Judge Borowski Gets On His High Horse

Here’s how politics works in the State of Wisconsin.

For 12 years Republican legislators had political districts so gerrymandered that Democrats in this 50-50 swing state had to win 55% of the state vote to win a majority in the Legislature. This enabled Republicans to hold a comfortable majority in both houses of the Legislature.

They used this power with impunity, among other things starving the City of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County when it came to state shared revenue, a program that went back more than a century to share the proceeds of the state income tax with all municipalities. Republicans argued that the Act 10 law reducing public worker pay and benefits would help municipalities hurt by less shared revenue, but the law exempted police and fire fighters and no city has more of these workers than Milwaukee. This, too, contributed to the city’s fiscal crisis.

For years the city pleaded for its own sales or income tax, which almost all big cities in nation can levy. No way, said Republican legislators.

Then came a new era in Milwaukee with two top officials who are young, gifted and Black: Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley and Mayor Cavalier Johnson. They overlooked Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’s insulting and misleading comments dumping on Milwaukee’s leaders for bad financial decisions. They went hat in hand to Vos and other Republican leaders to beg for a sales tax and more shared revenue.

They were forced to agree to all kinds of restrictions over local policies they didn’t agree with and negotiated the best deal they could get. The deal required the city and county not to cut the number of public safety employees, which was far more burdensome for the city, where the police budget alone gobbles up nearly the entire city property tax levy. And as the city loses population, which it has been doing for years, this requirement is all the more onerous. It was basically a full employment law for police and fire fighters, who support Republican politicians and have great clout in the Capitol.

The deal also forced the city to end the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission’s operational oversight of the fire and police departments, something enshrined in state law since 1911, and which the Milwaukee police union had long opposed.

But perhaps the most intrusive rule required Milwaukee Public Schools to go back to having police in its schools, with at least 25 school resource officers, even though MPS is a separate government with a separate budget and tax levy, and was never consulted on this deal. This was an astounding reach by Republicans. They argued this would make schools safer, but offered no evidence of this. Research suggests these programs work poorly, something MPS officials concluded when dropping the program in 2020. Meanwhile the provision would help the police union get more members and union dues.

The law that eventually passed, Act 12, required the Milwaukee School Board “to ensure that not fewer than 25 school resource officers are present at schools within the school district during normal school hours,” and that the board and the City Of Milwaukee “shall agree to an apportionment of the costs” for this. This left the city, which signed off on the legislation, and MPS, which didn’t, to argue over how much each should pay for the officers, which is exactly what they did.

The law also required the board to “ensure that the school resource officers complete the 40-hour course sponsored by the National Association of School Resource Officers,” but offered not a word about who should pay for this.

As MPS dragged its feet and continued to argue with the city, the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty sued the city for not complying with Act 12. Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge David Borowski heard the case.

Borowski has served as a judge since 2003 and has flirted with running for Milwaukee mayor and Wisconsin Attorney General and also considered entering the primary against Democratic Congresswoman Gwen Moore. He is also the brother of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editor Greg Borowski and husband of Jodie Tabak, the longtime aide to former Mayor Tom Barrett. He is, in short, a well-versed political insider who surely knew this legislation had created a shotgun wedding between MPS and the city while consulting only one of the two parties to the engagement.

But he is also something of a hothead. In 2018 he held a defense attorney in contempt of court and had him handcuffed and imprisoned; the attorney was later bought back to court in chains. And in 2022, “he ordered a court filing about his actions to be sealed from public view,” which former Journal Sentinel reporter Bruce Vielmetti obtained: “the document… details how defense counsel says Borowski berated them, offered his candid and arguably offensive thoughts on witnesses and jurors and cut short the defense attorney’s closing statement.”

In this case Borowski offered not an ounce of sympathy for the bad deal MPS was handed. “The gall and temerity of, again, primarily the school board, but to a lesser degree the city, is breathtaking,” he declared, as Urban Milwaukee reported.

He was so outraged that he made a decision that itself seemed to violate the state law. When confronted with the fact that the Milwaukee Police Department does not have officers with the required training, he dismissed that, calling it “a non-starter with this court.” He added that in his experience the vast majority of MPD officers have enough training to go into MPS schools and begin working as SROs.

In doing so, he substituted his judgment for that of the state Legislature, which declared that school resource officers must complete the 40-hour course by the National Association of School Resource Officers.

Meanwhile the city is having great trouble hiring any new cops, much less 25, which raises questions as to where the school resource officers will come from. Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman has said the department can’t devote any current manpower to the schools because they are all needed to police the city. Is Borowski going to order Norman to reassign police?

The judge gave the school board and city just 10 days to get 25 officers in the schools or face sanctions and contempt of court. Does that mean clapping city and school officials in jail as he did to that defense attorney? This could be a very interesting day in the never-dull courtroom of Judge Borowski.