Freedom Inc. et al wouldn’t be satisfied
if police were all Zen Buddhists

Seemingly sacrosanct: $130 million for bus rapid transit
over several years; $3.5 million annually to operate

Council meets 4:30 today on $40 wheel tax

New Police Monitor orders officers to wear new police uniform

The social justice warriors were at it again Monday night (10-28-19), haranguing the Madison Board of Education for an hour and a half with their “No Cops In School” mantra. Even though the issue wasn’t on the agenda. Even though, under terms of the school district’s contract with the City of Madison, school cops will remain in all four general high schools through June 2021.

Freedom Inc. and their ilk ask not for more humane police, nor for police trained in the David Couper school of pacifism. They want No. Police. Period. The same cabal of Freedom Inc., Progressive Dane, Black Lives Matter, and the International Socialists fought building a more humane and smaller (!!!) jail. No Jail, No Police.

No accommodation, no amount of hand-holding will persuade them otherwise. That police are trained to kill black and brown children is the foundational to their secular faith. Police are the lineal descendants of slave catchers, they believe. It is taught down the street at the great University of Wisconsin-Madison. Every sociology and grievance study graduate knows it is so.

A police monitor will make them love us

Ald. Keith Furman

Which is why Ald. Keith Furman’s naiveté is so absurd. The freshman alder purportedly represents the west side’s 19th district, which is largely lies between Gammon Road and Whitney Way north of Schroeder Road all the way up to the mansions decorating Lake Mendota Drive. (Map here.)

Furman believes that the $200,000 full-time police “monitor” will restore faith in the police among what is imprecisely termed Madison’s “marginalized community.” Furman shares this fantasy with what appears to be a close majority of alders. We will find out [CORRECTED] Tuesday, November 12, when the City Council votes on Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway’s budget.

That a police monitor could convert the social justice warriors was met with healthy skepticism by 50 neighborhood residents attending a neighborhood safety meeting at Olson elementary school on the far SW side Monday night (10-28-19). Two hundred grand for a cop second-guesser comes at the expense of the three police officers.

Subject of that meeting: how to keep person and property safe from the rash of car thieves and home invaders and gun shooters. Oh, the irony!

⇒ Keith Furman is anti-cop Progressive Dane as is Christian Albouras, the Meadowood area alder in District 20. Eight of the 20 alders were endorsed by PD as was Mayor Satya. PD’s platform: “Transitioning funding away from law enforcement and towards community development, early childhood education, and human services …”

Madison Police Report

Young burglars hit again on Keating Terrace early Saturday morning (10/26/2019 – 2:10 AM). They used a garage door opener that was inside an unlocked vehicle, parked in the victims’ driveway, to get into the victims’ home and steal a briefcase and purse. When the victims awoke, they discovered they had been burglarized. By this time, several transactions had been made on a credit card stolen in the break-in. Surveillance images from one store show two young men using the stolen card. They appear to be between 12 and 15 years of age.

A troubling fact: police at the community meeting Monday night said they have recovered stolen cars with as many as 15 garage door openers inside. Given that there is a limited number of frequencies, the thieves prowl nighttime streets clicking away on the openers on the chance that a garage door will magically open. Do you lock the door from the garage into the house? Your car even if it’s in the garage?)

The other startling fact: a vehicle stolen on the southwest side and recovered on the northeast side had 400 more miles on the odometer. Police in Indiana — Indiana! — have recovered autos stolen in Madison.

‘Micromanaging the police’

Advocates claim the police monitor will somehow prevent lawsuits but they never say how. One mother of the kids arrested for trashing Lakeview library last year actually advertised for a lawyer to shake down the city. A police monitor is going to make a difference?

As for more police, Chief Vic Wahl talked about his troops “feeling burned out” and quitting young. Part of it is “the national narrative about policing, which makes it very challenging.” Hear Chief Wahl

Wahl needs to filibuster on that point. With the exception of Ald. Paul Skidmore, Madison’s elected officials — including this mayor and her predecessor — allow their police to twist in the wind in deference to noisy activists who flood every governmental meeting and intimidate the few who dare challenge them. Ald. Skidmore: ‘monitor will micro manage.’

Blaska’s Bottom Line: What does it matter if Freedom Inc. and their ilk don’t trust the police? No institution enjoys 100 percent support. Supporters of the police monitor — people like Alder Furman — set a general tone that police are the problem, not the car jackers.