Defund the police? Thank the WisGOPs for that

Earlier this month, Governor Evers rightfully vetoed a GOP poser bill that would have cut shared revenue from Wisconsin communities if they reduced the staffs of their police departments, fire departments, and first responder units. Evers said this bill would have micromanaged local governments, and made already-difficult budgeting even harder.

And it’s pathetic to see GOPs try to stir up rubes with this garbage in 2021, because the Wisconsin Policy Forum noted on Wednesday that many Wisconsin communities were defunding the police before any of the uprisings of 2020, under budgets and laws passed by Scott Walker and a GOP Legislature. I had a lot of ideas ready to roll on this, and then Bruce Murphy of Urban Milwaukee beat me to the punch by also discussing the Policy Forum's paper.

I'll add to Murphy's ideas by going into more detail on a couple of angles. Let me give you some of the Policy Forum's numbers that go into how much is spent on law enforcement, and just how many cut spending at the end of the 2010s.

Starting with law enforcement, we find that total spending on that function across all municipalities increased from $1.21 billion in 2018 to $1.23 billion in 2019 (1.3%). However, the data show 253 municipalities decreased the dollar amount spent on all law enforcement activities (see Figure 1). This includes large cities (Milwaukee, Green Bay), suburbs (Bayside, Grafton, Stoughton, Verona), and a number of very small communities, including 144 municipalities with fewer than 2,000 residents.

In fact, all but 10 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties had at least one municipality that decreased its police budget in 2019. Milwaukee was the only municipality among this group with a spending decrease larger than $1 million ($7.4 million). Given that the spending data does not match the exact definition in the proposal, we did not look to see which of these municipalities met the 30-employee threshold.

Over that same two-year span, 461 municipalities increased their spending on police, including three that increased spending by more than $1 million: Madison ($2.2 million), West Allis ($1.7 million), and Racine ($1.5 million). It should be noted that 1,118 municipalities – more than three out of every five – spent nothing on police in either year; however, most of these are town governments with a population of under 1,000. As we noted in a recent report on local government spending, those small communities tend to be served by county sheriff departments.

I’m betting that increase of $2.2 million in added police spending in Madison won’t get mentioned on AM Hate Radio in Wisconsin.

Not surprisingly, the Policy Forum finds that bigger cities had more of their budgets tied up in police and fire protection in 2019. And that’s a big problem given the past decade of state Republicans limiting expenses for all municipalities in the name of “property tax relief.”

Wisconsin municipalities have been operating under strict property tax limits for more than a decade and intergovernmental revenue – primarily aid from the state – has also declined as a share of overall municipal revenue over that period. These constraints on the growth of property taxes and state aid likely have contributed to the difficulties faced by municipalities in maintaining police and fire department budgets and staffing…

In 2019, police, fire, and emergency medical services together made up 39.3% of all municipal operating spending in Wisconsin, down only modestly from the 40.5% mark in 2009. In big cities, like Milwaukee (52.1%), Madison (44.2%), and Kenosha (56.7%), that number is even higher (see Figure 3); 39 of Wisconsin’s 50 most populous municipalities spent at least 40% of their operating budget on these three services in 2019.

Then throw in Scott Walker’s side deal with the police and firefighter unions, where he paid back their support in 2010 by not allowing their unions to be busted by 2011’s Act 10. So cities have more of their expenses tied up in police and fire services, can’t raise property taxes to pay for these services, and aren’t allowed to use the “tools” of Act 10 to limit costs (by offloading them onto employees and away from tax dollars).

But at the same time, WisGOPs want to prevent (further) defunding of police. Well, seems like the answer to that one is easy. Allow cities and other municipalities to put in a sales tax that pays for police and fire services. More of the money that is generated by these places stays in the community to improve public safety, and property taxes don’t have to go up in the process.

And yet WisGOPs chose not to allow that happen, when they refused to allow Governor Evers proposal to free up more municipalities in Wisconsin to put in sales taxes to pay for services. I think communities should be able to use their own money as they see fit, but can’t there at least be some kind of compromise where the sales tax funds are targeted for public safety and/or roads?

If WisGOPs don’t allow a sales tax, then they can’t complain when communities choose to defund police. Because it’s the fiscal handcuffs that WisGOPs have imposed on local governments that have led to the defundings that have already happened!