Milwaukee Police Department

The Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) is the police department organized under the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The department has a contingent of about 1,800 sworn officers when at full strength and is divided into seven districts. Jeffrey B. Norman is the current chief of police, serving since December 2020.

MPD was founded in 1855. At the time, Milwaukee had an extremely high crime rate, fueled by local gangs, mobs, thieves and robbers. Milwaukee was originally served by the Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office, which became increasingly unable to provide adequate enforcement to the growing city. With burgeoning crime rates, citizens enacted an ordinance creating the Milwaukee Police Department.

Milwaukee's first chief of police was William Beck, a former NYPD detective, and its first policemen were Fred Keppler, John Hardy, George Fische, James Rice, L.G. Ryan and David Coughlin. As the department expanded, patrolmen were supplemented by "roundsmen", who would lead the patrolmen out to their beats at the beginning of the evening shift, and supervise them during the shift. A roundsman earned $5 more a month than a patrol officer.

The office of police chief, like the department in general, was subject to political forces for most of its history; for example, in 1878 new Mayor John Black appointed fellow Democrat Daniel Kennedy as chief, and Kennedy promptly fired 25 Republican patrolmen (as part of the spoils system then prevalent).

In 1924, Judson W. Minor became the department's first African-American officer and in 1975 Ada Wright became the first female MPD officer. On November 15, 1996, Arthur Jones became the first African-American chief. A lawsuit filed after his term found that Jones discriminated against officers based on their race, giving African-American officers promotions before European-American officers.^{[failed verification]}

On November 24, 1917, a large black powder bomb, wrapped as a package, was discovered by Maude L. Richter, a social worker, next to an evangelical church in the third ward. She dragged the package into the church basement and notified the church janitor, Sam Mazzone. Mazzone brought the bomb to the central police station at Oneida and Broadway and turned it over to police. The station keeper was showing it to the shift commander, Lieutenant Flood, right before a scheduled inspection, when it exploded.

Nine members of the department were killed in the blast, along with a female civilian. It was suspected at the time that the bomb had been placed outside the church by anarchists, particularly the Galleanist faction led by adherents of Luigi Galleani. At the time, the bomber's identity was not uncovered. Many years later, interviews with surviving Galleanist members revealed that Croatian national Mario Buda, chief bombmaker for the Galleanists, may have constructed the Milwaukee bomb.

At the time, the bombing was the most fatal single event in national law enforcement history, only surpassed later by the September 11 attacks on September 11, 2001, when 72 law enforcement officers representing eight different agencies were killed. Those responsible for the 1917 bombing never were apprehended, but days later, eleven alleged Italian anarchists went to trial on unrelated charges involving a fracas that had occurred two months before. The specter of the larger, uncharged crime of the bombing haunted the proceedings and assured convictions of all eleven. In 1918 Clarence Darrow led an appeal that gained freedom for most of the convicted.