MILWAUKEE (AP) - Community leaders working against disparities in the criminal justice system are greeting the settlement agreement in the ACLU’s stop-and-frisk lawsuit against the city with hope. The $3.4 million settlement was made official Monday when U.S. District Judge J.P. Stadtmueller approved it.
The settlement “brings in some reforms and some accountability measures that will ensure that the police are accurately documenting all the reasons why they are stopping citizens,” said Fred Royal, president of the NAACP Milwaukee Branch. “The lawsuit revealed that there were individuals being stopped for nothing other than the color of their skin.”
Martha Barry, racial justice director at the YWCA of Southeast Wisconsin, noted that police likely would see the settlement as an attack.
“But if it can get behavior to change that’s having a hugely detrimental impact on our community, it will . be a good thing,” she said. “If their motto of ‘protect and serve’ is really what they want to live by, then this will help them to better protect and serve the community that they’re in.”
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The nonprofit news outlet Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service provided this article to The Associated Press through a collaboration with Institute for Nonprofit News.
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The class-action lawsuit, filed in February 2017, was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Wisconsin and the law firm Covington and Burling LLC., representing Charles Collins and eight other Milwaukee residents. The parties reached a settlement that was approved by the Milwaukee Common Council and Mayor Tom Barrett on July 10.
The settlement aims “to end practices amounting to a decade-long stop-and-frisk program that resulted in hundreds of thousands of baseless stops as well as racial and ethnic profiling of black and Latino people citywide,” according to the ACLU’s website. The defendants were the City of Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission and the police chief, now Alfonso Morales....
Collins, a military veteran and longtime Milwaukee resident in his late 60s, was pulled over by MPD officers while driving home with his wife after visiting their son in 2014. Like the other plaintiffs, he broke no laws and was never charged.“Hopefully (the agreement) will move us in a direction to make this community much more of a community that folks of color feel that they can live in and . work, breathe, play and not be under scrutiny,” Barry said.Royal added that he hopes that the mandated participation of outside auditors as well as a local citizens oversight committee will ensure that new procedures for documenting police stops and monitoring other police interactions with community members will be adhered to.He noted that the city has spent more than $26 million in the last eight years to settle police misconduct suits. Six fire stations were closed as a result of the financial strain on the city budget, Royal said.The settlement calls for the Milwaukee Collaborative Community Committee, put together by the Common Council early