An Overview of the Office of the Milwaukee County Sheriff

There has been significant coverage of budget and policy issues related to the Office of the Milwaukee County Sheriff (Sheriff) in recent weeks. This post provides an overview of the budget and policy implications for the Sheriff.

Office Overview

Milwaukee County is one of the few fully-incorporated counties in the United States. This means the entire area of the County is covered by cities or villages that have their own police forces. Many of these police forces have their own specialized units, such as investigations, SWAT teams, and bomb squads.

This means that the Milwaukee County Sheriff is generally not the lead crime-interdiction agency in the County, as Sheriffs sometimes are in other places. In Milwaukee County, the Office of the Sheriff is required by the State of Wisconsin to provide a number of services:

• Operate a correctional facility (jail) for individuals booked by law enforcement agencies that have not yet been to a trial.
• Provide security (bailiff services) in criminal and family courtrooms for judges, juries, attorneys and the public.
• Ensure safety on the interstate system in the County, including speed and alcohol enforcement and accident response, among other duties. Milwaukee County is the only county in the state that is required to provide this service (State Statute 59.84(10)(b)); in the remaining 71 counties this is provided by the State Patrol.
• Notify individuals of actions against them or court procedures involving them through the delivery of legal documents such as summons, complaints, subpoenas, order to show cause, and writs when requested by the Courts (State Statute 59.27(4)). This can include evictions and restraining orders.
• Responsible for response to explosive ordinances, SWAT team responses, and recoveries in the County’s lakes. In Milwaukee County, the Sheriff will generally provide these services in cities that do not have their own units.

In addition to these mandated services, the Milwaukee County Sheriff is allocated funding to provide:

• Security services on the Milwaukee County Grounds in Wauwatosa, including at Froedtert Hospital through a contract arrangement.
• Security services in Milwaukee County Parks.
• Investigations of criminal activity in some Milwaukee County facilities.
• Cooperative law enforcement services through the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program (HIDTA).
• Security services at General Mitchell International Airport.
• Emergency management (which is mandatory but not required to be provided by the Sheriff) and 911 communications services.
• Law enforcement training services.
• Resources for other cross-jurisdictional task forces.

An overview of the Sheriff’s budget is provided here. As a core function of the County, expenditures for these important services has risen substantially in recent years. Expenditures in the budget for the Office of the Sheriff rose from just under $60 million in 2004 to more than $90 million in 2011. Part of this was the result of a shift in approximately $10 million in costs for Court security into this budget in 2011; however even without that shift expenditures have risen by nearly 33 percent between 2005 and 2011 (Click chart to enlarge)

 

Due to fiscal pressures on the County in recent years, the size and composition of the Office of the Sheriff has changed significantly. For instance, The Office of the Sheriff has replaced Deputy Sheriff positions with Corrections Officers in the Milwaukee County Jail, which has saved several million dollars in operating costs; and the Park Patrol/TEU unit has been reduced as other municipal agencies have taken on more active roles on the County’s transit system and in its parks where the Sheriff has reduced its role. In addition to these efforts, the County has had to consider the service levels it provides for mandated programs, such as civil process, and changing the way services such as park patrol or emergency management are provided.

Despite these changes, the Office of the Sheriff 2014 Adopted Budget includes $66.7 million in property tax levy funding in 2014, which is 24 percent of the total tax levy budget.  The Office of the Sheriff’s tax levy funding as a percentage of the countywide budget was slightly less than 20 percent in 2005; this figure continued to rise annually until 2011, when it peaked at 27 percent of the County’s total: