some homes could be repaired. Many required complete demolition before they could be rebuilt.
Irpin’s cultural center building still stands in ruin. Markushyn said the city hopes to rebuild it this year.
“It was, of course, very hard to see. It was burning, and you couldn’t do anything,” Markushyn said. “Because there was no electricity, no water, no firefighters, no services at all, nothing was working, and there were battles in the city.”
Lidiia Rodchenko, 72, and her husband, Viktor, had already experienced evacuation before they settled in Irpin.
They were forced to flee their hometown of Avdiivka near the Russian border in 2015, amid fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists.
They returned to Avdiivka in 2016, then fled again when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago.
But the war followed them to Irpin. They had to escape once more.
Viktor, left, and Lidiia Rodchenko stand in their home in Irpin on Feb. 17, 2025. The couple had fled two other cities before arriving in Irpin and being forced to evacuate once more in February 2022. (Erin McGroarty / The Cap Times)
“We had already gone through this in 2015. We knew what it was like,” Lidiia said.
The apartment they rented in Irpin was destroyed.
Once Irpin’s occupation had ended, they moved into a tiny home with their cat, Tomas. The group of homes had been donated by Poland as part of the country’s humanitarian aid to neighboring Ukraine.
The home is small but it’s on the ground floor, so Lidiia is able to easily move Viktor’s wheelchair from room to room and take him on walks outside. Viktor, 70, lost both his legs to complications from advanced diabetes, leaving many of the chores to Lidiia.
“I planted 22 rose bushes here. We have a drive for life now,” Lidiia said. “We will wait for victory. We need victory. We want to live in a free Ukraine and think for ourselves.”
Inside a kindergarten bomb shelter
Down the street from the destroyed cultural center, a drive for life is overflowing among some of the city’s youngest residents. At the Ruta Kindergarten School, children ages 2-6 enjoy a newly rebuilt school after the original building was destroyed by Russian shelling three years prior.
At recess time on a February school day, the children, donned in colorful snowsuits, hats and mittens, played in fresh snow.
Kseniia Katrych is the headmistress of the school. She proudly showed the bright classrooms — with large windows to let in natural sunlight — the kitchen where chefs prepare the students’ lunch of borscht and bread, and the school’s basement bomb shelter.
The school was rebuilt with donations from Lithuania. In front of the school, the Lithuanian flag flies next to the Ukrainian flag.
“As a symbol of our friendship,” Katrych said.
The multi-room shelter has play areas with toys, books, tables and chairs.
“We are really proud of our shelter. It is about 800 square meters (more than 8,000 square feet), and we’ve got everything children need,” Katrych said.
Kseniia Katrych stands with two of her students who have been playing in fresh snow outside Ruta Kindergarten in Irpin, Ukraine, on Feb. 17, 2025. (Erin McGroarty / The Cap Times)
The shelter has bathrooms, a kitchen area and small beds for children to nap. Some of the youngest children nap in the bunker each day so that teachers don’t have to wake them mid-sleep if the city is advised to shelter from a potential air strike.
The entire school — 300 students along with teachers and other staff — goes to the shelter each time the air raid sirens sound in the city.
“It could be five times a day. It could be three hours,” Katrych said of the sirens. “There are some days without alerts. But we come every time, quickly.”
Many of the children are young enough that war is all they know. Most find the air raid sirens a normal part of life.
Katrych was not in Irpin when the school was destroyed. She evacuated with her family the first day of the war.
“I even crossed the bridge,” she said. “It was not destroyed (yet).”
She worked in a kindergarten in Poland for a year before returning to help run Ruta.
“I love it. Kindergarten is my life,” she said. “You know children give you special energy. They are our hope.”
Markushyn feels that same sense of hope and pride with how the community has rebuilt and recovered with the help of sister cities like Milwaukee, which donated vehicles and humanitarian aid.
“When the city was in ruins, completely destroyed, and there was only one street passable for cars, it was fear, it was horror, and it seemed to me that rebuilding the city would be almost impossible,” he said. “But there is a saying: ‘The eyes fear, but the hands do the work.’”
The Republican-backed candidate in Wisconsin’s closely watched state Supreme Court race has resurfaced long-debunked concerns about voting fraud because of the late reporting of ballots in Milwaukee just two weeks before the April 1 election.
Brad Schimel, a former Republican attorney general, spoke of the possibility of “bags of ballots” and fraud in Milwaukee during an interview Tuesday on conservative talk radio. Schimel faces Democratic-backed Susan Crawford in the April 1 election with majority control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court at stake.
Schimel, in an interview on WISN-AM, said his supporters need to “get our votes banked, make this too big to rig so we don’t have to worry that at 11:30 in Milwaukee, they’re going to find bags of ballots that they forgot to put into the machines.”
Schimel said that happened in 2018 and in November “when (U.S. Senate candidate) Eric Hovde was ahead all night, and then all of a sudden, Milwaukee County changed that.”
Republicans and Democrats alike, along with state and Milwaukee election leaders, warned in the run-up to the November election that Milwaukee absentee ballots would be reported late and cause a huge influx of Democratic votes. Milwaukee is the state’s most populated city and is heavily Democratic. Its chief elections official was chosen with bipartisan support.
The reporting of those absentee ballots swung the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden, fueling baseless conspiracy theories that the election had been stolen from President Donald Trump.
Milwaukee’s absentee ballots are counted at a central location and reported all at once, often well after midnight on Election Day. Elections officials for years have made clear that those ballots are reported later than usual due to the sheer number that have to be counted and because state law does not allow them to be processed until polls open.
A bipartisan bill to allow for processing prior to Election Day died in the Republican-controlled Senate last year. Republicans, who have controlled the Legislature since 2011, routinely complain about slow processing in Milwaukee but have not passed bills to allow for speedier counting.
In 2018, the reporting of more than 47,000 absentee ballots after midnight put Democrat Tony Evers ahead of then-Gov. Scott Walker. Evers went on to win, and Walker criticized the late reporting, saying it blindsided him.
And in November, Hovde said he was “shocked” by the reporting of more than 108,000 ballots in Milwaukee early in the morning after the election in his defeat to Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin.
Schimel said in the radio interview he didn’t know what happened.
“I don’t know if there was fraud there,” Schimel said. “There’s no way for me to know that. All I know is this: We need to turn our votes out. That’s the best insulation we have against any potential fraud, is just get our people to the polls.”
Asked about his concerns during an appearance later Tuesday at the Milwaukee Rotary Club, Schimel said he brought up fraud because voters often ask him how to guarantee election integrity.
“I tell people, by following the rules,” Schimel said. “And then I tell them, ‘Here’s the best way to make sure your vote isn’t stolen: Go use it.’ That’s the answer.”
Yet despite his concerns, Schimel said: “I will always accept the results of the election.”
Crawford’s spokesperson, Derrick Honeyman, said Schimel was “dabbling in conspiracy theories to please his ally, Elon Musk, and it’s unbecoming of a judge and candidate for the state’s high court.”
Groups funded by billionaire Musk have contributed more than $11 million to help Schimel’s campaign. Crawford is backed by several billionaire Democrats, including philanthropist George Soros and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker.
Schimel’s comments drew criticism from the Democracy Defense Project, a bipartisan coalition promoting truth about elections that includes former Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen.
“There is no evidence of fraud in Milwaukee, but the failure of the state to allow early counting on absentee ballots before the close of polls feeds into conspiracy theories,” the group said in a statement.
The court is currently controlled 4-3 by liberals, but one of them is retiring, creating the battle for the majority.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
Dane County Judge Susan Crawford speaks at an event held by the Rotary Club of Milwaukee and Milwaukee Press Club as she campaigns for Wisconsin Supreme Court. (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)
Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford accused her opponent Brad Schimel of being a “partisan politician” at an event Tuesday hosted by the Rotary Club of Milwaukee and Milwaukee Press Club. Her comments come as both candidates have tried to claim they will be the more impartial justice.
The fight over impartiality has outlined this year’s campaign in contrast with 2023, when Justice Janet Protasiewicz won her seat, and majority control of the Court for the body’s liberals, by proclaiming her “values” that support a woman’s right to access abortion and that the state’s previous legislative maps unfairly benefited Republicans.
“I would ask voters and the media to look at the difference between the campaigns and the candidates,” Crawford said. “I have never taken a position on any case or any issue before the Supreme Court. And anyone who wants to support me needs to know that I am not making any promises.”
But she said Schimel, a Waukesha County judge and former Republican state attorney general, has built a career as an elected Republican and taken stances on cases that will likely come before the Court in its next term, including cases about Wisconsin’s 1849 law that has been interpreted as a blanket ban on abortion and a lawsuit against Act 10, the controversial law that limited collective bargaining rights for most public employees.
Crawford also pointed to millions of dollars in assistance Schimel’s campaign has gotten from Elon Musk and comments, reported this week by the Washington Post, that he told a group of supporters in Jefferson County that President Donald Trump had been “screwed over” by the Wisconsin Supreme Court when it ruled against his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Just days before Schimel’s comments were made public, he told reporters after a speech at a Wisconsin Counties Association conference that he didn’t know enough about the case to determine if it was decided correctly.
“He apparently has no objection to Elon Musk’s canvassers going door to door, saying that ‘Brad Schimel is going to uphold the Trump agenda,’” she said. “You know, he has not said anything to put a stop to that. So he’s got a long history as an extreme partisan. He’s run for partisan office something like five times, and he’s running this race very much as a partisan politician.”
Throughout her remarks, Crawford said that if she’s elected, she’d work with all six of the other justices, not just the liberals — taking digs at comments Schimel and some of the Court’s conservatives have made previously — but that she defines being a judicial liberal as someone who stands up for people’s rights and how the law can be used to protect those rights.
“If what people mean by liberal is that I’m going to work to protect the rights of every Wisconsinite on the Supreme Court, that I view our laws and our Constitution as tools to protect the rights of Wisconsinites, then I embrace that label, because that is what I will go about,” she said.
Last week, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that Schimel had said in a radio interview the Court’s liberals, all women, were “driven by their emotions,” when hearing oral arguments in a case about the 1849 abortion law. And in recent years, conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley has frequently attacked her liberal colleagues in published decisions, accusing them of being mouthpieces for the Democratic Party.
“I think there is a little bit too much talk and too much emphasis, particularly by my opponent, on the makeup of the court and these so-called lines between who’s the majority and who’s the minority,” she said. “My opponent, unfortunately, has been lobbying attacks against the same justices on the Supreme Court. You won’t hear me doing that. I intend to work with every other member of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is a body of seven justices, and they need to talk to each other.”
In a statement, the Schimel campaign said the panel of reporters moderating Tuesday’s event didn’t ask tough enough questions and that Crawford wouldn’t be an objective justice.
“Susan Crawford continued her campaign of hoodwinking Wisconsin voters today by spreading falsehoods and pushing the radical agenda of her Democrat handlers to a sympathetic press,” Schimel spokesperson Jacob Fischer said. “What Crawford should have been pressed on was her weak on crime penchant for releasing pedophiles and murderers back onto Wisconsin streets, her willingness to offer two congressional seats in exchange for financial support, or how she sold out her objectivity to the agendas of George Soros, Bernie Sanders, and other extreme liberals. Unlike Susan Crawford, who is clearly unfit to represent the interests of Wisconsin as an impartial justice, Judge Brad Schimel is committed to restoring fairness to the Court and saving Wisconsin from the Democrats’ radical agenda.”
During the event, Crawford pointed to occasions she would have sided against the Court’s liberals and times she issued rulings that she didn’t personally like but upheld because it was the law.
She said that when hearing challenges to the lame duck laws passed by Republicans in the Legislature in 2019 to take powers away from the governor and attorney general before Democrats Tony Evers and Josh Kaul could take power, the actions of the Legislature “left a bad taste in my mouth,” but she upheld some of those laws.
“That’s a case where, as a lawyer, I might have taken a different position as an advocate, but as a judge, I was applying the law to the facts of that case, and I came to a narrow decision,” she said.
Reading Time: 11minutesClick here to read highlights from the story
The Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office system for tracking officers with credibility concerns, allegations of dishonesty or bias, and past criminal charges is inaccurate and incomplete and relies, in part, on police agencies to report integrity violations.
Such tracking systems, often known as Brady/Giglio lists, are meant to help prosecutors fulfill their legal duty to share evidence that could help prove someone’s innocence.
Wisconsin lacks statewide standards for how such Brady information should be gathered, maintained and disclosed.
Of more than 200 entries on Milwaukee County’s list, nearly half related to a direct integrity or misconduct issue, such as officers lying on or off duty. About 14% related to domestic or intimate partner violence, and nearly 10% related to sex crimes, such as sexual assault or possessing child pornography. Another 14% involved alcohol-related offenses.
A deputy falsifying jail logs. Officers stealing during a search warrant. An off-duty officer hitting a parked car after leaving a bar, then lying about it.
Imagine one of them arrested you.
Would you want to know about their past?
Under the law, you have a right to that information. How and when you get access to it depends on prosecutors, who file criminal charges and bring a case in court.
The Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office has a system for tracking officers with credibility concerns, allegations of dishonesty or bias, and past criminal charges. But it is inconsistent and incomplete and relies, in part, on police agencies to report integrity violations, an investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, TMJ4 News and Wisconsin Watch found.
After reporters provided Milwaukee County District Attorney Kent Lovern with their analysis and raised questions about specific cases, he removed seven officers from the database and acknowledged one officer should have been added to it years earlier.
The haphazard nature of these tracking systems fails officers and people defending themselves, said Rachel Moran, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, who has extensively studied the issue nationwide.
“It does lead to wrongful convictions,” Moran said. “It leads to people spending time in jail and prison when they shouldn’t.”
Many criminal cases come down to whether jurors believe a defendant or a law enforcement officer.
The system of flagged officers — often known as a “Brady/Giglio list,” so named for two landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases — is meant to help prosecutors fulfill their legal duty to share evidence that could help prove someone’s innocence.
Wisconsin does not have statewide standards for how such Brady information should be gathered, maintained and disclosed. It falls to local district attorneys to decide how to gather and share information about officers’ credibility, leading to inconsistencies across the state’s 72 counties.
Lovern maintains his office is fulfilling its obligations. By compiling the spreadsheet, his office already is doing more than required, he said in an interview. Just because an officer is on the list does not mean he or she was necessarily convicted of a crime or had a sustained internal violation.
“The database is complete to the best of my knowledge and belief,” he said in a follow-up email in February, adding it always is subject to change with new information.
Some of those changes were prompted by this investigation, which found multiple inaccuracies in the Brady list released last fall. One officer was described as being involved in a custody death but he was not. Two were listed with the wrong agency. Another was listed for a criminal case that was expunged in 2002. At least five officers on the list were deceased.
After reporters raised questions, a West Allis officer who resigned after admitting he had sex with a woman while on duty at a school was removed from the list because, Lovern said, he did not lie about what he did. That officer was hired at another agency in the county.
The inconsistencies in Milwaukee County’s Brady list have frustrated defense attorneys and advocates for police officers — one union leader called it the “wild, wild west” — and are another example of a nationwide problem for legal experts like Moran.
“It’s just an ongoing travesty of constitutional violations,” she said. “It is a huge national problem that should be a national scandal.”
Who is on the Milwaukee County Brady list and why?
Milwaukee County District Attorney Kent Lovern speaks to reporters with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, TMJ4 News and Wisconsin Watch. (TMJ4 News / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
The district attorney’s office started tracking officers with documented credibility concerns more than 25 years ago.
The full list has not been made public — until now.
The move came after years of pressure from defense attorneys, media outlets and a lawsuit threat. The decision to release the list was harshly criticized by Alexander Ayala, president of the Milwaukee Police Association, the union representing rank-and-file officers in the city.
“It’s only going to be detrimental to police officers or even ex-police officers because they’re trying to move on,” he said.
The district attorney’s office first released the list to media outlets last September in response to public records requests. At the time, Assistant District Attorney Sara Sadowski wrote, in part: “This office makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of the record.”
She also said that some criminal cases may have “resulted in an acquittal, that charges were dismissed, or that charges were amended to non-criminal offenses.”
That list, dated Sept. 20, contained 218 entries involving 192 officers and included a wide range of conduct, from a recruit who cheated on a test to officers sentenced to federal prison for civil rights violations.
The Journal Sentinel, TMJ4 and Wisconsin Watch spent five months tracking down information about the officers through court documents, internal police records and past media coverage.
Milwaukee police officers made up the largest share of officers on the list, but nearly every suburban police agency in the county was represented, as well as the Wisconsin Department of Justice and the Wisconsin Department of Corrections.
At least a dozen officers kept their jobs after being placed on the Brady list, then landed on the list again.
Ceasar Stinson is shown with his daughter, Cearra Stinson. He was struck and killed when former Milwaukee County sheriff’s deputy Joel Streicher ran a red light in 2020. (Courtesy of Stinson family)
One of them was Milwaukee County sheriff’s deputy Joel Streicher.
Back in 2007, Streicher and five other deputies searched a drug suspect’s house without a warrant, according to a previous Journal Sentinel article. It wasn’t until 2019 that Streicher was added to the Brady list when he was caught up in a prostitution sting and pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct.
A year later, Streicher was on duty when he ran a red light near the courthouse and killed community advocate Ceasar Stinson. He resigned and pleaded guilty to homicide by negligent operation of a vehicle. Streicher declined to comment when reached by a reporter last month.
Criminal cases like Streicher’s represent three-quarters of the entries on the Brady list. The other quarter are tied to internal investigations.
The news organizations also found:
Of the 218 entries on the list, about 47% related to a direct integrity or misconduct issue, such as officers lying on or off duty. The allegations vary: One officer pleaded guilty to taking bribes for filling out bogus vehicle titles and was fired. Another former officer was charged with pressuring the victim in her son’s domestic violence case to recant. A lieutenant was demoted after wrongly claiming $1,800 in overtime.
About 14% related to domestic or intimate partner violence, and nearly 10% related to sex crimes, such as sexual assault or possessing child pornography.
Another 14% involved alcohol-related offenses, most often drunken driving. At least six cases involved officers, most off duty, who were found to be driving drunk and had a gun with them.
Nearly 7% involved allegations of excessive force. One of the officers listed in the database for such a violation was former Milwaukee officer Vincent Woller, who was added in 2009 after receiving a 60-day suspension for kicking a handcuffed suspect in the head, according to previous Journal Sentinel reporting.
Woller remained on the force until last year. He recently told a TMJ4 reporter he had testified “hundreds” of times in the past 15 years and never knew he was on the Brady list.
When asked to respond, Lovern, the district attorney, removed Woller from the list, saying Woller’s internal violation was not related to untruthfulness.
Lovern, who served for 16 years as the top deputy to his predecessor, John Chisholm, said he reviews any potential Brady material brought to his attention from the defense bar.
In those cases, he said, he often has concluded that while officers’ conduct may show “poor judgment,” it did not relate to credibility or untruthfulness.
Others have strongly disagreed with those decisions.
Assistant Public Defender Angel Johnson, regional attorney manager for the State Public Defender’s Office in Milwaukee, works in out-of-custody intake court on Feb. 11, 2025. (Angela Peterson / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
Three years ago, the State Public Defender’s Office asked for the full Milwaukee County Brady list, only to receive a partial list of about 150 names of officers charged or convicted of crimes.
Public defenders then shared police disciplinary records they had obtained while investigating and trying past cases, said Angel Johnson, regional attorney manager for the State Public Defender’s Office in Milwaukee.
Johnson had expected those officers would be added to the list.
“They were not,” she said.
How some police officers can be on the Brady list and keep their jobs
Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman and Milwaukee County Sheriff Denita Ball speak to reporters with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, TMJ4 News and Wisconsin Watch. (TMJ4 News / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
The Brady list is not a blacklist.
Eighteen officers are still employed by the Milwaukee Police Department, while five others are members of the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office, according to representatives for those agencies.
In some cases, an officer’s past integrity violation or criminal conviction, such as drunken driving, may not necessarily prohibit the officer from testifying. That means they can still be useful as police officers, officials say.
Police Chief Jeffrey Norman, left, alongside Mayor Cavalier Johnson, speaks on June 10, 2022, at the Milwaukee Police Administration Building in Milwaukee. (Jovanny Hernandez / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
“For us, it’s not about being placed on the list, it is how they will be used by the district attorney’s office,” Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman said in an interview.
Norman said he does consider an officer’s ability to testify when weighing internal discipline.
Milwaukee County Sheriff Denita Ball said she does not, instead concluding the internal investigation and deciding discipline before forwarding any information to the District Attorney’s Office.
“Somebody can just make a mistake,” Ball said. “If that’s the case, then their employment is retained.”
Norman stressed he takes integrity violations seriously and makes his disciplinary decisions after reviewing internal investigations, officers’ work histories, comparable discipline in similar cases and input from his command staff.
Depending on those factors, officers can keep their jobs despite an integrity violation.
Officers Benjaman Bender and Juwon Madlock were working at District 7 on the city’s north side in 2021 when a man reported that he had just been shot at in his vehicle a few blocks away, according to records from the department and the Fire and Police Commission.
The man handed Bender his ID. The officers did not write down his name, inspect his damaged car parked outside, interview witnesses, or ask him any other investigatory questions, even after the man took a call from someone involved in the shooting.
Milwaukee County Sheriff Denita Ball says she does not consider an officer’s ability to testify in court when weighing internal discipline. “Somebody can just make a mistake,” she says. “If that’s the case, then their employment is retained.” She is shown giving an address at her public swearing-in on Jan. 6, 2023, at the Milwaukee County War Memorial Center in Milwaukee. (Angela Peterson / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
Instead, Bender instructed the man to return to the crime scene by himself and told him a squad would meet him there.
“So it’s cool for people to just go shoot at people now?” the man replied.
“Just go over there,” Madlock said, as he returned the man’s ID.
Bender later told a sergeant the man had been uncooperative and that he did not see the man’s ID. Madlock told another sergeant the man had walked out on his own. Video from the lobby contradicted their accounts.
Internal affairs found both officers failed to thoroughly investigate and had not been “forthright and candid” with supervisors.
Norman suspended each officer for 10 days. They remain employed — and on the Brady list.
The department did not authorize the officers to speak with a reporter for this story.
In rare cases, the district attorney’s office will decide that an officer can never be called as a witness. Only two or three officers in the county have received that designation in the last 18 years, and none are still employed as officers, Lovern said.
Reporters were unable to track the current employment of every officer on the Brady list because the Wisconsin Department of Justice has refused to release a statewide list of all certified law enforcement officers, a decision that is being challenged in court.
The state has released a separate database of officers who were fired, resigned instead of being fired or quit while an internal investigation was pending.
A comparison to that database showed at least four officers on the Sept. 20 Brady list were working at different law enforcement agencies in the state.
Credibility matters whether you’re an officer or a citizen accused of a crime
There’s no guarantee an officer’s past will come up in court.
A defense attorney has to decide whether to raise it. And if they do, a judge has to decide if a jury should hear about it.
But for any of that to happen, prosecutors must collect and disclose the information in the first place.
“We don’t monitor the Brady list,” said Milwaukee County Chief Judge Carl Ashley, who added that he has never encountered a Brady issue during his 25 years on the bench.
“We get involved once the matter is brought to our attention,” he said.
Some prosecutors across the country come up with different systems to learn of potential Brady material. In Chicago, prosecutors started asking police officers a series of questions, such as if they had been disciplined before or found to be untruthful in court, before using them as witnesses.
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley (left) talks with Milwaukee County District Attorney Kent Lovern (right) and Milwaukee County chief judge Carl Ashley (middle) at the Milwaukee County Courthouse Complex and Public Safety Building in Milwaukee on Feb. 3, 2025. (Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal)
In Milwaukee County, the district attorney’s office relies on police agencies to self-report internal violations. Lovern defended the practice, saying the local agencies are “very direct with us.”
But that approach leaves gaps.
Out of 23 law enforcement agencies in Milwaukee County, only seven provided a written policy detailing how they handle Brady material in response to a records request sent in November.
The Milwaukee Police Department and eight other agencies in the county do not have a written policy, and the other agencies did not respond or the request remains pending.
Regardless, prosecutors have a constitutional requirement to find and disclose potential Brady material, whether the records are located in their office or at another agency, said Moran, the law professor.
“Prosecutors still have the ultimate obligation for setting up information-sharing systems,” she said.
Sometimes, officers slip through the cracks.
Before Frank Williams landed on the Brady list, the Milwaukee police officer had a history of misconduct allegations dating back to 2017. He had been investigated for excessive force, improperly turning off his body camera and interfering with investigations into his relatives, according to internal affairs records.
Milwaukee police officer Frank Williams appears at the Milwaukee County Courthouse in February 2024. He was charged with child abuse, later pleaded guilty to lesser charges of disorderly conduct and was forced to resign. (Courtesy of TMJ4 News)
His harshest punishment, a 30-day suspension in 2021, was for an integrity violation after he falsely reported he had stayed at home on a sick day when he instead played in a basketball tournament.
But Williams was not added to the Brady list until last year, when prosecutors charged him with child abuse. He later pleaded guilty to lesser charges of disorderly conduct and was forced to resign. Attempts to reach Williams and his attorney by phone and email were not successful.
When asked why Williams was not placed on the list earlier, Lovern said the Milwaukee Police Department did refer Williams for Brady list consideration in May 2021 after the integrity violation, and Williams should have been added then.
Lovern said he should have forwarded Williams’ information to a staff member to include him in the database. He found no record that he actually did.
As a result, Lovern’s office is now contacting anybody who was convicted in cases where Williams was a named witness in the three-year period he should have been in the database.
Officials with the State Public Defender’s Office said they appreciated Lovern’s decision, but said the case shows what can happen when a Brady list is incomplete.
“The ability to question those witnesses against our client and their credibility is fundamental,” said Bridget Krause, trial division director for the State Public Defender’s Office.
If the information is not disclosed, it can have devastating consequences.
“You can’t go back and unring some bells,” Krause said. “Somebody who served 18 months in prison and now you’re finding out this could have impacted their case, they can’t not serve that time.”
Criminal defense attorneys who regularly practice in Milwaukee County say they rarely receive disclosures about officers’ credibility.
One said he had been practicing for nearly 20 years and had never received one. Another said the district attorney’s office practices amounted to a policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Johnson, a manager for the state public defender’s office in Milwaukee, has practiced in the county for 10 years and tried numerous criminal cases.
She said she’s received two Brady disclosures related to officers’ credibility.
Both came this year.
About this project
This is the first installment in “Duty to Disclose,” an ongoing investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, TMJ4 and Wisconsin Watch into the Milwaukee County district attorney’s “Brady list,” a list of law enforcement officers deemed by the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office to have credibility issues. The office publicly released the list in full for the first time in late 2024 after pressure from the news organizations.
Journal Sentinel investigative reporter Ashley Luthern, TMJ4 investigative reporter Ben Jordan and Wisconsin Watch investigative reporter Mario Koran spent five months verifying information of the nearly 200 officers on the list, discovering that it is frequently incomplete and inconsistent.
Readers with questions or tips about the Brady list can contact the Journal Sentinel’s investigative team at wisconsininvestigates@gannett.com.
Project credits
Reporters: Ashley Luthern (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), Ben Jordan (WTMJ-TV), Mario Koran (Wisconsin Watch)
Contributing reporter: Dave Biscobing (ABC15)
Photos and video: Bill Schulz, Sherman Williams (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
Graphics and illustrations: Khushboo Rathore, Andrew Mulhearn (Wisconsin Watch)
Editors: Daphne Chen (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel), Tim Vetscher (WTMJ-TV), Nicole Buckley (WTMJ-TV), Jim Malewitz (Wisconsin Watch)
Digital design and production: Spencer Holladay (USA TODAY Network), Ridah Syed (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
Copy editing: Ray Hollnagel (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
For more than 25 years, the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office has maintained a list of law enforcement officers who have been accused of dishonesty, bias or crimes.
Often known as the “Brady list,” it is meant to help prosecutors fulfill their legal obligation to turn over evidence that could help defendants.
The Brady list is a compilation of law enforcement officials who have been accused of lying, breaking the law, or acting in a way that erodes their credibility to be a witness. It’s also sometimes known as the do-not-call list or the Brady/Giglio list.
The name comes from the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland, which ruled that prosecutors cannot withhold material that might help the defense at trial.
What kind of behavior gets you on the Brady List?
(Andrew Mulhearn for Wisconsin Watch)
The type of misconduct that can land a law enforcement officer on the Brady list is broad, ranging from violent crimes to workplace issues. An officer does not have to be found guilty of a crime or even charged with a crime to be placed on the list.
Of the names on Milwaukee County’s Brady list, the majority involve criminal cases. Roughly a quarter involve internal investigations.
The offenses range from crimes like domestic violence or drunken driving to integrity issues like falsifying police documents or cheating on police training tests.
How does the District Attorney’s Office find out about potential Brady material?
The District Attorney’s Office is responsible for prosecuting crimes. If a law enforcement officer is referred for potential criminal charges, prosecutors would know about it because they make charging decisions.
But if an officer is facing an internal violation and not a criminal charge, it is up to the officer’s law enforcement agency to report the information to prosecutors, according to Milwaukee County District Attorney Kent Lovern.
Do police agencies have written policies for telling prosecutors about Brady material?
Not all of them.
The media organizations sent records requests to 23 law enforcement agencies in the county asking for any policies governing how to handle Brady material.
The Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office and six other agencies provided a written policy. The Milwaukee Police Department and eight other agencies in the county said they do not have a written policy.
The remaining agencies did not respond or the request remains pending.
If an officer is on the Brady list, does that mean they can’t testify?
No. Being placed on the list only means that prosecutors have to disclose that officer’s history to the defense. If defense attorneys wish, they can raise the officer’s credibility issues with the judge.
At that point, it is up to the judge to decide whether or not the officer is credible enough to testify.
In rare cases, the district attorney’s office has determined an officer could never be relied upon to testify. Lovern said that has only happened two or three times in the past 18 years, and those officers are no longer employed as law enforcement.
If an officer is put on the Brady list, can they stay on the force?
Yes. Just because a law enforcement officer is on the list does not mean they are necessarily prohibited from testifying. That means they can still be useful as police officers, officials say.
Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman and Milwaukee County Sheriff Denita Ball say they carefully consider the facts and severity of each case before deciding whether to keep an officer on the force.
Where can I find Wisconsin’s Brady list?
In Wisconsin, there is no single Brady list. District attorney’s offices in each county are responsible for maintaining their own lists.
Nearly 200 current and former law enforcement officers are on the list, which dates back about 25 years. Some are accused of multiple offenses. Of those on the list, the majority are from the Milwaukee Police Department, but nearly every suburban police department is represented.
Protesters march in Milwaukee calling for more community control of the police. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
What has become of the city of Milwaukee’s Fire and Police Commission (FPC) since the passage of Act 12, which traded its policy-making powers over the police department for a fiscal deal with the state? That’s the question the Milwaukee Turners’ – described as Milwaukee’s oldest civic group – sought to answer with hard data.
From June to December 2024, the Turners’ “Confronting Mass Incarceration team” monitored the FPC – itself one of the nation’s oldest civilian-led oversight bodies for police and fire departments. The team monitored the FPC’s meetings, who attended, what attendees did, and how commissioners engaged in the meetings. A white paper published earlier this month, detailing the team’s findings, noted among other things that:
The FPC spent 81% of its time discussing personnel matters, and often discussed these during closed sessions which the public cannot view. The Turners noted 359 minutes were spent discussing personnel matters, whereas just 49 minutes were spent on public comment.
The Turners noticed what they described in the white paper as “an overall lack of active engagement and participation from commissioners.”
Law enforcement personnel attended FPC meetings more frequently than members of the general public. During the monitoring period, 30 police personnel attended meetings whereas 20 members of the public attended. Of those members of the public who attended the meetings, half engaged in public comment and of those, only three received a direct response from commissioners.
The report states the FPC “appears to serve as a rubber stamp” and that the commission “has failed to secure public trust.” Dr. Emily Sterk, a research and advocacy associate with Milwaukee Turners who worked on the project, explained why the numbers looked the way they do. While citizens can discuss whatever they want during public comment, commissioners can’t discuss anything that isn’t on the agenda due to open meetings laws. “So therefore they just have this practice to, you know, have public comment but then not even address the public that is there,” Sterk told Wisconsin Examiner.
While she understands the legal reason for this practice, Sterk said, “that is, for us, subjectively very troubling when a member of the public makes the time and effort to get themselves down there, go to this meeting which – as we alluded to in the white paper – the regular sessions are very frequently heavily delayed because of the closed sessions that are taking place.” As a result, the commission ends up engaging in back-and-forth discussions with city officials and law enforcement more frequently than the public, whose comments may be left unheard.
The Wisconsin Examiner’s Criminal Justice Reporting Project shines a light on incarceration, law enforcement and criminal justice issues with support from the Public Welfare Foundation.
Leon Todd, executive director of the FPC, told Wisconsin Examiner that personnel matters such as promotions, hiring or setting recruitment standards “are extremely important.” Todd added, “I don’t think it is necessarily problematic that the FPC spends a goodly amount of time on that. It is part of their core functions. It’s been part of their core responsibilities for more than 150 years…Since 1885 no person has been appointed or promoted to any position in the police or fire departments without the express approval of the FPC board.”
Yet even this function of the FPC has come under fire. In January, the commission was criticized by conservative elected officials, right-wing media outlets and the Milwaukee Police Association after an officer was denied promotion. WISN12 reported that the FPC considered promotions for seven officers, and only denied officer Jason Daering. A couple of weeks later in early February, the FPC reversed its position and voted to promote Daering to sergeant. Prior to the final vote, FPC co-chair Bree Spencer said that the police department didn’t provide a full file, that Daering did not appear for an interview and was unprepared. “So we really encourage, going forward, that people take this process seriously,” said Spencer.
The commission’s voting record was another issue for the Milwaukee Turners. In their report, the group noted that over its monitoring period last year, the FPC took up 122 agenda items, of which 120 received unanimous approval. Only two agenda items – one involving the promotion of a detective and another concerning reappointing a former police officer – received No votes, with both items receiving two No votes. “Given the current practices of the FPC, including closed sessions and lack of Commissioner participation during regular sessions, the public is left unaware of why these aye or no votes were made,” the report states. “We observed an overall lack of transparency when it comes to Commissioners’ voting records. Even if Commissioners are actively participating in deliberation and debate during closed sessions, the public has no way of knowing this.”
Todd also pushed back against the Milwaukee Turners’ claim that the FPC has become a rubber stamp. Harkening back to the pre-Act 12 era Todd, who was appointed by former mayor Tom Barrett in November 2020, recalled the FPC’s record of pushing for police reform measures “that the [police] department did not agree with.” From a ban on chokeholds and no-knock warrants, to approving a policy of publicly releasing video of incidents like police shootings within 15 days of the incident. Those decisions – made when the FPC was led by Chairman Ed Fallone and Vice Chairwoman Amanda Avalos – were “probably, if not the reason, a big reason why the Legislature took away [FPC’s] policy-making authority, because they were acting independently and listening to community members from Milwaukee,” Todd told Wisconsin Examiner.
A Milwaukee police squad in front of the Municipal Court downtown. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
After the passage of Act 12 in 2023, Fallone and Avalos resigned their positions in protest. Stripping the FPC of its decades-old policy-making powers emerged as a bargaining chip in negotiations between Milwaukee elected officials and the Republican-controlled Legislature. In exchange for targeting the FPC, reversing the Milwaukee Public School district decision to remove school resource officers from its facilities at the request of students and community members, and agreeing to never reduce the police force, the city of Milwaukee was allowed a new sales tax and county was allowed to raise its sales tax, which enabled both governments to avoid a fiscal catastrophe. Act 12’s law enforcement aspects had previously been proposed as bills favored by Republican lawmakers and the Milwaukee Police Association, which failed to pass.
For the FPC, it seems that many roads lead back to the shared revenue and sales tax deal codified by Act 12. In its report, Milwaukee Turners recommended that Act 12 be amended to return the policy-making powers of the FPC. This state-level solution, however, relies on cooperation from the Republican-controlled Legislature which helped craft, negotiate, and implement Act 12.
Protesters gather at the Milwaukee County Courthouse to call for transparency in the death of Breon Green. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
In the meantime, the Turners recommend that the FPC bring ideas for policy changes to the common council. “We recommend that the FPC dedicate less of their regular sessions to closed door personnel matters, and instead publicly engage in discussions about new and amended [Standard Operating Procedures] that are brought forth by the [Milwaukee Police Department],” the report reads, adding that “the Common Council might actively invite policy recommendations from the FPC, especially as it relates to the concerns of their constituents.”
Todd told Wisconsin Examiner that the commission adopted a new rule requiring that the police department provide copies of any new or amended policies to the FPC within 48 hours, and no less than 30 days before the policies take effect. When that happens, a communication file is created by the FPC which goes into the regular agenda, and thus becomes public. Todd said that so far, the commission has not sent policy recommendations to the common council.
Todd is considering other ways to beef up the FPC’s oversight capacity. Specifically, he wants to encourage a focus on the FPC’s audit unit as a way of being “more proactive” and “not just reactive.” Todd pointed to an audit on police pursuits, and the police department, Todd said, is also looking to create a vehicle pursuit committee. The commission also continues tracking citizen complaints about officer behavior, as well as progress the department makes in eliminating discriminatory stop and frisk practices as part of the Collins settlement agreement. This year, the audit unit is expecting to do six or seven audits which are unrelated to the Collins settlement, said Todd.
Additionally, an ordinance passed in the common council to ensure the elected body is quickly notified of policy changes.
How the commission attracts more members of the public to attend meetings is another issue. Todd acknowledged that there have been fewer citizens attending public comment after the passage of Act 12. “I think that’s unfortunate,” he told Wisconsin Examiner. “I think that we welcome people to come and express their views, their input.”
Milwaukee police officers on the scene of an officer-involved shooting at King Park in 2024. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
The last major policy he could recall passed before Act 12 was the video release policy concerning police shootings and related deaths. Local activists fought for the reform, as did the families of people killed in incidents involving Milwaukee-area police.
Todd said that the FPC still has “soft power” such as through audits, which it can use to influence the police department. “So I’m hoping that we will get more public input going forward,” he said, noting that FPC recently welcomed in a new commissioner, Krissie Fung, from the Milwaukee Turners.
“Our findings highlight the importance of fostering a culture of police and fire accountability within the FPC,” the Turners’ white paper concludes. “By advocating for legislative changes to restore policy making authority, increasing public engagement, and ensuring rigorous Commissioner participation, the FPC can rebuild public confidence and strengthen its capacity to address systemic inequalities in policing.”
“We really hope to continue to provide civilian oversight of the FPC and see what happens over the course of the next few months,” said Sterk, “especially as we continue our lobbying for the amendment of Act 12, as we hope members of the FPC and members of the public do as well.”
This report has been updated to clarify that Act 12 allowed the city to offer a sales tax and the county to raise its sales tax.
Several state lawmakers are working on a bill that would keep immigration officers out of “safe havens” throughout Wisconsin.
Their move comes as members of immigrant communities can no longer rely on places to be free from immigration enforcement, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the department that oversees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
Reversing policy from the Biden administration, ICE officers can detain or arrest people for immigration violations inside churches, schools and hospitals.
“Given the recent executive orders and initiatives that the Trump administration has put forth, it is very harmful for our immigrant and migrant communities in various ways,” said state Sen. Dora Drake, D-Milwaukee, one of the co-authors of the bill.
“I’m a firm believer that families should be strengthened and not pulled apart.”
Federal policy
In 2021, the administration of former President Joe Biden issued guidelines about where immigration enforcement should be restricted — places referred to as “protected areas” — including schools, medical and mental health facilities, places of worship or religious study, locations where children gather, social service establishments, sites providing emergency or disaster relief, and venues for funerals, weddings, parades, demonstrations and rallies.
The guidelines stated that enforcement should be restricted in, or even near, these spaces so as not to discourage people from accessing essential services or participating in essential activities.
On Jan. 21, the day after President Donald Trump took office, the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement about the cancelation of this Biden-era policy, effectively eliminating safe havens and allowing immigration enforcement, such as raids and arrests, to take place in these areas.
“We are protecting our schools, places of worship and Americans who attend by preventing criminal aliens and gang members from exploiting these locations and taking safe haven there because these criminals knew law enforcement couldn’t go inside under the previous administration,” said Tricia McLaughlin, the Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary of public affairs, in an email.
Local response
The sorts of places identified by the proposed bill overlap with but are not identical to the ones in the policy of the Biden administration.
It identifies schools, places providing child care, places of worship, places providing medical or health care services, and state and local government buildings.
State Sen. Tim Carpenter, D-Milwaukee, another co-author of the bill, said that he and his colleagues “wanted to hit the main ones right away that we were hearing from people.”
However, Carpenter, whose Senate district has the highest percentage of Hispanic residents in the state – more than 45% – said that he is open to amending the bill to include more places.
The sorts of spaces in Milwaukee currently mentioned in the bill are responding in varied ways.
Milwaukee Public Schools has taken quite a clear stance, reaffirming in January its own “safe haven” resolution adopted in 2017.
The resolution vows to oppose actions by ICE on school grounds by “all legal means available.”
The union representing MPS teachers, Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, fully supports the resolution as well.
In other types of places, the response is less clear-cut.
A spokesperson for Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin, one of the largest hospital systems in the state, said in an email that staff is “closely reviewing recent federal policy changes and discussing their potential impacts,” adding that they “remain focused on our commitments to delivering exceptional care with dignity and respect while achieving the best possible health outcomes.”
Places not identified in the initial version of the bill also are grappling with the changes in immigration policy.
Milwaukee Christian Center, for example, which provides social services such as housing support and violence prevention, intends to comply with the law in terms of a judicial warrant and would confer with counsel about what to do regarding an administrative warrant, said Karen Higgins, executive director of the organization.
Difference between warrants
This difference between types of warrants is crucial for the authors of the bill.
A judicial warrant is issued and signed by a judge, while an administrative warrant is issued by a federal agency specifically for immigration violations.
Unlike judicial warrants, administrative warrants do not require compliance from local law enforcement or private entities, including schools, churches and hospitals, unless they choose to comply.
The state bill, if it became law, would apply to administrative warrants rather than judicial ones.
No one is trying, Drake said, to provide havens for people who are being detained or arrested on a judicial warrant.
“We’re not saying that there aren’t individuals that are causing harm out there,” she said.
McLaughlin, of the Department of Homeland Security, described a thoughtful process when a safe haven is involved in immigration enforcement.
“Our agents use discretion. Officers would need secondary supervisor approval before any action can be taken in locations such as a church or a school.”
“We expect these to be extremely rare,” she added.
‘I am asking them to follow the law’
Rep. Sylvia Velez-Ortiz, D-Milwaukee, the main author of the bill, frames the issue in basic constitutional terms.
“I’ve never said the word ‘safe haven’ or ‘sanctuary,’” she said. “I am asking them (the federal government) to follow the law. I expect them not to do illegal searches and seizures.”
“And,” she added, “I expect them to pay for their own operations.”
What’s next?
Velez-Ortiz said that the bill has about 20 co-sponsors and was expected to be handed to the clerk Tuesday and posted online.
Unless things change soon, it appears unlikely that the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee Public Schools will meet the Feb. 17 deadline to place at least 25 student resource officers in schools.
Wisconsin Act 12, a law enacted in summer 2023, mandated that police officers be placed in MPS and stipulated that they must first complete 40 hours of training through the National Association of School Resource Officers.
This has yet to happen.
A school resource officer is a law enforcement officer who works full time in collaboration with a school district, according to Act 12.
School resource officers typically carry firearms, according to the National Association of School Resource Officers.
No trainings scheduled
Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said no Milwaukee Police Department officers have completed or are scheduled to take the weeklong training before Feb. 17.
“We are never going to recommend that an officer start working in a school without first being put through this training,” Canady said. “We’re talking about the most unique assignment in law enforcement: putting men and women in schools and trusting them to do good work with adolescents in the school environment.”
MPD did not confirm its timeline for training or whether it has enough officers who have completed the training in the past.
Even if there were officers with past training, though, that wouldn’t necessarily be the best or safest option, Canady said.
“We don’t have a timeline on when you should retake the training,” but “there have been massive changes” in the past five years, Canady said.
Subjects that have been updated or added include training on how adolescent brains develop, forms of bias and how to understand trauma, he said.
A spokesperson for MPD deferred all questions to the City Attorney’s Office, stating the department is “unaware of the status of the agreement.”
Several attempts to speak with the City Attorney’s Office were unsuccessful as were attempts to speak with every member of the Milwaukee Board of School Directors except one.
Training is the most important concern when it comes to officers in schools for Henry Leonard, Milwaukee Public Schools board director of District 7.
Without this training, Leonard said he fears “a haphazard approach to this and it turns into a disaster.”
Next steps
There are no consequences for having not met the 2024 deadline stipulated by Act 12, according to an analyst with the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau, a nonpartisan agency that provides research and legal services to lawmakers.
An additional hearing has been scheduled if the Feb. 17 deadline is not met.
Jeff Fleming, a spokesman for Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, said there have been some productive meetings between the city and MPS.
“The Mayor is optimistic the outstanding issues can be resolved,” he wrote in an email to NNS.
How we got here
In 2016, MPS pulled officers from inside its schools and, four years later, ended a contract with MPD for patrols outside its buildings.
Act 12 required the city to beef up its police force by 2034 and ordered officers back into MPS by Jan. 1, 2024. That deadline came and passed as the school district and city jostled over who would pay the estimated $2 million cost to fund the officers.
Pressure to bring officers back into schools picked up after a mother of an MPS student who was bullied sued the city and school district for not meeting Act 12 requirements.
Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge David Borowski decided in favor of the mother, ruling that the city of Milwaukee and MPS are responsible for getting officers in schools by Feb. 17.
Impact on current officer shortage
NNS reported in December about hiring challenges within MPD as the number of new recruits wasn’t enough to offset the retirement and departure of other officers or potentially the new requirements of Act 12.
Leon Todd, executive director of the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission, said officers placed at MPS would come from the current ranks of the MPD, which could stretch the department’s already thin ranks.
“One of our top priorities is to grow the size of MPD, and we obviously want to limit the strain,” Todd said. “While these officers would be placed in MPS and wouldn’t be available to take other calls for service, the number of calls are going to be reduced as they won’t need to respond because they will already have officers in schools.”
According to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article, there were 40,643 calls to police from MPS-associated addresses from 2013 to 2024, although 7% of those calls were during nighttime hours.
The Fire and Police Commission is typically in charge of hiring all new officers. But because the school resource officers are going to be current officers, Todd said, the police chief or the department’s executive command staff will decide who is sent into schools.
Canady emphasized the importance of carefully selecting those officers.
“There should be input from the school community,” Canady said. “These should be officers who are veterans, who have been with the department at least three years, so we know something about their character. They should be officers who have shown sincere interest in working with youth.”
Leaders Igniting Transformation, a youth-led nonprofit in Milwaukee, doesn’t want officers back in schools at all.
“We are angry and terrified at the thought of placing armed police officers back in Milwaukee classrooms, who have shown time and time again that they are unfit to work with students and have no place in our schools,” a recent statement from the group said.
Reading Time: 4minutesClick here to read highlights from the story
The Gender Health Clinic at Children’s Wisconsin hospital in Milwaukee canceled a transgender teenager’s appointment this week, her family confirmed to Wisconsin Watch.
The pause comes after President Donald Trump signed an executive order seeking to block federal funding for hospitals and clinics that provide gender-affirming care, such as puberty blockers, to those under 19.
The family is calling for clear guidelines from Attorney General Josh Kaul, who on Wednesday issued a statement along with 14 other attorneys general saying the executive order violated the law.
Children’s Wisconsin did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Gender Health Clinic at Children’s Wisconsin hospital in Milwaukee canceled a transgender teenager’s appointment — the first reported case of a Wisconsin hospital pausing gender-affirming care after President Donald Trump signed an executive order blocking funding for hospitals that provide such treatment.
UPDATE (9:47 a.m. Feb. 7, 2025): On Friday, after Wisconsin Watch published this story, the teen’s parent received a call from Children’s informing her that the appointment would be rescheduled for Friday afternoon.
A group of families and doctors have sued the Trump administration in federal court over that order and another, saying they are discriminatory and the health care order unlawfully withholds funds.
Children’s Wisconsin did not respond to multiple emails and calls, including three pages sent to the spokesperson on duty. Rep. Ryan Clancy, D-Milwaukee, said he contacted Children’s on behalf of a constituent Wednesday and has also not received any response, which he characterized as unusual.
Clinics in several states across the country have reportedly suspended care for transgender youth in response to the order, which sought to end gender-affirming care for patients under 19 years old at any facility receiving federal funding.
On Wednesday, Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul and 14 other attorneys general denounced Trump’s order as “wrong on the science and the law.” In a joint statement, they noted that a recent court order affirmed the Trump administration cannot halt funding through administrative memos or executive orders.
“This means that federal funding to institutions that provide gender-affirming care continues to be available, irrespective of President Trump’s recent Executive Order,” the statement said. “We will challenge any unlawful effort by the Trump Administration to restrict access to it (gender-affirming care) in our jurisdictions.”
But the Milwaukee clinic — one of only two dedicated pediatric gender clinics in Wisconsin, along with one at UW Health in Madison — had already canceled an appointment, Wisconsin Watch has learned.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order blocking funding for hospitals that provide such therapy. He is shown at a campaign rally at the Waukesha County Expo Center in Waukesha, Wis., on May 1, 2024. (Jeffrey Phelps for Wisconsin Watch)
On New Year’s Eve, Milwaukee-area mom Sarah Moskonas received a long-awaited message: The clinic had approved her 13-year-old daughter for hormone therapy.
The family felt ecstatic. The approval was almost a decade in the making. Her daughter has seen a therapist specializing in gender identity since she was five or six and has been a patient in Children’s gender clinic for four-and-a-half years. She has been on puberty blockers for about three years. Starting hormone therapy was the culmination of numerous conversations, therapy sessions, doctor’s appointments and blood tests on the lifelong journey of helping Moskonas’ daughter live as her true self.
“She’s very aware of what her therapy looks like and what the implications could be long term and what are the upsides and what are the possible drawbacks,” Moskonas said.
After receiving approval from the clinic to move forward, they scheduled a “consent appointment” for Feb. 3, when both parents would provide informed consent on behalf of their daughter to take the next step in treatment.
But on Jan. 28, Trump issued the executive order, one of several that have targeted transgender people with demeaning, inaccurate language.
Moskonas said she received a call Jan. 31 from her daughter’s clinician informing her that Children’s Wisconsin could not provide her daughter with hormone therapy. The discussion turned to whether it was because of Trump’s order.
“Essentially … the answer was yes, this was because of the executive order,” she said.
Moskonas provided electronic health care records showing the appointment was scheduled before Trump’s inauguration and canceled after the executive order.
New York Attorney General Letitia James warned hospitals that ceasing treatment for transgender youth would violate the state’s anti-discrimination law.
Moskonas wants Kaul to take a similar stand and provide clear direction for Wisconsin hospitals.
The state Department of Justice referred Wisconsin Watch to Kaul’s joint statement and did not respond to a follow-up request.
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul and 14 other Democratic attorneys general have denounced President Donald Trump’s order that seeks to end gender-affirming care for patients under 19 years old. Kaul is seen at a press conference outside of La Crosse, Wis., on July 20, 2022. (Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Watch)
Sarah Coyne, an attorney specializing in health care regulation at Quarles in Madison, said that hospitals are likely pausing care “as a risk management strategy” and it’s “not clear how all of this will play out in the long run.”
Craig Konnoth, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, said that federal court rulings applying to Wisconsin have held that transgender discrimination is a prohibited form of sex discrimination and that it is illegal to turn away transgender patients under the Affordable Care Act.
After Children’s gender clinic canceled the appointment, Moskonas contacted elected officials, including Clancy. She called clinics in Madison and Chicago to see if they would provide care.
A spokesperson for UW Health’s clinic told Wisconsin Watch it was evaluating the order.
As Wisconsin Watch has previously documented, gender-affirming care like the kind Moskonas’ daughter has received is considered the only evidence-based care for children and adults with gender dysphoria, and it is endorsed by every major medical association in the country. Research has consistently shown that it improves mental health outcomes for trans youth.
Sarah said her daughter “knows who she is better than most adults I know.” Gender-affirming care has allowed her to live authentically as herself and flourish emotionally.
“My wife and I have assured her that we are not giving up,” Sarah said. “We are not accepting no for an answer.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Young Black men in cities across America died of drug overdoses at high rates in the 1980s and 1990s. During the recent fentanyl crisis, older Black men in many cities have been dying at unusually high rates.
They’re all from the same generation.
An investigation of millions of death records — in a partnership between The New York Times, The Baltimore Banner, Big Local News and nine other newsrooms across the country — reveals the extent to which drug overdose deaths have affected one group of Black men in dozens of cities across America at nearly every stage of their adult lives.
In recent years, the opioid epidemic has brought dangerous drugs to every corner of the country, and overdoses have risen among younger, whiter and more rural populations.
That huge tide now appears to be ebbing — but not for this group of Black men. In the 10 cities examined in this partnership, including Baltimore, Chicago, San Francisco, Newark, Washington, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, Black men ages 54 to 73 have been dying from overdoses at more than four times the rate of men of other races.
“They were resilient enough to live through a bunch of other epidemics — HIV, crack, COVID, multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis — only to be killed by fentanyl,” said Tracie M. Gardner, the executive director of the National Black Harm Reduction Network and a former New York state health official.
In all, the analysis identified dozens of cities, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest, where a generation of Black men were at higher risk of overdose deaths throughout their lives. In many of those places, cities have done little to distribute resources to this population.
The details vary from city to city.
In Chicago, there is no focused effort in nearly $1.3 billion of state opioid settlement money to help older Black men, despite a heavy death toll for this group, The Chicago Sun-Times found.
In Pittsburgh, Black men in jail with opioid use disorders have been less likely to receive medications to combat their addictions than white men, a PublicSource investigation has found, though local officials are working to close the gap.
In San Francisco, many of the men vulnerable to overdoses use both opioids and cocaine, a combination that may make treating their addictions more complex, according to an analysis of mortality data by The San Francisco Standard.
In Newark, NJ.com/The Star-Ledger also found that overdose victims were using both opioids and cocaine.
InPhiladelphia, older Black men were actually less likely to die than their white peers — until recently. By 2018, their death rate had shot up, according to a Philadelphia Inquirer analysis.
InWashington, local regulations and insurers have prevented doctors from giving longtime opioid users effective doses of drugs meant to curb their cravings, reporters for The 51st found.
In Indianapolis, Black men said they were reluctant to use public health solutions like syringe exchanges or fentanyl test strips because of a fear of harassment by police, Mirror Indy found.
In Milwaukee, around half of older Black men lost to drugs spent time in state prison. Wisconsin is trying to increase access to a Department of Corrections treatment program, which has a waitlist of 11,700, Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and Wisconsin Watch found.
In Boston, where this generational disparity is a more recent phenomenon, older Black men feel less welcome in treatment programs, the Boston Globe found.
‘Dying for decades’
Black men of this generation, born from 1951 to 1970, came of age at a time of wide economic disparities between Black and white people in their cities. Some of them served in Vietnam, where they were first exposed to heroin. In cities where heroin was available, others started using the drug closer to home in the 1970s and ’80s, and became addicted.
Many have continued to use drugs on and off for decades. Though some managed their addictions safely, the risk of overdose was always there.
Mark Robinson, 66, grew up in Washington and now runs a syringe exchange program in the city. He estimates he knows 50 people who have died over the years from overdoses, including one of his best friends.
“Black men didn’t just start dying,” he said. “We’ve been dying for decades as a direct result of opioid use disorder.”
The cities with this pattern of drug deaths tend to be places with large Black populations, intense residential segregation and heroin markets that were active in the 1970s, when the oldest of these men were young and first became exposed to illicit drugs, according to Dr. Dan Ciccarone, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
“Heroin has become an endemic problem,” he said. “It never went away.”
In addition to the risk of overdose, men of this generation lived through convulsions in public health and criminal justice. In the 1980s, some became exposed to HIV through drug injections. In the 1990s, more aggressive sentences for drug crimes meant many of them spent time in jails or prisons.
Several public health researchers said widespread incarceration may have reduced these men’s chances of staying clean. “You’re basically disarming them from having a good life,” said Ricky Bluthenthal, a professor of public health at the University of Southern California, who has studied injection drug users for decades. “They lose girlfriends, they lose houses, they lose connections to their children.”
They have lived through the social upheavals of COVID, a period of isolation that coincided with an increase in the overdose rate for nearly all groups.
They also stand to benefit from the recent embrace of more medical approaches to drug addiction. Drugs that can reverse an overdose are widely distributed in many cities now. And more doctors are willing to prescribe medications that can curb drug cravings for people who want to quit.
But in many of the cities where older Black men are dying at high rates, those innovations may not be reaching this group.
Decades of drug use, criminal risk and stigma have made some reluctant to discuss their addictions. The Philadelphia council member Kendra Brooks said she recently learned about nine overdoses among older Black residents in her neighborhood. The overdoses had happened quietly, in private homes.
“In this generation, you don’t get high in public,” Brooks said. “It’s something very private and personal. Amongst folks that I know, it’s like a secret disease.”
Older Black drug users have been less likely than white ones to receive prescription medicines that are now the gold standard for addiction treatment.
Medicare, the public program that insures older Americans, tends to cover fewer addiction services than insurance for younger people.
And, more generally, many outreach programs are aimed at younger populations.
“If you go to a harm reduction program, it’s not typically set up with older folks in mind,” said Brendan Saloner, a professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, who studies access to health care among people who use drugs. “They’re not in any way unwelcome, but they’re not generally the target.”
In Chicago, Fanya Burford-Berry, who directs the West Side Heroin and Opioid Task Force, pleaded with state officials to devote more resources to the city’s older Black drug users at a recent meeting.
“It seems like there’s a blind spot when it comes to prioritizing Black men, older Black men and drug usage,” she said.
‘Not any real heroin’
This generation’s experience also highlights how much more dangerous the drug supply has become. Despite better treatment and more resources to combat addiction, the overdose death rate among older Black men in these cities has risen in recent years, as heroin has been replaced by the more potent fentanyl.
“There is not any real heroin being sold in the streets, period,” said Joe Henery, 77. Henery, who lives in Washington, used heroin for 30 years before getting clean. He said his friends who are still alive were “fortunate enough to survive the epidemics of all sorts,” but he worries about the risk of overdose for those who are still using. What was once heroin in Washington is now almost all either replaced by or mixed with fentanyl.
Fentanyl is easier for cartels to manufacture in labs and smuggle into the country. But the high doesn’t last as long as heroin’s, which often means drug users take more doses a day to avoid withdrawal symptoms. And its variable strength makes it more likely for even experienced users to take a fatal dose accidentally.
Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health, said the pattern of deaths in Baltimore reported by The Times and The Banner has caused her to seek new research on why these men are dying and how to prevent it.
Volkow acknowledged that their drug addiction has long placed them at risk, but she said that fentanyl has greatly intensified that risk.
“If you were, in the past, using heroin, your chances of dying were much, much lower than your chances of dying now,” she said. “The key element now is the dangerousness of the drugs.”
Reporting was contributed by Cheryl Phillips, Eric Sagara, Sarah Cohen and Justin Mayo of Big Local News; Frank Main, Elvia Malagón and Erica Thompson of The Chicago Sun-Times; Aubrey Whelan and Joe Yerardi of The Philadelphia Inquirer; Venuri Siriwardane and Jamie Wiggan of PublicSource; Abigail Higgins and Colleen Grablick of The 51st; Ryan Little of The Baltimore Banner; David Sjostedt, Noah Baustin and George Kelly of The San Francisco Standard; Steve Strunsky and Riley Yates of NJ.com/TheStar-Ledger; Darian Benson and Mary Claire Molloy of Mirror Indy; Edgar Mendez and Devin Blake of Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and Wisconsin Watch; and Chris Serres and Yoohyun Jung of the Boston Globe.
About this project
The data and methodology behind this project can be downloaded from the Stanford Digital Repository. This article was published in partnership with The Baltimore Banner, Stanford’s Big Local News and other local news outlets: The Chicago Sun-Times; The Philadelphia Inquirer; PublicSource; The 51st; The San Francisco Standard; NJ.com/The Star-Ledger; Mirror Indy; Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and Wisconsin Watch; and the Boston Globe.
Reading Time: 8minutesClick here to read highlights from the story
Milwaukee County is among dozens of U.S. counties where drugs are disproportionately killing Black men born between 1951 and 1970.
Black men of the generation accounted for 12.5% of all drug deaths between 2018 and 2022. That’s despite making up just 2.3% of the total population. The trend has only accelerated in more recent years.
Most of the men who died used cocaine that was cut with stronger fentanyl — the faster-acting drug has fueled the national opioid epidemic. Most had a history of incarceration.
Limited options and lingering stigma prevent a generation of Black men from accessing drug treatment.
In many ways, Hamid Abd-Al-Jabbar’s life story involved redemption. A victim of abuse who was exposed to alcohol and drugs while growing up on Milwaukee’s North Side, he made dangerous choices as a teenager. By age 19, he landed in prison after shooting and killing a man during a 1988 drug house robbery.
But he worked on himself while incarcerated, his wife Desilynn Smith recalled. After he walked out of prison for good, he found a calling as a peace activist. He became a violence interrupter for Milwaukee’s 414 Life program, aiming to prevent gun violence through de-escalation and intervention.
Abd-Al-Jabbar may have looked healed on the outside, but he never moved past the trauma that shaped much of his life, Smith said. He wouldn’t ask for help.
That’s why Smith still grieves. Her husband died in February 2021 after ingesting a drug mixture that included fentanyl and cocaine. He was 51.
Smith now wears his fingerprint on a charm bracelet as a physical reminder of the man she knew and loved for most of her life.
“He never learned how to cope with things in a healthy way,” said Smith, executive director of Uniting Garden Homes, Inc., an organization that provides mental health and substance use services on Milwaukee’s North Side. “In our communities addiction is frowned upon, so people don’t get the help they need.”
Desilynn Smith is still grieving the loss of her husband Hamid Abd-Al-Jabbar, who died in 2021 after ingesting a mixture of cocaine and fentanyl. She is shown Jan. 23, 2025, in her office at Uniting Garden Homes, Inc., in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Abd-Al-Jabbar is part of a generation of Milwaukee’s older Black men who are disproportionately dying from drug poisonings and overdoses, even as the opioid epidemic slows for others.
Times and Banner reporters initially identified the pattern in Baltimore. They later found the same effect in dozens of counties nationwide.
In Milwaukee, Black men of the generation accounted for 12.5% of all drug deaths between 2018 and 2022. That’s despite making up just 2.3% of the total population.
The county’s older Black men were lost to drugs at rates 14.2 times higher than all people nationally and 5.5 times higher than all other Milwaukee County residents.
Six other Wisconsin counties — Brown, Dane, Kenosha, Racine, Rock and Waukesha — ranked among the top 408 nationally in drug deaths during the years analyzed. But Milwaukee was the only one in Wisconsin where this generation of Black men died at such staggering rates.
Hamid Abd-Al-Jabbar, right, helps distribute masks in Milwaukee during the pandemic-impacted April 2020 elections. After spending years in prison, Abd-Al-Jabbar found a calling as a peace activist. (Courtesy of City of Milwaukee Office of Violence Prevention)
Milwaukee trend accelerates
The trend in Milwaukee County has only accelerated since 2022, the last year of the Times and Banner analysis, even as the county’s total drug deaths decline, Milwaukee NNS and Wisconsin Watch found.
Drugs killed 74 of the county’s older Black men in 2024. The group made up 17.3% of all drug deaths — up from 16.2% in 2023 and 14.1% the previous year, medical examiner data shows.
Abd-Al-Jabbar’s story shares similarities with many of those men. Most used cocaine that was cut with stronger fentanyl — the faster-acting drug has fueled the national opioid epidemic. Most had a history of incarceration.
Boxes of Narcan are stored in the Uniting Garden Homes, Inc., office, Jan. 23, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Marc Levine, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researcher, concluded in 2020 that “Black Milwaukee is generally worse off today than it was 40 or 50 years ago” when considering dozens of quality of life indicators.
Meanwhile, limited options and lingering stigma prevent a generation of Black men from accessing drug treatment, local experts told Milwaukee NNS and Wisconsin Watch.
“Black men experience higher rates of community violence, are often untreated for mental health issues and experience greater levels of systemic racism than other groups,” said Lia Knox, a Milwaukee mental wellness consultant. “These all elevate their risk of incarceration, addiction and also death.”
A network of organizations providing comprehensive treatment offers hope, but these resources fall far short of meeting community needs.
A silent struggle
Smith and Abd-Al-Jabbar first started dating at 14, and they had a child together at 16. But as their relationship blossomed, Smith said, Abd-Al-Jabbar silently struggled with what she suspects was an undiagnosed mental health illness linked to childhood trauma.
“A lot of the bad behaviors he had were learned behaviors,” Smith said.
Desilynn Smith, executive director of Uniting Garden Homes, Inc., wears a bracelet bearing the fingerprint of her late husband Hamid Abd-Al-Jabbar at Uniting Garden Homes, Inc., in Milwaukee. “I keep that with me at all times,” Smith says. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Abd-Al-Jabbar became suicidal as a teen and began robbing drug dealers.
When he entered prison, Abd-Al-Jabbar read and wrote at a fifth grade level and coped like a 10-year-old, Smith said. By age 21, she said, he’d already spent two years in solitary confinement. But he had the resolve to change. He began to read voraciously and converted to Islam.
He was released from prison after 11 years, but returned multiple times before leaving for good in 2018. Smith and Abd-Al-Jabbar married, and he started earning praise for preventing bloodshed as a violence interrupter.
Still, he struggled under the pressures of his new calling. The work added weight to the trauma he carried into and out of prison. His mental health only worsened, Smith said, and he turned back to drugs as a coping mechanism.
“The main thing he learned in prison was how to survive,” she said.
Most men lost were formerly incarcerated
At least half of Milwaukee’s older Black men lost to drugs in 2024 served time in state prison, Milwaukee NNS and Wisconsin Watch found by cross-referencing Department of Corrections and medical examiner records. More than a dozen other men on that list interacted with the criminal justice system in some way. Some served time in jail. For others, full records weren’t available.
Most of the men left prison decades or years before they died. But three died within about a year of their release. A 55-year-old North Side man died just 22 days after release.
In Wisconsin, DOC officials and prisoners say drugs are routinely entering prisons, putting prisoners and staff at risk and increasing challenges for people facing addiction.
Thousands wait for treatment in prison
The DOC as of last December enrolled 815 people in substance abuse treatment programs, but its waitlist for such services was far higher: more than 11,700.
“You don’t really get the treatment you need in prison,” said Randy Mack, a 66-year-old Black man who served time in Wisconsin’s Columbia, Fox Lake, Green Bay and Kettle Moraine correctional institutions.
Randy Mack, a resident of Serenity Inns, talks with Ken Ginlack, executive director, in the facility’s library on Dec. 19, 2024. Expanding on its original outpatient treatment center on Milwaukee’s North Side, Serenity Inns also runs a residential treatment facility and a transitional living program and opened a drop-in clinic in January. (Andy Manis for Wisconsin Watch)
Leaving prison can be a particularly vulnerable time for relapse, Mack said. Some men manage to stop using drugs while incarcerated. They think they are safe, only to struggle when they leave.
“You get back out on the streets and you see the same people and fall into the same traps,” Mack said.
Knox, the wellness consultant, agrees. After being disconnected from their communities, many men, especially older ones, leave prison feeling isolated and unable to ask for help. They turn to drugs.
“Now with the opioids, they’re overdosing and dying more often,” she said.
Access to the program is uneven across the state. Corrections officials have sought to expand it using settlement money from national opioids litigation. In its latest two-year budget request the department set a goal for hiring more vendors to administer the program.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers plans to release his full budget proposal next month. His past proposals have sought millions of dollars for treatment and other rehabilitation programs. The Republican-controlled Legislature has rejected or reduced funding in most cases.
Mack said he received some help while in prison, but it wasn’t intense enough to make a breakthrough. Now he’s getting more holistic treatment from Serenity Inns, a North Side recovery program for men.
Executive Director Kenneth Ginlack said the organization helps men through up to 20 hours of mental health and substance use treatment each week.
What’s key, Ginlack said, is that most of his staff, including himself, are in recovery.
“We understand them not just from a recovery standpoint, but we were able to go back to our own experiences and talk to them about that,” he said. “That’s how we build trust in the community.”
Fentanyl catches cocaine users unaware
Many of the older men dying were longtime users of stimulants, like crack cocaine, Ginlack said, adding they had “no idea that the stimulants are cut with fentanyl.”
They don’t feel the need to use test strips to check for fentanyl or carry Narcan to reverse the effects of opioid poisoning, he said.
A group discussion is shown at Serenity Inns in Milwaukee on Dec. 19, 2024. (Andy Manis for Wisconsin Watch)
Last year, 84% of older Black men killed by drugs had cocaine in their system, and 61% had fentanyl, Milwaukee NNS and Wisconsin Watch found. More than half ingested both drugs.
Months after relapsing, Alfred Carter, 61, decided he was ready to kick his cocaine habit.
When he showed up to a Milwaukee detox center in October, he was shocked to learn he had fentanyl in his system.
“What made it so bad is that I hear all the stories about people putting fentanyl in cocaine, but I said not my people,” Carter said. “It puts a healthy fear in my life, because at any time I can overdose — not even knowing that I’m taking it.”
Awareness is slowly increasing, Ginlack said, as more men in his program share stories about losing loved ones.
Milwaukee’s need outpaces resources
Expanding on its original outpatient treatment center on West Brown Street, Serenity Inns now also runs a residential treatment facility and a transitional living program and opened a drop-in clinic in January.
Still, those don’t come close to meeting demands for its services.
“We’re the only treatment center in Milwaukee County that takes people without insurance, so a lot of other centers send people our way,” said Ginlack, who said the county typically runs about 200 beds short of meeting demand.
“My biggest fear is someone calls for that bed and the next day they have a fatal overdose because one wasn’t available.”
‘I don’t want to lose hope’
Carter and Mack each intend to complete their programs soon. It’s Mack’s fourth time in treatment and his second stint at Serenity Inns. This time, he expects to succeed. He wants to move into Serenity Inns’ apartment building — continuing his recovery and working toward becoming a drug counselor.
“My thinking pattern has changed,” Mack said. “I’m going to use the tools we learned in treatment and avoid high-risk situations.”
Butterfly stickers adorn the windows of Desilynn Smith’s office at Milwaukee’s Uniting Garden Homes, Inc., on Jan. 23, 2025. They remind her of her late mother. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Carter wants to restore his life to what it was before. He spent years as a carpenter before his life unraveled and he ended up in prison. He knows he can’t take that life back if he returns to drugs.
“I have to be able to say no and not get high. It doesn’t do me any good, and it could kill me,” he said. “I have to associate myself with being clean. I don’t want to lose hope.”
As Smith reflects on her partner’s life and death, she recognizes his journey taught her plenty, too. “I was hit hard with the reality that I was too embarrassed to ask for help for my husband and best friend,” she said. “I shouldn’t have had that fear.”
The topic of lead poisoning is back in the news in Milwaukee after officials confirmed a case this month at Golda Meir Lower School.
A student at the school was exposed to chipping lead paint in a bathroom in the school’s basement, said Tyler Weber, deputy commissioner of environmental health at the Milwaukee Health Department.
Weber said the Health Department’s investigation continues, but said: “The most apparent lead paint hazards have been controlled.”
The Health Department also plans to conduct testing for lead in the school’s water.
Here are some things you should know about lead poisoning.
1. How serious is lead poisoning?
Lead poisoning can pose a significant risk, especially to young children and pregnant people. According to a Milwaukee Health Department webpage, lead poisoning is “one of the most serious health threats facing young children in Milwaukee.”
Lead exposure and lead poisoning can contribute to learning and behavioral difficulties in children, according to the World Health Organization. Lead is absorbed into the body at a much higher rate for young children, and extremely high exposure to lead can be deadly.
But lead poisoning can sometimes be difficult to detect from symptoms alone.
“It’s not always apparent if your child is lead poisoned,” Weber said. “That’s why it is important to follow our blood screening recommendation … especially if you are a child in the city of Milwaukee.”
2. Importance of blood tests
Blood tests for lead can show whether you and your child are being exposed to dangerous amounts of lead. Both the Wisconsin Department of Health Services and the Milwaukee Health Department recommend blood tests for lead for all children under the age of 5.
The Milwaukee Health Department recommends testing all children at the ages of 12, 18 and 24 months, and then once every year until the age of 5. Testing is recommended for all children, regardless of previous testing frequency and results.
3. Where can I get tested for lead poisoning?
Blood testing for lead poisoning is free for those enrolled in BadgerCare Plus, Wisconsin’s Medicaid program.
Even if you are not eligible for coverage under BadgerCare, your children could be. BadgerCare provides coverage for adults at 100% of the poverty level, but children are covered in families with an income of up to 300% of the poverty level.
(Current income limits for BadgerCare eligibility are available here, and you can find out more about BadgerCare and enrollment here.)
Testing for lead poisoning is covered under most private insurance plans.
4. Free community resources
For those without health insurance, local options for free lead testing are available.
In Milwaukee, the MacCanon Brown Homeless Sanctuary and the Coalition on Lead Emergency offer a free monthly lead testing clinic on the second Saturday of every month from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 2461 W. Center St. Every participating child will receive a free stuffed animal, and each participating family will receive a $10 gift card.
“Lead paint is the primary source of lead poisoning in the city of Milwaukee,” said Caroline Reinwald, a public information officer with the Milwaukee Health Department.
Lead paint was banned for residential use in 1978, but homes built before 1978 can contain lead paint. The paint can chip or create dust, which is dangerous to ingest.
A guide published by the Environmental Protection Agency recommends several steps if you think your home may contain lead-based paint, including regularly cleaning surfaces with warm and soapy water and making sure that you and your children regularly wash hands, pacifiers, bottles and toys.
Contaminated water can also be a cause of lead poisoning. Many buildings in Milwaukee have lead service lines or water mains, and the city is currently conducting a Lead Service Line Replacement Program to change the old pipes. You can check to see if your building has lead pipes here.
Even if a building does not have lead service lines or water mains, some older water fixtures may still contain lead. Milwaukee Water Works recommends running your water pipe for three minutes before drinking or cooking with it and only using the cold water tap to reduce the amount of lead in your water.
“A water filter can also help. Not all filters remove lead, however – look for a point-of-use filter, such as a pitcher or faucet mounted filter, with the NSF/ANSI/CAN 42 and 53 for lead certification. More information is available here.”
Maintaining a full diet with enough iron, calcium and vitamin C can also help limit lead absorption among children. This guide includes food and recipe recommendations that can provide these nutrients.
Milwaukee Alderwoman Larresa Taylor said at a news conference Wednesday that she is confident of two things: that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants to move its Milwaukee-based facility to the northwest side of the city and that she is going to fight any such move.
“We are a district that has tremendous potential, but that doesn’t mean that we’re going to accept any and everything, and it certainly doesn’t mean that we’re going to allow someone to just come into our district without warning or without knowledge,” she said.
She is not alone in her opposition.
Many officials and activists stood in solidarity with Taylor, including other alderpeople, Milwaukee County Board supervisors, community organizers, business improvement district representatives and state lawmakers.
“People are scared. Kids are scared. This is the time to push back hard,” said Milwaukee Common Council President José Pérez at the news conference. “Whether here or somewhere else in the city, my role as council president is to assure that the laws are followed, and those laws are to protect our families, our most vulnerable.”
What might happen?
The current building ICE is using downtown as a processing center is being sold, said Taylor, who said her office received a request on Dec. 9 regarding the modification of a building at 11925 W. Lake Park Drive on Milwaukee’s northwest side.
These modifications include a sally port, a type of secured entryway and a chain link fence with privacy slats.
Taylor said that these modifications are consistent with the use of the building as an ICE processing center, where ICE could transport and temporarily hold people.
Nuts and bolts
As far as zoning goes, the West Lake Park Drive location is designated as planned development, rather than traditional zoning.
With traditional zoning, there are clearly delineated uses, but, with planned development, “Everything done gets either approved or denied by the (city of Milwaukee) Department of City Development,’ said Tyler Hamelink, plan examiner from the city of Milwaukee’s Permit and Development Center.
Taylor said that her office is “definitely in communication with the Department of City Development.”
“That is where our information is coming from,” she added.
Taylor also is planning to meet with the owner of the building to discuss possibilities.
What happens next?
Pérez said that options to fight back include “legal appeal or by the screaming of our voices.”
Milwaukee County Board Supervisor Juan Miguel Martínez announced the formation of a coalition to oppose an ICE facility at this District 9 location.
The coalition is currently solidifying support and mulling its options, said Eddie Cullen, spokesperson for the county board.
“The mayor has not publicly opined about a plan to replace the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility currently located at Broadway and Knapp Street,” said Jeff Fleming, spokesperson for Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson. “The contact the city has had about the proposed northwest side location has come only from private sector building owners.”
Newly elected Milwaukee County District Attorney Kent Lovern has made it a priority to listen to residents on the north and south sides of Milwaukee.
“What I have heard loudly and clearly is everyone wants to feel safe, and everyone wants that safety in their daily lives, and they want that for their children,” Lovern said.
With nearly 30 years of experience as a prosecutor, he’s recognized for his collaborative approach to systemic issues.
Lovern focuses on collaborations outside his office, in part, because he believes these collaborations are necessary to sustainably reduce violence and increase public safety in Milwaukee.
“I just feel like we need to better connect into one another and develop our own system of public safety – one that is really framed up as community development, economic development, educational development and the public safety comes with that,” he said.
Among Milwaukee’s large network of criminal justice advocates, many say they feel heard by Lovern.
“Kent has always been thoughtful and responsive to me,” said Emilio De Torre, executive director of Milwaukee Turners, which advocates for various criminal justice initiatives as well as those impacted by the criminal justice system.
Working together
“We can’t unring the bell of a crime, right? If somebody commits a crime, like myself, they need to be prosecuted,” said Adam Procell, who coordinates the monthly resource fair Home to Stay, for formerly incarcerated individuals reentering society. “But after that time period, when somebody gets out, he (Lovern) also understands that if we don’t provide the person with an opportunity to lead an optimal lifestyle, they’re going to have to prosecute them again for another crime.”
For Lovern, people reentering have a unique ability to lead others away from crime.
“People returning back to communities, looking to be proactive members of their community, looking for ways to help mentor young people and help instruct young people about the pitfalls and the mistakes they made – that’s a very powerful group,” he said.
Milwaukee County has the largest population of people on parole, probation or extended supervision in the state. At the end of October, nearly 13,000 people were under supervision, state correctional data show.
“On the whole, I have heard more interest in reentry across the board … than I have heard at any time in my career,” Lovern said.
Causes of crime
Lovern’s support of reentry is consistent with an overall preventive approach to crime.
He cites the relationship between drug addiction and crime as a good example.
“We’ve had a strong approach to this for some time because right after John (Chisholm) was elected, 18 years ago, we created an early intervention unit, and that was immediately designed to offer opportunities for people to work through a criminal charge … and we’ve seen a lot of success with that.”
WISDOM, a statewide faith-based organization, wants Lovern to expand on this philosophy.
“There’s a lot of room for certainly expanding treatment alternatives to incarceration for people living with mental illness and with addiction issues, and there are many opportunities to divert more people from the system. I’m definitely optimistic that those types of programs will continue and will expand,” said Mark Rice, coordinator of WISDOM’s Wisconsin Transformational Justice Campaign.
Lovern is proud of Milwaukee’s mental health courts, which address cases involving mental health concerns, including assessments of competence and insanity pleas.
An intermediate goal the DA’s office is close to achieving, he said, is increasing the number of cases handled in these courts to 30 cases on an ongoing basis, compared to 10 cases previously.
“Somebody might come first through the police department or to the DA’s office, and we may be saying, ‘Look, this person isn’t really committing criminal behavior – the bigger concern here is the mental health piece,’” said Lovern.
But certain violent crimes have increased since 2022, including robberies and carjackings.
“There’s no question that there is additional work that needs to be done to drive down the level of violent crime we see in this community,” Lovern said.
The problem, he added, is not evenly spread throughout the city.
“Everyone’s concerned about crime everywhere, but we know where the concentrations of violent crime exist,” said Lovern, adding that many residents in these neighborhoods tell him that “a strong response” to crime is needed and that these “neighborhoods need to be valued.”
Limits of the office
Rice, of WISDOM, does not want fairness and justice to be lost, however.
“We still in Wisconsin incarcerate Black people at one of the highest rates in the nation,” he said. “There’s a lot of discretion up front when plea bargains are reached in terms of who gets diverted from the system and who goes in.”
Rice and others also worry about the systemic limitations of the DA’s office to address such problems.
“Jobs like the DA’s office, mayor’s office, police chief tend to be very difficult, with unforeseen pressures and inherent flaws in how they’ve been systemized over the years,” said De Torre, of Milwaukee Turners. “The real test is how a person acts and what they do within a flawed system.”
Login
