John Hollway, executive director of the Quattrone Center, and Police Chief Shon Barnes discuss the center's new analysis of the police response to the 2020 protests in Madison.
The “Madison Method” of successfully policing large protests was once a point of pride for the Madison Police Department. It was put to the test in the summer of 2020 and failed.
“Despite its utility in the past, the Madison Method did not prevent protests in Madison after the murder of George Floyd from escalating into violence and widespread damage to property,” states a new analysis of the police department’s response to historic protests in the city last year. “After each significant outbreak of violence, MPD evaluated and modified its approach to the ongoing protests. Even so, violence continued to erupt in Madison streets.”
In August 2020, the police department invited the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School’s Quattrone Center to do an analysis of what went wrong during the historic protests downtown last year and to see how the department could improve. A 137-page report from the center, released Nov. 16, studied 14 “critical incidents” that occurred during the 2020 protests, including over the last weekend in May following the death of Floyd; on June 23 after the arrest of activist Yeshua Musa; and on Aug. 24 after the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
The report documents how initially unprepared the department was for anti-police sentiment during the first wave of protests and how it changed tactics as protests continued throughout the summer.
“While the Madison Method had been successful in the past with a strategy of MPD officers walking in the crowd in partnership with protesters, virtually any appearance of MPD officers could be used to escalate and agitate protesters under these conditions,” the report states.
After a peaceful march that thousands attended on May 30, a smaller group continued to protest downtown. Around 4 p.m., police were chased into the City County Building by protesters after an unattended squad car was damaged. The crowd then moved to State Street and storefront windows were broken by a handful of protesters carrying “sticks and clubs.” In response, officers in riot gear were deployed to form lines to disperse the crowd. The police used pepper spray and tear gas which only made the situation worse, according to the report.
“This enraged an already angry crowd primed for a fight with police, subjecting community members and MPD officers alike to hours of violent clashes and property damage throughout the downtown area,” states the report.
As reported in Isthmus at the time, similar tactics were used by police officers at a standoff on the Capitol Square the evening of May 31, when members of the National Guard joined Madison police officers to reestablish order. This led to hours of back-and-forth with demonstrators that left a haze of tear gas in many downtown streets.
The Quattrone Center’s John Hollway led the review with local law enforcement representatives, national policing experts, and community stakeholders. He noted that after the first weekend of protests, the department made the presence of officers generally less visible while deploying smaller teams of riot gear-clad officers.
“[This] was actually a productive response when you have a small group of people that is leaving the protest and going to commit arson,” said Hollway at a Nov. 16 press conference at the central district police station. “For example, it allows for a more rapid response to address just those people that are endangering lives…and deal with that without interfering with the larger, more peaceful protest that's going on.”
Even so, the change in tactics didn’t entirely prevent the use of tear gas on large crowds and property damage still occurred.
The analysis produced 69 recommendations for how the department could improve, including by implementing better communication with the public, more crowd control training for officers and command staff, and new protocols that allow the department to track and review when individual officers use pepper spray, tear gas, and lethal munitions.
Hollway compared the investigation to what’s been done in the transportation or health care sectors after “sentinel events.”
“In the criminal justice system, we often look back at who should be blamed for something,” said Hollway at the news conference. “But we rarely take the additional obligation of forward looking accountability to learn from an event that had an outcome that nobody wanted, and to learn from that event and prevent the next error from happening.”
At the news conference Chief Shon Barnes pledged to implement all 69 of the report’s recommendations and present an “accountability metric” to the public to track the department’s progress.
A number of the recommendations from the report call for new equipment for the police department. This includes vans to quickly transport small teams of police in riot gear to separate out “instigators” who commit crimes at protests from the larger crowd. The report also recommends GPS trackers for officers so command staff knows where individuals are located and new communication equipment so police can better talk to each other and the public (even when officers have riot gear helmets on).
Barnes said a new amplification system to allow the police to deliver messages to widely dispersed crowds and body-worn cameras are “a must for our department.”
“I believe in body-worn cameras. I think it goes a long way to establish trust and transparency with our public and I will certainly be working to ensure that our department explores body-worn cameras,” Barnes said.
Various city committees have studied and debated whether to equip Madison police officers with body-worn cameras for more than six years. Currently, the Madison city council still needs to give final approval to implement a pilot program to equip officers stationed at the North District Precinct with body-worn cameras — the cost is expected to be $136,000.
Like the pilot program, many of the Quattrone Center’s recommendations would cost money. But it’s unclear whether there is the political will to invest more funds in the Madison police force, which already has the largest budget of any city agency. While there was outrage that the police didn’t do more to prevent the destruction of property downtown during the 2020 protests, there were equally loud calls to “defund the police.”
Ald. Nikki Conklin was a co-sponsor of an amendment to the recently passed 2022 budget that redirected $82,000 from the police department’s budget to pay for two additional mental health care workers for the newly created Community Alternative Response Emergency Services program. She says her views on police funding have not changed with this report. “I'm staying true to reimagining public safety and really investing into our community to get to the root causes of problems,” Conklin tells Isthmus. “We have to stop putting band-aids over things and start getting to the meat of the problems that often lead to bad outcomes with police.”
Brandi Grayson, CEO of Urban Triage, agrees. She says that prioritizing funding for law enforcement over other needs of the community is part of what fueled the protests last summer.
“To get at the heart of racism and trauma in our community, we need to get the police to put down the guns and badges and meet people where they're at outside of the institution of policing,” says Grayson. “Instead of vans to transport militarized police teams, maybe we consider why people were protesting the police in the first place?”
Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway says that communication “before, during and after protest events” emerged as an important theme in the report.
“It’s apparent that clearer communication would build trust and help ensure public safety,” Rhodes-Conway writes in a statement. “Chief Barnes came to Madison eager to build bridges and build trust. He is already working towards many of these goals and I look forward to working with him and his team on these recommendations.”
Keith Findley, who was one of the community stakeholders who participated in the Quattrone Center report, says “we as a community need to decide how much policing we want.” But he argues that in order for police to do their job well, sometimes the community needs to invest in training and equipment.
“When deployed properly, some of these tools can be used not as tools of surveillance or oppression, but as tools of accountability and learning,” says Findley. “If we set up the structure so that they're used appropriately, they can be well worth the investment in terms of public safety, public confidence, and good police-community relations.”
Findley notes that it’s encouraging that the Madison Police Department was eager to participate in the analysis conducted by the Quattrone Center.
“It was a process of deep reflection and self-review,” says Findley. “There's value in the department inviting that kind of introspection.”