It is now official: the Milwaukee police department will undergo sweeping reforms to end its officers’ practice of stopping and frisking people without legal justification and based only on race or ethnicity. For the last decade, tens of thousands of Black and brown Milwaukeeans have been interrupted in their daily lives by police stopping them without reasonable suspicion of criminal activity as required by the Constitution.
Milwaukee has agreed to reform its stops and frisks in the settlement of Collins v. City of Milwaukee, brought in 2017 by the plaintiffs, the ACLU, the ACLU of Wisconsin, and Covington & Burling. On July 10, Milwaukee’s Common Council approved the agreement (click here for more information), but it wasn’t final until the mayor signed the council’s resolutions about the agreement, the city attorney signed the agreement, and the parties filed it with the court today.
Of the challenges to citywide, unconstitutional stop and frisk in the U.S., Collins has resulted in the most extensive police reforms since Floyd v. City of New York in 2013.