Fitchburg makes a misleading pitch for its own “Cop City”

The multimillion-dollar project highlights the problem with policing as public service.

In December, the Fitchburg Police Department presented its proposal for a $49.2 million dollar Public Services facility—well over the project’s initially proposed budget of $35 million. The Fitchburg project has been called a “Cop City” by groups like the Madison-area abolitionist non-profit Freedom Inc. Though the term is most popularly associated with the massive proposed police training facility in Atlanta, Cop Cities are a nationwide trend of structures designed to escalate police training with similar projects in Chicago, Nashville, Baltimore, and the Bay Area. 

At a January 6 meeting on the project, Lt. Edward Hartwick of the Fitchburg Police Department repeatedly stressed the “need” for expanded policing facilities and training in response to projected population growth. As Fitchburg police justify spending huge sums of public money—in a move that will be “replicated across Dane County,” according to Hartwick—it is worth critically examining the narrative that increased policing is the best and only way to keep a growing community safe. While police training facilities nationwide use environmental and public engagement arguments to justify public spending that could otherwise benefit communities, these claims are not grounded in research and serve to mask their harmful effects.   

The pitch vs. the impact

In presenting the project, proponents focus on claims that the new facility will “reduce environmental impacts.” This focus on sustainability introduces a new iteration of the practice of “greenwashing,” wherein corporations falsely highlight the environmental benefits of a product, in the context of policing. 

With the new facility, police also aim to “prioritize accessibility and community space.” In a series of Public Information Meetings in January, Fitchburg police presented proposed schematics, which include a public entry plaza and lobby designed to create a “more open welcoming space.” But these sustainability and community-building arguments do not address the nationwide dual oppressions of climate and criminal injustice for low-income minority neighborhoods.

“This is a building where everyone should feel safe,” said Hartwick in his January 6 presentation. 

But these reformist gestures largely serve to mask the fundamental flaws in policing as an institution. How can “everyone” feel safe when police in Wisconsin target Black communities at a rate nearly three times that of the Black population? Can there really be such a thing as a “community-oriented policing approach” under these conditions? Critically examining the community-based language that police employ reveals that only certain communities are, in fact, intended to benefit. 

For example, while the facility design will contain a multipurpose space for community events to be “reserved for public use,” it also will hold training areas for “defensive and arrest tactics,” as Hartwick has put it. It seems that rather than truly benefiting the community at large, such facilities will allow police to continue privileging the white, wealthy communities they have long served, while honing the skills they use to discriminate against poor communities of color.

At the January 6 meeting, officers reiterated the importance of increased police training for reducing incidents of police brutality and killings, which they argued are a matter of police inexperience with using firearms. Specifically, Fitchburg police drew attention to the 2021 murder of Daunte Wright in Minnesota, in which a veteran officer claimed she fired her gun rather than her taser. According to Hartwick, training prevents “no intent” killings such as Wright’s. Hartwick focused on the issue of the “loss of life and loss of money,” referring to the $3.25 million settlement the City of Brooklyn Center reached with Wright’s family. Implicit in the promise of Cop Cities is the notion that training police with more lifelike simulations can reform the institution. 

However, Minnesota police officers were required to undergo 1,000 hours of basic training and 48 additional hours every three years, prior to Wright’s murder. Furthermore, Minnesota had already reformed and invested $12 million in funds for additional police training following the 2016 police murder of Philando Castile. While Fitchburg officers vaguely stated that new conference rooms would allow them to “bring the NAACP in,” there is no actual evidence that even direct implicit bias training makes any difference in real-life scenarios. Instead, costly police training facilities continue to invest public resources into false solutions, perpetuating the idea that police violence and inefficiency can be trained away. 

The community-oriented arguments for larger police facilities, in addition to justifying extravagant spendings of public money, assume that more, better-trained police will increase wellbeing, despite the fact remaining that there is no established link between policing and public safety. In reality, when comparing police spending with the overall crime rate over a six decade time period in the U.S., there was no correlation between higher spending and less crime. 

The need for this Fitchburg facility is based on projected population growth in the city, which is estimated to reach 49,000 by 2043. Fitchburg recently expanded to encompass areas of the former Town of Madison, which had a 27 percent Latinx and 13 percent Black population, and more low- to moderate-income households than Fitchburg’s overall population. Future growth in Fitchburg is also likely to continue this trend of racial and economic diversity. The current plan for the Public Services facility assumes that more people necessitates more police officers, vehicles, and equipment. Yet it is also clear that these things do not guarantee safety, particularly for the most overpoliced and underprotected members of our communities. The “need” for Fitchburg to invest in police as the community grows is a false narrative; in fact, police demands are not remotely equivalent to what our community needs. 

Better investments

As Fitchburg now aims to spend well over the city’s 2024 general operations budget of $36.8 million dollars on this project, it raises the question: how could Fitchburg spend $49 million dollars in ways that would actually increase safety? One clear answer would be to invest in preventative measures against violence rather than responding to acts of harm with further escalation. 

One of the scenarios that Fitchburg police brought up as a reason for increased officer training was mass shootings. They referenced the 2022 events in Uvalde, Texas, where police officers waited before engaging a gunman inside an elementary school. What if, instead of treating mass acts of gun violence as inevitable, we invested in ways to stop them from happening all together? 

A closer look at the case of Uvalde, for instance, reveals that the 18-year-old gunman had grown up bullied for being poor and had a documented history of mental health problems. In the U.S—which holds less than 5% of the world’s population, but 40% of the world’s civilian-owned guns—the root of the gun violence epidemic lies in our system neglecting people’s basic needs and mental health and then allowing them to easily gain access to firearms hours after coming of age. It will not be solved by giving police more liberty to militarize their tactics under the guise of violence reduction. 

Currently, the Fitchburg police department employs one part-time, social worker. The current schematic, designed to last at least 20 years, has only one office designated for social work staff. This is a clear instance of how, in dedicating such a large portion of its city budget to police, Fitchburg is missing an opportunity to invest in areas like social work that could put a stop to violence before it happens. 

In a cost analysis, UW-Madison researcher Greg Gelembiuk estimated that, in comparison with 20 comparable police headquarters projects nationwide, the cost per square foot of the Fitchburg facility is 215 percent that of the U.S. median. 

“In a letter I sent to Fitchburg Alders, I also had a section discussing opportunity cost. Because if you put all this money into police, what are you foregoing? What are you losing?” Gelembiuk tells Tone Madison. “Even the analyses that appear to show a reduction in crime, say in high crime areas, with added police, the cost benefit ratio for that is way less than, say, the nurse family partnership program, in terms of crime reduction.” 

The Fitchburg Public Services Facility would thus be both part of the growing trend of costly Cop City projects around the U.S., and a particularly exorbitant case of spending. Meanwhile, there remains little evidence suggesting these facilities are more effective than preventative community safety measures.