
Milwaukee Police News - awwstn2
http://www.milwaukeepolicenews.com/
======
jpxxx
It's militaristic, it's alienating, it's fetishistic, it's hostile, it
insidiously portrays class and ethnic conflict as an everyday battle worth
fighting, and it panders to the worst in Americans who already endorse the
myriad excesses and injustices of an ever-growing quasi-private law and order
machine that has ruined the lives of millions.

But awesome job on the scrollbars, yo.

~~~
luke_s
I live in Melbourne Australia and I have got to say, this is the first
reaction I had as well. The imagery used on their website was frankly
shocking. My first response was "WTF! Is this really how Americans see their
police? Is their job to charge round shooting people?"

Compare and contrast the pictures used on the 'about' page of the Victoria
police website:

<http://www.police.vic.gov.au/content.asp?Document_ID=3>

With the images on the same section of the Milwaukee police website:

<http://www.milwaukeepolicenews.com/#menu=about-page>

What do the two different pictures say about how the police view themselves
and their job? Looking at the images how do you think the two police
departments relate to the community they serve? What type of potential
recruits would be attracted to the Victoria police VS Milwaukee police?

~~~
bdunbar
_"WTF! Is this really how Americans see their police?_

I live in Wisconsin, in a small town of 20,000.

Our police department has an armored car, with a mount for a water cannon.
We've got a TAC [1] team. Our cops carry rifles in the trunks of their patrol
cars.

Elsewhere you can find comparable sized police departments that have .50
machine guns, armored personel carriers.

So .. yeah. That's not how we see the police.

It's how they are.

[1] A TAC team is not a SWAT team, although the only difference I can see is
our TAC team is only a part-time deal for the officers.

~~~
pc86
I live in a small Pennsylvania borough with an operating budget of about $1
mil/year (this includes all services for the entire borough of 3-4 precincts).

Our police department is 8 full-time officers and 3 part-time officers with I
believe 2 full-time admin/support staff in the office. We have 5 cruisers, 4
SUVs and at the last borough council meeting the council approved the purchase
of a 6th brand new cruiser and a new fleet of AR-15 style rifles for the
officers.

Because America.

~~~
bdunbar
_Because America._

Well .. because politics, because 9/11, because War On Drugs.

 _new fleet of AR-15 style rifles_

Most police officers are better armed and equipped for patrol than I was when
I was on sentry duty at Marine Barracks in the 80s.

Something is amiss here.

~~~
EliRivers
During all your years on sentry duty, how often did you find yourself in
situations where you needed to shoot someone? Do the police find themselves in
that situation more frequently (or are they significantly more likely to)?

Also, in the event that you did, how far away was your nearest armed support?
Sixty seconds? Less?

~~~
bdunbar
'Needed' might be the wrong word.

Three times in 2 3/4 years I had a weapon drawn, round in the chamber.

Twice I did not have a target. Once, I did but he obligingly put his hands up
when ordered.

 _how far away was your nearest armed support? Sixty seconds? Less?_

Depended on the sentry post, other factors. Sometimes right behind me. Other
times minutes away, at best.

If your point is that police are more likely to encounter bad guys than a
Marine guarding strategic assets .. maybe.

How does the police department owning a armored personnel carrier help a
patrol officer at a traffic stop? How often does your average Mayberry police
department encounter bad guys who can only be overcome by a SWAT team?

~~~
EliRivers
"How does the police department owning a armored personnel carrier help a
patrol officer at a traffic stop?"

And how does the USN carrying nuclear weapons help you check passes at the
gate?

That aside, yes, my suggestion was that the police are more likely to need the
firepower than you were, and were more likely to have to get by on their own
for longer before support turned up.

~~~
bdunbar
Supposedly most cops will go through their careers never drawing their weapons
on duty. Don't know if it's true, but I've read it.

I've had 'most' cops beat by the time I was 21 and I wasn't even trying.

------
slapshot
Kudos for breaking the mold and I love the design from a "this is new and fun"
perspective, but I completely disagree from a functional perspective. It looks
really neat (if a little over-testosteroned), but if I'm visiting the police's
web page then I might want to do one of the following (there are plenty more,
these are just an example):

    
    
      - Find the non-emergency number for the police;
      - Report a crime;
      - Find my car that has been towed;
      - Pay a fine, citation, traffic ticket, etc;
      - Find the nearest police station (to get fingerprints, etc);
      - Apply for a job;
      - View a map or statistics about crime.
    

To do any of those, I have to start at the picture of cops, scroll all the way
to the bottom of the page (past lots of press releases), click on "about" and
then start navigating. Or notice the tiny box on the far right side of the
screen, click "about" (why click "about" if I want to find my car? I dunno),
then start navigating. Some of these links are also in a PDF [1] just in case
I haven't gotten my "Acrobat Reader wants to update itself" message for the
day.

I'd say this is at least 25% less functional than some other (probably much
cheaper) very plain sites I've seen for similarly-sized cities. [2]

In other words: if you aren't in the business of user experience, think twice
before presenting a novel user experience. The business of police should be
policing, not looking cool online. There is a zero chance that a technophobe
would be likely to solve their problems using this site, thus increasing the
burden on (already depleted) staff at stations.

[1] [http://www.milwaukeepolicenews.com/wp-
content/themes/milwauk...](http://www.milwaukeepolicenews.com/wp-
content/themes/milwaukeepolice/MPD-FAQs.pdf)

[2] E.g., <http://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/police/>

~~~
mikeash
That's a rather impressive rant to write without apparently ever considering
whether this site is _intended_ to be used for any of that stuff.

~~~
shaggyfrog
Clearly it _is_ intended for those use cases, because, as grandparent said,
the links to find the answers are there, it's just not that easily available.

I'm not sure exactly what issue you're taking up here, because grandparent
clearly states some very straightforward and common user scenarios that any
police website should be expecting to handle, and handle efficiently.

This site loads like a dog on my machine. Or perhaps that's a shout out to the
K9 unit.

~~~
mikeash
Except it's not the police web site. It's an auxiliary site intended for news.
Go search for "Milwaukee police" and see what the #1 hit is and what the
official web site is. It's not this one.

~~~
shaggyfrog
"Official" or not, it's a public-facing website for the Milwaukee police
force. What it was "intended" for, and how the public is going to see it, are
two different perceptions that are clearly not aligned.

~~~
mikeash
I don't see how they're clearly not aligned. As far as I can tell, you got
confused because you saw a direct link that was not well labeled and didn't
notice the "news" in the URL. Do you have any reason to believe that the
average person who goes looking for the information you describe will find and
attempt to use this site?

------
danso
To be clear, this is NOT the official website, thank God. It is their PR site
that was designed pro bono by an ad agency. They still have a standard
website, ugly, but with actual information and not just visuals.

[http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/milwaukee-unveils-worlds-
best-...](http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/milwaukee-unveils-worlds-best-looking-
police-website-143535)

~~~
001sky
good info, but tangentially...since when are cop's having PR websites?!

~~~
genwin
Since they realized they got a bigger budget only by spending all their
previous budget.

------
nostromo
If you want your city to be perceived as a war zone, this is the website for
you.

~~~
TheFuture
I'm here, it is.

At least certain parts are. There's about a 4sqmi area that almost certainly
someone will be murdered in this weekend. Maybe a few. Shootings almost every
day. If they're even reported.

------
guelo
The militarization of police departments, including professional propaganda,
is scary.

------
HarryHirsch
This looks as if it had been done by the Yes Men, but the WHOIS record tells
that it is official.

Seriously, the job of the police is to uphold the law, not to look catch
criminals or look cool in their paramilitary gear.

Here's the scary bit: the police relies on the support of the community and
yet puts forth that image of itself. If they think that looking that way
improves their image one will be better off staying far away both from the
citizens of Milwaukee and its police department.

~~~
billswift
The _really_ scary bit is that most people still support the police, and will
probably continue to do so no matter what the police do.

------
saraid216
I... appreciate that they're using modern technologies. That's awesome. I also
really like that they're topically focusing what they want to present. That's
also awesome.

But that was a painful experience to go through, and it felt like my browser
was crying. To me, in terms of UX, this is pretty much one step short of the
blink tag. It's glitz for the sake of glitz, to the detriment of utility.

------
mbell
I despise sites like this, they are _painful_ to use and the transfer of
actual information is nearly zero. I spend more time trying to get the content
to line up than I do consuming it. It comes off as a tech demonstration put
together without a single thought given to the usability or business goals of
the site. Another example of this type of design:
<http://www.sugarloaf2020.com/>

Please stop designing sites like this.

~~~
chrischen
What's wrong with the sugarloaf website? If you click on the links on the left
the content automatically lines up.

~~~
mbell
If you scroll the experience is terribly broken and scrolling is a deeply
ingrained interaction paradigm for web sites. Its particularly annoying on a
mac trackpad due to inertial scroll.

Saying "don't scroll, use the buttons" to get a non broken experience is like
saying "don't click the big red button" to avoid the server throwing a 500.

~~~
chrischen
Well I personally don't find the experience terribly broken, or broken at all.
I don't see why anything on that page even has to perfectly line up. I mean on
Pinterest you don't expect everything to perfectly line up when infinite
scrolling, and you don't really lose any information if the image doesn't line
up on this page.

However, I can see how it can really annoy some obsessive type personalities
(who consider it horribly broken if the page doesn't line up perfectly)... no
offense. It might be painful, but that pain's probably not due to you being
able to get info from the page.

I've also disabled inertial scrolling. I can see how that would make it
impossible to line up the page, but the page has clearly been designed to be
used even if the images and elements aren't perfectly in place.

In my opinion, inertial scrolling on a desktop computer is the actual useless
embellishment here. It makes sense on a small screened mobile device because
there is no scroll bar, and because normal desktop-sized web pages will end up
super long on a small screen. But on a desktop few pages will be large and
long enough to require you to do a flick to go down.

~~~
mbell
> I don't see why anything on that page even has to perfectly line up.

The timeline page is basically unusable unless it lines up really well.
Additionally it took me 4-5 times through to realize the years on that page
were click actions (except 2013 which looks identical to the others???).
Partially because of the annoyance of lining stuff up took me out of the
mindset of 'what should i click on' and partially due to the inversion of
focus. Generally actions the user can make should be clearly defined and stand
out. In this case the current year stands out and the other years are very
muted. In most interaction cases the elements that are muted are 'inactive'.

While you can read the content on the other pages with them out of alignment,
the stiff breaks in the image background are very distracting.

All I can say to get to the real point is that if I hadn't grown up riding
that mountain 30+ days a winter I never would have stuck around long enough to
glean anything useful about it.

For what its worth the general feedback I've heard from other Sugarloafers
indicates its not just me or my personality type that hates this site, it's a
wide range of folks whose response has been "yuck".

------
noonespecial
A nitpick about the website: It completely breaks the back button. Back un-
scrolls?! WTF.

And now for the sad commentary on the social state: The vehicle in the picture
says "Rescue" on it in large, friendly letters. The vehicle is a tank
festooned with gun ports.

~~~
bdunbar
_The vehicle is a tank festooned with gun ports._

You're being needlessly alarming.

The vehicle is a wheeled armored personell carrier. Totally not a tank - there
aren't any caterpillar tracks.

Go back to bed, nothing to see, no worries, Citizen.

~~~
noonespecial
My mistake. By the by, when should we expect the armor and weapon upgrades on
the fire trucks to be complete?

~~~
iy56
They are already there. Firehoses and ladders are weapons against fire, just
as guns are weapons against criminals.

------
subsection1h
Not only was this site posted just 16 days ago,[1] but as I commented at the
time, scrolling the site causes 100% usage of one of my CPU's cores. This is
still the case.

The fact that so many people consider sites such as this to be "awesome" is
one of the many reasons I'm glad I no longer work for clients.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4436366>

~~~
tayl0r
The performance is terrible. Have the developers ever heard of smooth
scrolling? How can any self respecting developer release this?

------
at-fates-hands
As a piece of propaganda, I'd say it's pretty nice considering I can count the
sites using good Parallax effects on one hand.

Unfortunately, the selection of images doesn't help their cause. Considering
their history, I would think there would be more pictures of Cops helping kids
and old folks as opposed to images of urban attack vehicles and cops in SWAT
gear.

------
ck2
Why are the Milwaukee police more heavily armed than the soldiers in
Afghanistan?

~~~
rdl
The lead guy has what appears to be a Benelli M2 shotgun with a bunch of crap
added (rail, light, and some kind of red dot sight). The other guy has what
might be some kind of AR15/M4.

Yes, they're wearing black, and have a lot of random junk attached to them,
but they're not necessarily much more heavily armed than a CA CHP car with a
shotgun and an AR-15 or M16A1 inside.

The APC, yeah, that's a bit over the top.

------
headShrinker
I grew up in on the east side of Milwaukee, moved to Chicago and now live in
NYC. With each move the police grew progressively more militarized. I always
felt it, but obvious when I was travelling in Italy over the summer. I noted
how unassuming and calm the Italian police were.

Parts of Milwaukee, can be very rough but I don't think the police looking and
acting like paratroopers is the answer to staving social unrest and anxiety.
No matter where I am in the US it seems the message of "protect and serve"
gets lost in translation.

America is a very fear riden place and I would guess that when a fearful
people vote and elect representatives, they elect people who assure safety of
the people by more and more aggressive stances.

~~~
genwin
Well put. Yes it's sad that half of Americans think the best response to most
offenses is shoot-to-kill, ask questions later. My city has a professional
police force; I don't think it's a big coincidence that we also have a
relatively low crime rate.

------
patdennis
It's almost impossible to scroll using the trackpad on my MBP.

I think it's the inertial scrolling that causes problems... the slightest
touch sends it down three or four pages.

~~~
hkmurakami
The scroll also snaps back to the top when I resize my window.

Also, I think it's detecting my screen resolution and assuming that my browser
is maximized. My browser is typically 1/2 the width of my screen, so
everything's all garbled up :(

------
petercooper
From the Hot Fuzz school of policing..

------
some1else
The site beaks the back-button.

The parallax scrolling looks cool, but there's too much momentum, making the
desired content scroll out of view.

The visual language is 1984. This sends chills down my spine and I'd never go
for an image like that for a public service. Maybe this image is reassuring to
the Milwaukee Police Dept, but that shouldn't play a role in designing a
"customer-facing" website.

------
andrewguenther
As cool and interesting as it is, as a citizen, the information I am actually
interested in is all the way down at the bottom. Even then, if what you're
looking for isn't in the FAQ, you have to open a PDF just to see more links
(what?). There isn't even a phone number listed for non-emergency calls.

Very nice page, but a poor website

------
rurounijones
Excellent looking site (Takes ages to load although that might be HN bashing
it)

About the only thing I don't like about it is the preponderance of images
featuring gun-toting SWAT members, armoured cars etc, seems a bit hollywood.

------
chrsstrm
Great photos, but scrolling with my magic mouse got me angry pretty quick when
I couldn't read anything even near the edge of the top or bottom or each
section without an over-scroll happening.

------
digitalengineer
Our police rides around on bicycles. But hey, I live in Holland. Short video:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBOnGuK7D0o>

------
ww520
Actually the design is innovative and very good in breaking the mold. As with
anything new there might be some shortcomings, like being performance hog on
the browser.

Kudos for trying something new.

------
enraged_camel
Looks pretty, but is not very usable.

------
mman
There is about a 750ms delay for scrolling on my lastgen macbook air. I am
going to upgrade my machine for this site.

edit: Actually it's more like a 50ms delay followed by some mollasses

~~~
zbowling
don't worry. i have the macbook retina with a gig of video ram and the latest
and fastest i7 processor and it's scrolls like crap.

------
JacobIrwin
Missing MOST WANTED page...? <http://www.milwaukeepolicenews.com/most-wanted-
page>

------
callmeed
I've been very annoyed at/interested in non-obvious menu item labels lately.
For example, on this site we have "The Source" and "The Stats"–I would have no
guesses as to what those mean.

I see this with my own website customers as well. Instead of "Pricing", they
use "Investment" and instead of "Contact", they use "Hello" or "Inquiries".

Does anyone have links explaining if/why this is bad?

------
awwstn2
OP, here. I agree with much of the criticism, and I have nothing to do with
Milwaukee, their PD or this website. I just thought it was quite different
from normal municipal websites, and would be worth discussion.

Perhaps they should take the idea of interesting and different design and
decouple it from the militaristic attitude, and they'd be on to something.

------
autophil
I like it. The site has a Hill Street Blues quality to it, but tougher and
darker. That's okay. The cops need to look tough because they are tough.

I think the more communication the better. Is it propoganda? Maybe, but I
wouldn't work my brain into a lather about that.

Overall, I'd say it's cool. If my town had a site like this I'd read it.

------
quomopete
A perfect example of design that complete overshoots and denigrates its
usability and usefulness. I wouldn't even expect this amount of slickness from
a web app that dispenses froyo from my cd-rom drive. The Mobile experience
should be the desktop experience, as well; for something like a police
blotter.

------
yskchu
If you didn't tell me this was a police website, I'd have thought it was a
tabloid, with that huge font.

I guess it's a modern theme, but is this the image they want to portray? Looks
more like a movie or magazine website rather than a professional police force.

------
l0tics
Looks great until you click on something like "pay for a parking ticket"
<https://step1.caledoncard.com/citations/milwaukee.html>

------
swang
If only discussing the usability issue. 1. Spacebar doesn't work, and 2. It
lags even on a rMacBook. and 3. scrolling using the MacBook trackpad makes the
site feel slippery.

------
splatcollision
Yes, we live in a police state over here. Please send help.

------
pasbesoin
One site for which I'm definitely not enabling Javascript.

------
EthanEtienne
Mmmm, all I see is a beautiful site, I guess I'm brain washed.

------
derleth
> WARNING: We have detected that you currently have Javascript disabled.

> This website requires the use of Javascript, for the best possible viewing
> experience we highly recommend that you enable Javascript via your browser's
> options.

Do I really need to elaborate here? For the record, the site works (to some
extent) in Lynx.

But in Firefox without Javascript, they actually took the time to make it
completely useless _and_ they have that little block of text on top. Why did
they waste their time doing that?

If they don't support non-Javascript browsers, fine. I actually don't care
about that. But to... _anti-support_ them. To actively work to make the page
useless to them. _That_ is what I don't get. I would appreciate some insight
into their thoughts here.

~~~
lmm
They don't want to support non-Javascript browsers, but they don't want users
who've turned off Javascript to think their site is broken. So they put a
warning box up to explain the situation. Seems fair enough, as long as it's
just a passive warning rather than blocking the actual site.

------
Evbn
Android gets a simple mobile site with boring self-congratulatory text reports
of the great job cops are doing. Apparently 20th century computers get all the
fun on this one.

