Three police funding grants are working their way through committees to eventually go before the Madison City Council, none of which would require taxpayer dollars but could add hundreds of thousands to the police department’s operating budget.
Police funding has been a controversial topic in recent years, heightening after the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020. In response, Madison erupted with looting, tear gas and fire after hours of peaceful protesting; local activists called on elected leaders to defund the city’s own police department.
Later that summer in 2020, Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway slashed the department’s general fund by nearly $2 million as part of budget cuts. It was the largest decrease to the Madison Police Department’s budget in the last 10 years.
Taxpayer dollars toward the city’s police department have fluctuated since. But MPD might have a workaround to combat the cuts in the form of grants.
Funding history
Over the past three decades, law enforcement and police spending have been top priorities for municipalities, according to a Wisconsin Policy Forum report, receiving one out of every five operating and capital dollars spent by cities in the state.
In the past year, Madison shifted $82,000 from MPD’s 2022 budget to the Madison Fire Department for the Community Alternative Response Emergency Services, or CARES. The program is an alternative to police addressing mental and behavioral health crises, with CARES teams deescalating, treating or referring people to behavioral health services in the community instead.
While MPD’s 2022 budget is approximately $80 million, the vast majority of spending goes to salaries, wages and benefits for department staff. With 2023 budget decisions ahead and a projected $13 million deficit in the city’s operating budget, cuts seem imminent.
The three resolutions approving additional state and federal funds for MPD have already passed the Public Safety Review Committee and are moving to the Finance Committee for approval before heading to the City Council.
"Rebuilding trust and keeping our city safe remain the top priorities for the Madison Police Department. We know these goals will take time," said Stephanie Fryer, a spokesperson for MPD. "These grants would allow us to use outside funds to achieve those goals."
"We believe they can better our department and our entire community," she added.
But for some, the funds raise red flags when it comes to purpose and transparency.
Project Safe Neighborhoods grant
One of those grants is a Project Safe Neighborhoods grant from the state Department of Justice for $13,343 and a Dane County Narcotics Task Force subaward of up to $31,433.
The Project Safe Neighborhoods initiative aims to reduce violent crime, gun violence and gang activity by linking federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. The money would go toward overtime pay for data-driven initiatives through Sep. 30, 2024. The subaward may be used for gun violence-oriented overtime for MPD officers on the task force through the same date.
Former Ald. Brenda Konkel, who serves on the Public Safety Review Committee, was the only member to vote against the grant at an Aug. 10 meeting, expressing doubts about what the grant funding actually accomplishes.
"These funds always make me uncomfortable. When I see things called 'Project Safe Neighborhoods' or lots of words that have been used over the years, it usually is to make it sound like it's going to be doing something great for neighborhoods, but instead it is overpolicing neighborhoods," said Konkel, the executive director of MACH OneHealth, a local organization working to bring health care to the homeless.
"I don't know if that's what this is because I can't really tell what it is," she added.
Konkel questioned in which neighborhoods the grant money would be used, suspecting it would go toward more policing in low-income and marginalized communities.
MPD Patrol Lieutenant Stephanie Drescher clarified the funds are distributed to community engagement initiatives, as well as those centering around prevention, intervention and accountability.
The initiatives take place in areas “identified as a focus for gun and violent crime issues,” Drescher said at the meeting. The money specifically will help provide overtime pay.
"I just feel like these funds often don't do the good that it sounds like they're going to do," Konkel said. "The lack of transparency in these funds makes me not want to support it, but it's just really hard to know."
Safer Communities grant
Another grant with a similar name — the Safer Communities grant from the state Department of Administration — would give $833,338 to the Madison Police Department for hiring, training, equipping law enforcement officers, updating technology and policies, and implementing new crime-reduction initiatives. The money would go through June 30, 2023.
The resolution allocates $669,938 of the grant funding to the police budget for purposes delineated in the resolution, including:
- $2,000 sign-on bonuses and up to an additional $2,000 for out-of-state recruitment bonuses for the 2023 spring recruit class, using up to $110,000;
- $98,000 to train officers to improve efficiency, effectiveness and accountability;
- $175,000 to purchase and enter into a contract for ShotSpotter Connect patrol management software, which claims to improve crime response in specific neighborhoods using data and reduce bias and overpolicing;
- $30,000 for electric bicycles for officers to “better engage the community, respond to calls quicker and arrive on scene with less fatigue than conventional bikes”;
- $221,400 for ballistic helmets for all officers for potential use during active shooter responses.
The remaining $163,400 would go toward a future proposal that will be part of MPD’s 2023 operating budget request.
Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance grant
Lastly, the U.S. Department of Justice Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance grant would provide $110,839 for various city and county law enforcement initiatives.
Dane County would receive $27,183 that would be used for human services drug court treatment program, special events and diving team supplies, according to the resolution, as well as the district attorney’s office victim and witness services program.
But the bulk of the grant, $83,656, would go to the Madison Police Department and would be divvied up as follows:
- $35,000 for electric vehicle charging stations at district stations and training center;
- $18,156 for an electronic signboard (the kind you see on the side of the road with information) for public safety messages;
- $12,500 for communication headsets for the special events team;
- $12,000 for patrol tire deflation devices;
- $6,000 for police officer recruiting supplies.
Rhodes-Conway along with Ald. Patrick Heck, District 2, are the sponsors of all three resolutions for the grants, which should help with the city’s multifaceted approach to preventing and reducing violence, Rhodes-Conway told the Cap Times in an email.
"Every resident in Madison deserves to feel safe in their homes and neighborhoods," the mayor said. "I've had several constructive talks with (Police) Chief Shon Barnes about how these state and federal grants would be used to make our community safer."
She hopes they will improve accountability and trust between officers and Madison residents, with all three focusing on community policing efforts and reducing racial disparities in policing.
"The grants are a way to move the agency forward with external funds and focus on the needs identified by department leadership and community input," Rhodes-Conway added.
Transparency and 'rubber-stamping'
Despite the money not coming out of taxpayers' pockets, the grants still give more capital and resources to both city and county law enforcement agencies.
Jim Palmer, executive director at the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, believes the proposals are "strategic and yet diverse" in a way that will be meaningful for members of the public and law enforcement officers.
"They're all targeted in a way that even those who have been critical of law enforcement in the past, particularly at the local level in Madison, I would think they would appreciate," Palmer said. "(The grants) focus more resources toward human services, drug court, treatment programs, victim services, things of that nature."
He added that when examining all three grant programs, there seems to have been a concerted effort to address concerns about overpolicing, highlighting the ShotSpotter Connect patrol management software.
The program is designed to reduce the potential for overpolicing in neighborhoods by using artificial intelligence-driven analysis to help plan patrols, according to the company’s website.
ShotSpotter also created a controversial gunshot detection system that installs on city streets and tries to identify and locate the sound of gunshots. While Madison is not using this program, the company has been scrutinized by the ACLU and the MacArthur Justice Center for lack of privacy and for overwhelming use in communities of color.
"The (patrol management) software I think is well-intentioned and I will be curious to see how that works," Palmer said. "I'm aware that it has been criticized in some other states for not providing a certain degree of transparency that the public wants and deserves.
"Hopefully here the city police department can do more to manage those expectations or to achieve that level of transparency," he added.
At the Aug. 10 Public Safety Review Committee meeting, Konkel asked what the point of the committee is if it is not actually reviewing policies, such as the three grants before them.
"If we're just rubber-stamping things, why am I here?" she asked. "I feel like we're not setting priorities at a high level. We probably wouldn't say buy 30 electric bicycles. We would probably say something more along the lines of, 'Get out into the neighborhoods.'"
Konkel did not respond to the Cap Times’ request for an interview. At the meeting, she contended the committee could be doing more to provide voices to those who don’t attend their meetings.
"To me, it's frustrating to be sitting on a body like this and be voting on these things and not really having any impact at all," Konkel said.
In response, Chief Barnes argued there is a review process and expressed frustration that the police department is criticized every time an idea isn’t communicated months ahead of time.
"It gets kind of frustrating. Every time we have an idea, it's like, 'Well, why didn't we know you had that idea?’” Barnes said. "Because we're running a police department."
He said state and federal grants often come in with little notice, leaving departments with a quick turnaround to assign those dollars to actual services and resources.
Heck, one of the alders on the committee, said the committee will need to do a better job of having big picture discussions; instead, the committee "just kicks the can down the road."
"We have a low capacity committee that doesn't have a tradition of engaging to a great degree in the past," Heck said. "We're down two members again. Do we have the capacity to look at these grants, for instance, and provide input? I'd say mostly no right now, but I still think it's a great goal."
A lot of it comes down to people power, he added.
"We'll have to do better and figure out what portions of that bigger discussion that we want to tackle. We can't tackle it all. There's no way," he said. "We need a much bigger committee and a lot more staff to help us — but I still think there's some of that we can do."
