Special News Series: Rising Up for Justice! – Citizen-Led Commission Launches Community-Based Program For Police Reform in Milwaukee

Introduction To This Series:

This post is one installment in an ongoing news series: a “living history” of the current national and international uprising for justice.

Today’s movement descends directly from the many earlier civil rights struggles against repeated injustices and race-based violence, including the killing of unarmed Black people. The posts in this series serve as a timeline of the uprising that began on May 26, 2020, the day after a Minneapolis police officer killed an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, by kneeling on his neck. The viral video of Floyd’s torturous suffocation brought unprecedented national awareness to the ongoing demand to truly make Black Lives Matter in this country.

The posts in this series focus on stories of the particular killings that have spurred the current uprising and on the protests taking place around the USA and across the globe. Sadly, thousands of people have lost their lives to systemic racial, gender, sexuality, judicial, and economic injustice. The few whose names are listed here represent the countless others lost before and since. Likewise, we can report but a few of the countless demonstrations for justice now taking place in our major cities, small towns, and suburbs.

Citizen-Led Commission Launches Community-Based Program For Police Reform in Milwaukee

After months of protests in Milwaukee by activists demanding police reform, a citizen-led group is launching a community-based policing project in the city.

By Corrinne Hess, Wisconsin Public Radio

Milwaukee’s 16-person Collaborative Community Commission, which includes members of the Latino, Black, LGBTQ+ and Jewish communities, is working with the Milwaukee Police Department to develop a policy for community policing, an approach that generally involves closer collaboration between law enforcement and the residents they serve.

The work comes at a time when the city is searching for a new police chief, and is on track to have its worst homicide rate in years. Tensions between communities of color are high in Milwaukee and throughout Milwaukee County.

Since October 7, there have been protests and arrests in nearby Wauwatosa following the decision by Milwaukee County District Attorney not to charge Wauwatosa Police Officer Joseph Mensah in the February killing of a 17-year-old Black teen.

Nate Hamilton chairs the commission. His brother, Dontre Hamilton was killed in 2014 by a Milwaukee Police officer who was later fired.

“We want to make sure we all have a chance to go home at night along with law enforcement,” Hamilton said. “We can be better for each other, for ourselves, and I feel that if you trust in this approach that we are taking right now. Because what is going on around this world, this nation and this county is very disturbing.”

…The group was officially made a city commission this year, giving it more power in the city and assigning it a full-time staff member. Hamilton hopes community policing reduces the fear many people have of police and the fear police officers have when going into certain communities….

Read the full article here.

More Breaking News here.

More about the police killing of Dontre Hamiliton, a mentally ill young man asleep on a park bench, and the ongoing protests in Milwaukee here and about a California city’s large settlement to the family in a similar case here.