Weekly Fiscal Facts are provided to Wisconsin Newspaper Association members by the Wisconsin Policy Forum, the state’s leading resource for nonpartisan state and local government research and civic education. The Wisconsin Policy Forum logo can be downloaded here.
- Download this column as a Word document
- See other WNA Member Content offerings
Seven municipalities on Milwaukee County’s North Shore could realize savings and potentially improve the quality of law enforcement services by consolidating their police departments into a single one to serve the region.
But the amount saved from consolidation, as well as the extent of service improvements, may vary considerably, according to a recent Wisconsin Policy Forum analysis. Key factors include whether these communities would opt to maintain existing police patrol levels, or reallocate patrol capacity while using some share of the savings to fortify specialized areas of police operations.
The analysis, commissioned by the city of Glendale, models options for a consolidated North Shore Police Department (NSPD) and broadly assesses the financial and service-level impacts. It lays out factors that should be considered but does not endorse any plan or model.
The Wisconsin Policy Forum has conducted more than a dozen service sharing and consolidation studies in the last decade for local governments seeking to explore collaboration with neighboring jurisdictions.
Perhaps no area in the state has been more successful in recognizing the benefits of service sharing and consolidation than Milwaukee County’s North Shore. Its seven municipalities – Bayside, Brown Deer, Fox Point, Glendale, River Hills, Shorewood, and Whitefish Bay – previously consolidated their fire, public health, and dispatch services. Policing is one of the few large functions that has not been consolidated.
Helpful context for our modeling comes from a review of six Wisconsin police departments that serve communities similar in population and other characteristics to the North Shore: those serving Appleton, Eau Claire, Janesville, Oshkosh, Waukesha, and West Allis. Those departments have an average of 112 sworn officers each – 50 fewer than the collective number in the North Shore. That is explained partly by the fact that the North Shore’s seven individual departments are unable to achieve economies of scale realized by larger departments.
A leading concern we heard from North Shore police chiefs was that efforts to take advantage of economies of scale under a single consolidated department would conflict with expectations of North Shore officials and citizens regarding police presence in their communities. With this in mind, in our research process, we built two models for consideration.
Model 1 maintains the status quo in terms of patrol staffing, but adjusts command staff, sergeants, and non-sworn staff to reflect economies of scale from consolidation. Model 2 imagines a consolidated NSPD that takes advantage of the elimination of municipal boundaries to reallocate patrol capacity while also fortifying specialized areas of police operations.
With this report, we aim to provide North Shore leaders with two distinct approaches that assist them in framing a decision on whether to pursue a consolidated department. Ultimately, the report finds no clear-cut answer as to whether consolidation should occur. For local officials and residents, the answer may come down to questions including how consolidation may affect one’s community — as well as the importance for each community of retaining highly localized control of policing.
This information is a service of the Wisconsin Policy Forum, the state’s leading resource for nonpartisan state and local government research and civic education. Learn more at wispolicyforum.org.
