Supervisors Will Work On Plan for Sheriff Review Board

Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office vehicle in Sherman Park. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

In the coming months, county supervisors will work on creating a citizen review board for the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO). It comes as the Sheriff as indicated her intent to create her own review board.

The board received a legal green light from their attorney this month to create the board. But the board declined to vote on a resolution relating to the report from the Office of Corporation Counsel during its meeting Thursday.

It was a procedural move, Sup. Justin Bielinski told Urban Milwaukee, so the body can keep the file alive while it works out the details.

Bielinski sponsored a 2025 budget amendment that requested OCC analysis, and he is chairman of the board’s Committee on Judiciary, Law Enforcement and General Services, which holds the resolution and will be the venue for future deliberations on the proposed review board.

“We haven’t hashed out exactly what this is going to look like, yet,” he said. “We want to seek more information from certain stakeholders.”

Supervisors are likely to model their proposed independent Citizen Review Board (CRB) on once created in La Crosse County last year, which is a non-binding body that does not have any formal authority over law enforcement in La Crosse County, but does offer a formal venue for interaction between the community, elected officials and law enforcement. Candidates had to apply for a seat on the board.

The county’s attorneys advised that any body the supervisors created would be similarly constrained by state law, and unable to actually force the sheriff to adopt any policies proposed by the CRB.

For now, Bielinski wants to hear from stakeholder groups who have ideas about who should be on the board and what the process for selecting board members should be. He added that funding for a CRB will be one of the budget priorities he will promote to County Executive David Crowley.

Sheriff Denita Ball is also planning to create her own Community Advisory Board, but it would lack the independence that supervisors are seeking. The sheriff’s board would be composed of 15 community residents, selected or appointed by the sheriff.