On September 18, 2002, armed Milwaukee police officers stormed the El Rey grocery store and tortilla factory during business hours. Pointing guns at employees and customers, officers detained dozens of employees, forcing pregnant women to the ground and compelling many employees to sit on a concrete floor in handcuffs for hours. Twenty-five employees filed complaints with the Milwaukee Fire & Police Commission. The FPC sat on the complaints for a year, refusing to investigate what had happened. Finally, the FPC sent the complaint to the Police Department and, in effect, asked the department to investigate itself.
A lawsuit alleged that the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commision failed to meaningfully investigate the complaints. In 2007, the Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously ruled that state law requires the FPC to investigate serious citizen complaints. The Court threw out an internal rule that the FPC had used in ways that made it virtually impossible for citizen complaints to proceed.
“While the FPC can make some rules, the Supreme Court recognized that the commission had imposed far too many barriers on Milwaukee residents seeking remedies for police misconduct,” noted Karyn Rotker of the ACLU of Wisconsin. The ACLU -WI, along with the Milwaukee Branch of the NAACP and Milwaukee Inner-City Congregations Allied for Hope, had submitted a friend of the court brief emphasizing the need for civilian review and investigation of police misconduct.
“The Supreme Court made it clear that the FPC can’t make residents of Milwaukee go through 500-page manuals to try to figure out what rule was violated, and then dismiss complaints for not following through on technicalities,” added attorney John Celichowski of MICAH. “The Court also said that the FPC can’t just dismiss a complaint and tell the police to investigate themselves – which is essentially what happened here.”
“Groups who have studied the FPC have for years found that the commission needs to exercise more oversight over the police,” said Jerry Ann Hamilton, president of the Milwaukee Branch of the NAACP. “This decision emphasizes that point. We also need the FPC to allow citizens to complain about policies, not just individual officer actions, and to set up a process to identify patterns of behavior, officers complained against, and situations which seem to give rise to complaints, and take corrective action.”
“The FPC can’t do this on its own,” added attorney Rotker. “In 2003, the city put the FPC in its department of employee relations, reducing the FPC’s autonomy and budget. It’s time for the city of Milwaukee to make sure the FPC has the budget, and the investigators, to do its job, and to make sure the FPC does its job of addressing police misconduct in a meaningful way.”
In 2023, the powers and autonomy of the Milwaukee FPC were further reduced with the passage of Act 12.
