There is a movement on campus calling for a hiring freeze of the UW-Milwaukee Police Department (UWM-PD) with the hope of lowering the police department’s budget and distributing money to underfunded resources on campus, organizers said.
At the end of the fall semester, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the group behind this movement, delivered a 250-signature petition to UWM’s administration in Chapman Hall. Now, SDS is awaiting a response.
“It would be really great to get a response from the administration that they’re willing to put a hiring freeze on the police department,” SDS Social Media Chair Liam Farin said after delivering the petition, “We’re optimistic, but we aren’t necessarily expecting that to be the result. Regardless, we’ll keep pushing for it because we know that this is a thing that students support.”
The hiring freeze itself would be a commitment from UWM administration to stop hiring new employees into UWM-PD, according to Farin. SDS has been pushing for this for over a year now.
“Their concrete commitment would be that they’re willing to really analyze these antiquated systems that the university has had for a long time,” he said.
SDS believes that the police budget, which currently sits at $3 million, should be allocated to things like mental health resources, the Women’s Resource Center, the Multicultural Student Center and other various underfunded and understaffed campus student resources. Only 12 counselors assist with mental health at UWM as of 2021 providing care for 2,178 students each, according to SDS documents, compared to the 34 law enforcement officers and 11 civilian staff members who currently make up UWM PD, according to UWM-PD’s website.
“Campus [police] get such a large budget and we want to make that a more equal playing field for the students,” SDS Recruitment Chair Patricia Fish said, calling UWM-PD the group’s biggest issue currently.
SDS is a student activist organization that began in the 1960s with various chapters still existing on campuses today. The organization was reestablished on the Milwaukee campus in 2006.
“SDS is a multi-issue national organization … and because we are multi-issue, we like to focus on many different campaigns. So, each school specifically caters their campaign to what is most needed on campus,” Fish said.
They garnered many of the signatures for the hiring freeze petition through tabling at the Student Union almost every week during the fall semester and speaking with students, who Fish says have been receptive to the idea.
“There hasn’t been much pushback,” she said. “We’ve had one or two people be kind of reactionary, but that’s to be expected, especially on a campus where people come from all kinds of different backgrounds. Overwhelmingly we’ve had a lot of support and people are engaging with us and talking to us.”
Despite support and encouragement from some students, SDS can’t be certain of the response from UWM. The organization’s next steps depend on how the university responds.
“Even if they don’t agree to giving us a tangible commitment to the hiring freeze, I do know that we are going to be starting to move forward with the demilitarization aspect of it as well,” Fish said.
SDS leaders said they hope to do more research on what weapons are used by the police department and the money spent on such items.
Eventually, SDS wants to get cops completely off the UWM campus in exchange for a trained security team and mental health crisis experts. Farin said he believes that programs with security, mental health and medical experts are more effective and would save the university money—“Everyone benefits from this.”
“We want people to actually see that [SDS] is actually doing stuff and that it’s not just a theory club,” said Trenton Houck, an active member of SDS. “We just want to make it clear that we are actually in direct action … hopefully it will inspire more students to want to join us.”
The organization’s main goal for the spring semester is to continue chipping away at campus police and get the student body more involved, both in their organization and in Milwaukee.
“[SDS wants to] bridge that gap between the university and the Milwaukee community … I know that a lot of people aren’t directly from Milwaukee, but we’re living in Milwaukee. This is a city,” Farin said. “We’re all inhabiting it and we explore it. We need to make sure we’re one big community rather than [the university being a] separate entity within the city of Milwaukee.”