Black Citizenship Low in Milwaukee, a City Dominated by White Liberal Politics From [HERE] More than halfway through a court-ordered reform process, Milwaukee police are still disproportionately searching people of color in traffic and pedestrian stops and too often doing so without justification, new reports say.

Black residents were 18 times more likely to be subjected to a frisk and 4.8 times more likely to be pulled over than white people last year, according to two monitoring reports authored by the Boston-based Crime and Justice Institute released this fall.

Hispanic and Latino residents were 2.4 times more likely than white people to be frisked after encountering police in a traffic stop, informal street interview or another kind of encounter. And even accounting for differing crime rates, Milwaukee officers conducted frisks more often in Black, Hispanic and Latino neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods, the reports found.

The results are discouraging for activists who sought to reform the department's stop-and-frisk practices. Fred Royal, a vice president of Milwaukee's NAACP branch who works closely with the Police Department, said he did not expect a major cultural change to occur in four years but was still disappointed with the progress.

"I can’t understand how they cannot do the constitutional policing that they say they’ve been so committed to doing, which would justify those stops and frisks," he said.

Police and other city officials maintain the consent decree has led to notable improvements.

In a joint statement from Mayor Cavalier Johnson’s office, the Police Department and the Fire and Police Commission, the city said it is investing more time to determine what specifically is driving the disparities and is requiring more officer training on identifying biases.

“The city is resolute that constitutional policing occurs in each and every police interaction,” the statement said. “Mayor Cavalier Johnson is committed to assisting the FPC and MPD with the appropriate resources to attain the goals of the settlement agreement.”

The reform process, known as a consent decree, stipulates that Milwaukee police must meet certain benchmarks for at least five years. Four years into the agreement, the state's largest police agency has not met all of those requirements for a single year.