The Obama Legacy in Milwaukee Policing

From Heather Mac Donald in City Journal: a discussion of how Attorney General Jeff Sessions is trying to undo the anti-police policies of the Obama Administration. Mac Donald specifically discusses Milwaukee:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has reoriented the [collaborative reform] program to help departments fight crime, rather than phantom police bias, without imposing a costly bureaucratic overlay. The changes come too late, however, for the Milwaukee Police Department, whose chief, Ed Flynn, was sweet-talked into collaborative reform by the former head of the COPS office. In 2016, Milwaukee’s collaborative-reform team produced a draft 243-page report, characterized by the usual Obama hallmarks—above all, a disparate-impact approach to finding police bias that measures police activity, like stops or arrests, against population ratios rather than against crime rates. The current DOJ lawyers agreed with Flynn that the draft report was seriously flawed and should not be released until its errors were corrected. But someone—whether an Obama aide, a member of the collaborative-reform team, or a Milwaukee police official—leaked the report to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and to the city council. The Journal Sentinel, which has waged a crusade against Flynn for years, splashed its nearly 3,000-word article on its front page under the unintentionally hilarious headline: TRUST IN POLICE DAMAGED, REPORT SAYS: DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE DRAFT SAYS MILWAUKEE CHIEF RELIES TOO MUCH ON DATA. Accusing a police department of relying “too much on data” is like accusing a doctor of relying too much on evidence-based disease markers in his diagnoses. Another term for “data-driven” is “victim-driven,” since crime data simply record the incidence of criminal victimization. The Journal Sentinel followed up with another front-page piece the next day: 9 KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THE DOJ DRAFT.

Predictably, the report criticizes traffic-stop rates, allegedly three times higher for blacks than for whites. The investigators concede that the department deploys its resources based on “data to identify neighborhoods of higher crime rates.” Race, in other words, has nothing to do with deployment or enforcement. But, the report goes on to explain, “community members have expressed concern that the areas identified as high crime are also more populated by minority community members. As a result, MPD’s data driven policing strategy has a disparate impact on minority community members.” This, in a nutshell, is the core dilemma facing police departments today. Given the huge disparities in law-breaking, the police cannot go to where people are most being victimized without generating racially disproportionate stop and arrest data. In 2016, blacks made up 89 percent of robbery suspects in Milwaukee, 85 percent of aggravated-assault suspects, and 81 percent of homicide suspects, though they are 39 percent of the population. Their victims were predominantly minority. The nonfatal shooting rate for blacks is over 15 times higher than for whites; the homicide rate is over 11 times higher than for whites. The only way to avoid generating racially disproportionate police activity data is to stop serving the minority victims of crime. No one has articulated this bind more eloquently over the years than Ed Flynn.

The dilemmas of policing in the Black Lives Matter era were put on vivid display this April, when Milwaukee’s city council voted to require the MPD to loosen its policy on car chases. The current MPD policy, instituted by Flynn, requires a high threshold of criminal behavior before officers can give chase; it represents the gold standard of “progressive” policing, because high-speed car chases are extremely dangerous. But the city council now wants officers to crack down on reckless driving because minority communities have complained about speeding, often by carjackers who zoom away after stealing cars. Nearly 90 percent of car-theft suspects are black, but the same municipal officials who routinely blame the MPD for high rates of black incarceration are now demanding that the department ramp up enforcement against the black population. “It’s more than a little baffling to me,” reports Flynn, “that the same city council that’s on the record as opposing putting people in jail for committing crimes wants us to engage in more pursuits that place innocent lives at risk to catch people they don’t want to see put in jail.”

The collaborative-reform draft cites MPD’s alleged failure to engage in community policing. In fact, Flynn has put so many officers on bikes to interact with the community that critics have accused him of letting patrol-car response times increase. The report also alleges that the department has a patrol workforce that does not “reflect the diversity of the Milwaukee community at large.” Like every other department in the country, Milwaukee tries to recruit as many minority candidates as possible. The Black Lives Matter narrative that policing is racist does not facilitate that effort; nor does the fact that minorities are more likely to have a criminal record and weaker test scores. It’s unlikely in any case that further racial engineering would improve policing: another Obama-era collaborative-reform report found that black and Hispanic officers in Philadelphia had a much higher rate than white officers of shooting unarmed black males. That disparity, which has been found elsewhere, undoubtedly derives from racial quotas in hiring.

As if the leaked report were not causing the MPD headaches enough, the Wisconsin ACLU is suing in federal court for a consent decree against stop, question, and frisk. The suit is based on the usual specious disparate impact analysis.

Law enforcement policy, better than almost anything else, shows how liberals are so attached to their narrative of black victimization at the hands of whites that they will harm black people to avoid admitting the flaws in that narrative.

Blacks are most certainly victims of crime, and they are by a vast disproportion more victimized than whites. But the idea that blacks are mostly victimized by other blacks is something that would create huge cognitive dissonance among liberals.

Liberals are, however, happy with the notion that black people are mostly the victims of white cops.  Thus we have a war on cops.  Which is also, de facto, a war on black people.

And Riots Accomplish What?

Milwaukee Riots: Race Hustler Spouts the Usual Clichés

Race hustlers like Rainey claim to represent the community, but in fact lots of blacks condemn violence, and even refuse to blame whitey for the problems of the inner city.

A good sample of views from the Sherman Park area (where the recent riots happened) can be found in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Yes, some of the people there give standard, politically correct answers:

Ceasar Stinson, a 44-year old who grew up in the Sherman Park area, jumped in the conversation. He said the violence and reaction to the killing — regardless of the circumstances surrounding the shooting — are symptoms of deeper issues and historical white supremacy.

“There’s a historical hatred and fear of African-American men,” he said. “Police have it. We have it. … We have a fear and hatred for one another.”

Others are more willing to point to problems in the black community:

Like many others contemplating what happened, Yvette McFarland said one of the main solutions starts at home.

“Parents need to parent their kids,” she said. “Parents need to teach biblical morals and values.”

She raised two children in the area in the 1990s before moving to Wauwatosa.

“I’m just sad to see how our black community is in such a rage,” she said.

Nearby, a pastor debated a longtime resident about the actions of those responsible for torching four buildings.

“I think it’s wrong,” said the Rev. Jeffery Hawkins of the Church of Living God and West Side Missionary Baptist Church. “It’s senseless.”

Hawkins is a postal carrier, and the gas station that burned was the last stop on his route for 10 years. He knows the neighborhood and the people well.

“Everyone wants to be politically correct instead of spiritually right,” he said. “You’re upset because police are killing black men … and you’re saying ‘Aw, the white man is keeping me down.’ But if you don’t change your way of thinking, you’re dooming yourself. ... You’ve got too much hate. You have to overcome hate with love.”

Hawkins, who is African-American, said his children are in college and that one of the reasons African-Americans in Milwaukee might not have opportunities is because they haven’t learned to read. “My wife and I sit down and read with (our kids). We have to teach them.”

Regardless, the reaction of the community was heartening. As one community resident explained:

“The good thing is that to get up early in the morning, a Sunday morning, and watch so many people come out to help out, just to help out because it’s the right thing to do — it proves not just to this community, (but) to the city, to the world, that we have more good in this world than we have bad. We just tend to focus on the bad.”

Cramping the Style of the Street Car

One of the fiascoes of Milwaukee City government in recent history is a plan to spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money to build a streetcar line that connects the trendy, affluent east side (where most people have cars, and where bus service is good) to the train station on St. Paul Street.

It will do no good for people who live on the suburbs. It will do no good for black people who live on the city’s North Side. It will do no good for people who live on the South Side. It will do no good for people who live in the Marquette area. It quite clearly reflects, not sober policy analysis, but rather the fetish of certain elites with mass, government planned and run transportation.

The costs of relocating utility lines to make way for the streetcar will be massive, and the City of Milwaukee has been demanding that ratepayers throughout the entire service areas of the affected utilities (the vast majority of whom will get no benefit at all from the project) should be forced to pay these costs.

Now enter the The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which today urged at a public hearing of the Public Service Commission that utilities not be forced to foist on ratepayers the entire relocation costs. According to the Institute:

September 27, 2012, Milwaukee, WI - Brett Healy and his fellow utility ratepayers, represented by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (“WILL”), scored a significant victory in today’s proceedings before the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. The City of Milwaukee had argued that the construction of its 2.1 mile downtown streetcar project is a proper exercise of its police power to promote the public safety and welfare, and therefore it has the legal right to force the utilities that will be affected by the project (and their ratepayers) to absorb all of the costs for the relocation or reconstruction of their facilities. Those costs have been estimated at more than $50 million. The City, which expects to essentially pay for the $65 million project with federal funds, has no room in its project budget to pay even one dollar of utility relocation costs.

The Commission declined to rule today that the construction of the streetcar project is a proper exercise of the City’s police power, setting that issue for a later hearing. More importantly, however, the Commission held that even if the streetcar project is a proper exercise of the City’s power, the City cannot impose all of the relocation costs on the utilities that will be affected. Only those costs that the Commission finds to be “reasonable” can be shifted to the utilities. The Chairman of the Commission particularly noted that the Commission’s duty is to protect Wisconsin’s utility ratepayers, and expressed serious reservations that it would be appropriate for the City to pass on millions of dollars in costs to Southeastern Wisconsin utility ratepayers who will receive no benefit from the City’s project. The Commission rejected the City’s contention that it had no jurisdiction to decide the cost issue, and said that it would hold a hearing to determine what costs it would permit the City to pass on to the utilities and their ratepayers.

Rick Esenberg, President and General Counsel of WILL, said “this is a clear victory for our clients and for the concept of government accountability. The Public Service Commission has done what we asked it to do, and will take a close look at the City’s decision to impose millions of dollars in costs on ratepayers who do not live in the City. We are confident that the Commission will decide that, if the City wants to move forward with the streetcar project, the City’s taxpayers should pay for it.”

Brett Healy, who originally brought the matter before the Commission, said “it’s clear that the City has no room in its budget for paying any of the utility costs and equally clear that the Commission will not let the City get away with shifting all, or even most, of those costs to utility customers. It’s time for the City to let its taxpayers know that the streetcar project cannot be financed with “free” federal dollars, and that it will likely cost them in substantially increased property taxes at the end of the day.”

This mania for mass transit among liberal elites, as we have noted before, reflects the resentment of these elites at the uppity nature of ordinary Americans. They want to live where they want to live. They want to drive their cars where they want to. They don’t want to have to conform their lifestyles to what urban planners think is best.

And the liberal elites hate that hugely.

Conservative Student Conference in Milwaukee

Students who are interested can apply to attend here. In fact, there is plenty of capacity, and all who apply will be accomodated.

Bogus Numbers About Black Unemployment in Milwaukee

From Murphy’s Law, a debunking of one piece of nonsense about Milwaukee and about the black community here.

In a column last week, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Eugene Kane led off by noting recent “news reports” that the rate of black male unemployment is nearly 50 percent. Gosh, if the figure is from news reports, it must be true, right?

If you had any doubt, consider a Business Journal story from last year telling readers the black male unemployment rate could be as high as 60 percent.

Yup, this is apparently a city where most black males don’t have jobs, where their rate of unemployment is astronomically high, higher than it was during the Great Depression. The bad news was spread nationally by publications such as the West Orlando News and by the Wikipedia entry on Milwaukee. There’s even a documentary movie informing the world of our toxically high black unemployment rate.

As it happens, this much-traveled and misleading statistic is based on one source: UW-Milwaukee researcher Marc Levine’s reports on black male unemployment. How does Levine come up with this figure? When computing his jobless rate, he does not exclude black men who are in prison, blind, disabled and retired. He also includes students 16 or older attending high school or college.

Needless to say, this is not how unemployment is usually computed. The most recent figure for black male unemployment in the city of Milwaukee by the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey was 18.3 percent. The Urban League used a similar approach to determine the national rate was 15.8 percent in its call on President Barack Obama to target this problem for a program of federal aid.

People like Levine, who is acting like a political activist rather than an academic researcher, doubtless think of themselves as being “concerned” about the black community, but when people try to be politically correct, they often do damage to the cause they think they are aiding.

The UW-Milwaukee Employment & Training Institute did a report criticizing Levine’s method of computing black male unemployment: “It promotes a stereotype of African-American males in Milwaukee as neither working nor even willing to look for employment … diverts attention of workforce investment planning away from the needs of active job seekers and underemployed workers to persons not in the workforce … [and] creates an unachievable (and undesirable) target for employment initiatives: seeking full employment of teenage students, disabled workers now receiving SSI and other income support, and retired workers on Social Security.”

As Bruce Murphy asks, “Why exaggerate it to the point where the problem seems so drastic nothing can be done to solve it?”

Levine is like feminist “researchers” who define rape so broadly that it comes to seem a rather normal and common thing.

In the case of black unemployment, as with rape and pretty much any other issue you can name, making bogus assertions you think will promote your pet political agenda is not only dishonest, it’s likely to end up harming your agenda.