article: Plaintiffs, ACLU national and the ACLU of Wisconsin, along with Covington & Burling attorneys, filed this class action alleging that the Milwaukee Police Department's (MPD) stop-and-frisk policies were unconstitutional. The case was filed in the Eastern District of Wisconsin on February 22, 2017. The complaint alleged under Section 1983 that Milwaukee's stop-and-frisk policies violated the Fourth Amendment's search and seizure protections as well as the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. It also alleged under Section 2000d that Milwaukee was in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The plaintiffs sought declaratory and injunctive relief as well as attorney's fees and costs. This case was brought as a class action on behalf of all persons who had been or would have been stopped by MPD officers after January 7th, 2008. More broadly, the complaint alleged that in 2008, when Milwaukee adopted a "broken windows" policy regarding crime prevention, MPD began engaging in high-volume, suspicion-less stops as well as stops illegally motivated by race and ethnicity. The complaint alleges a formal and informal quota system of stops that led to a threefold increase in stops from 2007 to 2015. Plaintiffs also defined a subclass of black and Latino individuals. All of the named plaintiffs in the class were black or Latino, and the complaint detailed specific allegations of suspicion-less stops for each of them as well as data indicating the impact that Milwaukee's stop-and-frisk policy had specifically on black and Latino communities. The parties were engaged in negotiations almost from the beginning - a Joint Interim Settlement Report was filed in September 2017, and minute orders show that the parties were engaged in mediation and later settlement negotiations throughout the fall of 2017 and into the spring and summer of 2018. A settlement was approved on July 23, 2018. The settlement covers a range of issues: changes to officer training; revisions to MPD policies and guidelines regarding reasonable suspicion and probable cause; body camera usage; data collection, coding, and publication; timely filing of reports after stops; supervision from within MPD for officers conducting stops; procedures for both external and internal complaints regarding stop-and-frisk; data auditing by MPD; hiring, counseling, retraining, and discipline; and community engagement. The District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin retained jurisdiction to enforce the agreement under Judge J. P. Stadtmueller. To achieve compliance with the agreement, MPD must incorporate all substantive parts of the agreement into policy, hire and train needed personnel, appropriate sufficient funds, and show sustained and continuing improvement on constitutional policing based on a variety of data-based factors. The settlement terminates after five years. The ACLU and an outside consultant (CJI) will act as monitors. The settlement indicates $1,900,000 in attorney's fees and costs, and Milwaukee is also responsible for paying for CJI's fees. <b>Current status</b> MPD is required to provide data on variety of police and civilian interactions quarterly, and to make training and policy materials available for review. CJI is to file a report each year regarding MPD's compliance and their review of relevant data. If MPD is non-compliant, CJI can submit six-month updates on those issues, indicating whether they have been fixed. The case is ongoing: CJI filed an initial report in September of 2019, a six-month report indicating items on which MPD is non-compliant in April of 2020, and a second semi-annual report on Jun 5, 2020.
summary: The ACLU and ACLU of Wisconsin brought a class action on February 22, 2017 in the Eastern District of Wisconsin against the City of Milwaukee, alleging that their stop-and-frisk program violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. The case settled on July 23, 2018, requiring MPD to undertake reforms around training, data collection and dissemination, hiring, and more. The goal is to make sustained and continuing improvement on constitutional policing. The ACLU and an outside consultant will act as monitors for the five-year duration of the settlement.