The Madison Police Department is receiving international recognition for transforming Halloween on State Street from a night of rioting to an entertainment festival.
MPD is one of seven finalists for this year’s Herman Goldstein Award for Excellence in Problem-Oriented Policing. The winner will be voted on at this weekend at a POP Conference in Bellevue, Wash.
Capt. Mary Schauf of the MPD central district, said reorganizing Halloween was a collaborative effort between police, city officials, community organizations and a student group called the Halloween Action Committee.
Former President of the Halloween Action Committee and University of Wisconsin senior Tom Wangard — who also serves as a Badger Herald opinion right — said the award nomination was somewhat unfortunate in light of recent downtown crime.
“Kudos for them, they achieved there goals for Halloween, but I feel like there are some gaping holes in their record downtown,” Wangard said.
According to Wangard, MPD has “poor policies and mismanaged priorities” such as spending time and resources raiding bars and busting up house parties, rather than focusing on basic responsibilities of safety.
However, the idea behind the POP strategy is to approach problems more analytically by looking at crime trends.
POP is a strategy developed at UW in the 1960s and further documented by UW Law professor Herman Goldstein, for whom the award is named after.
Police officers, police researchers and crime analysts from across the nation and England will share ideas with each other, mostly in the form of case studies, like Halloween, UW Law Professor and chair of the POP judging committee Mike Scott said.
Schauf will help present the materials they put together on the Halloween revamping process, which started in 2002.
“In recent years [Halloween] had deteriorated into unacceptable levels of violence,” Scott said. “MPD really systematically began to collect a lot of data about past events.”
Schauf said they tried to have a concert even in 2003, but riots still erupted at the end of the night. She added the problems were mostly at the end of the night, trying to get people to just go home.
“Every year we looked at [Halloween], we asked our self a series of questions,” Schauf said, adding they wanted to see what worked and what did not.
By making Halloween an event more of a concert-type venue, Schauf said the police have fewer problems because “most people know how to act at a concert.” She credited Frank Productions for their expertise and ability to market the event.
Schauf said police wanted student input because with a student body of over 40,000, it’s important to “hear the student voice.”
Wangard said the Halloween Action Committee was actually started as the opposition to the police.
“We realized they had the strangle hold on the event,” Wangard said, adding the group needed to cooperate so they could work from the inside.
Schauf said getting everybody to agree on everything never happens and the city needed to come to a compromise on the event, resulting in Freakfest.
In 2006, the first year people had to purchase an admission ticket to get on the street, police did not have to use pepper spray at the end of the night to disperse the crowd at the end of night as they did in previous years.
Scott said the competition this year is tough. Madison has never won the award, although they were finalists once. Green Bay Police won in 1999 for cleaning up a main street, boosting economic development.
The Downtown Coordinating Committee will meet with MPD tonight in room 108 of the City County building to discuss changing some aspects of Freakfest, including admission prices and entrance times.
