• U.S.

Middle America’s Crime Wave

9 minute read
Kathleen Kingsbury

It’s as if Milwaukee, Wis., had reverted to a state of lethal chaos. A Special Olympian is killed for his wallet as he waits for a bus. An 11-year-old girl is gang-raped by as many as 19 men. A woman is strangled, her body found burning in a city-owned garbage cart. Twenty-eight people are shot, four fatally, over a holiday weekend.

These are the kinds of crimes American cities expected never to see in high numbers again. In the 1990s police departments nationwide began applying the so-called broken-windows theory: arrest the bad guys for minor offenses, and they wouldn’t be around to commit more serious ones. This zero-tolerance approach–combined with more cops on the street to enforce it, a strong economy and a fortuitous demographic change that reduced the population of young men who typically cause the most trouble–lowered the rates of murder, robbery and rape for 10 consecutive years. Until last year. Not only did crime suddenly begin to rise in 2005, but the most violent crimes led the trend. Homicides shot up 3.4%. Robberies, 3.9%. Aggravated assaults, 1.8%. Hardest hit were not metropolises like New York City and Los Angeles but cities with populations between 400,000 and 1 million–such as Baltimore, Md.; Charlotte, N.C.; St. Louis, Mo.; and Oakland, Calif.–and this year looks to see similar rates of increase, if not worse.

Few places have suffered more than Milwaukee. The homicide count for the city of 590,000 fell from 130 in 1996 to just 88 in 2004. But last year, according to FBI figures, Milwaukee saw the country’s largest jump in homicides–up 40%, to 121. This year’s total will probably be lower, but as the killings over that bloody holiday weekend and other crimes show, violence has returned to the city. “You’ll be able to read about something even more heinous tomorrow,” laments Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan. “People are scared.”

Like the residents of dozens of other recently crime-afflicted midsize cities across the country, people in Milwaukee are trying to figure out why their town has suddenly become so dangerous. While the cohort of young adults is ground zero for violent crime, the reason isn’t as simple as a rapidly growing population. Since the late 1990s, the number of Americans under 30 has increased at a rate consistent with that of the general U.S. population, about 6%. Some other likely explanations have emerged.

FEWER COPS ON THE BEAT

Most municipalities count on grants from the Justice Department’s State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance and Office of Community-Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, program to help pay for officers on their force. But $1.9 billion, or 45%, of that funding has disappeared since the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks, as federal resources are increasingly directed toward homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Midsize cities, which depend more heavily on federal funds than larger ones do, have nearly 25% fewer officers than they did in 2001, and the White House’s budget proposal for next year would sweep away an additional $1.5 billion.

In Milwaukee, COPS universal hiring funds dropped from more than $1 million in 2002 to zero last year. That has left more than 200 police vacancies out of a force less than 2,000 strong. The city is hard pressed to fill the gap, since the police budget eats up nearly the entire Milwaukee tax levy of $213 million. Mayor Tom Barrett is hoping that the feds will start pitching in again. “We’ve spent five years on homeland security,” Barrett says. “Now we need to focus on a little hometown security.”

Further exacerbating the city’s police shortage is the redeployment of cops from the streets of Milwaukee to those of Baghdad, Mosul and Kabul. As many as 135 officers at one time have gone on leave to serve in Wisconsin’s National Guard or military reserve units in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It’s difficult to manage a force that’s always coming and going,” says police chief Nanette Hegerty. Those left to hold down the fort at home feel overstretched and underappreciated. “Morale is low,” says Officer John Balcerzak, head of the police union. “We’re racing to a new crime before we’ve investigated the last. That leaves criminals out there on the streets.”

Residents feel equally frustrated. “The police simply showing up can be half the battle in many people’s minds,” says Steve O’Connell, who lives in the working-class Sherman Park neighborhood. This summer, Milwaukee’s 911 dispatchers received, on average, 1,700 calls a day. As police captain Donald Gaglione told a community meeting, “If your 911 call is not a high priority, it may take several hours before we respond, if at all.” But people who live in volatile neighborhoods say they need police to intercede before minor disturbances become serious matters.

If police are struggling to answer 911 calls, they have even less time to patrol neighborhoods, so they can’t build the trust essential to preventing crime. Tensions between the city’s African-American community and police are particularly high–40% of the population is black and 47% is white, but there are three times as many white cops on the force. As Alderman Ashanti Hamilton explains, “If the only time people in black neighborhoods see a police officer there it is to arrest somebody, then, of course, they’re going to be nervous.” Chief Hegerty says repairing this relationship is critical. “We have to count on law-abiding residents to tell us what’s going on in their neighborhoods,” she says.

Ester Hodges learned that the hard way. A former construction worker who moved into a west-side Milwaukee home three years ago, she says a neighbor’s young daughters terrorized her street and, more personally, bullied her children. Hodges, 48, became a one-woman block watch, calling the police regularly, buying surveillance cameras with her own money and speaking out at community meetings. “I let the police know time after time that trouble was coming,” she says. Briefly last spring the police monitored her area more closely. Three weeks after the patrols stopped, however, Hodges says, a threatening group showed up at her house. Police still haven’t sorted out exactly what happened next, but by the end, Hodges had been shot in the stomach. No charges have been brought in her shooting. She survived, and her neighbors eventually moved, but police are investigating whether Hodges may have taken justice into her own hands by firing at her antagonizers. No one else was hit.

MORE PAROLEES ON THE STREET

U.S. prisons release an average of 630,000 inmates each year, and that number will rise for the foreseeable future as more and more sentences run out from arrests made during the Reagan Administration’s war on drugs in the 1980s and the zero-tolerance crackdown in the ’90s. Calculate in average recidivism rates of 40% for those released from federal penitentiaries and 67% for those who leave state facilities, and it’s clear that more crimes are being committed because there are simply more criminals around to commit them. Says Milwaukee district attorney E. Michael McCann: “We’re charging the same guys who came through our doors 10 or 20 years ago.”

A commission set up to study the city’s worst homicides found that 50% of both homicide perpetrators and victims in 2005 had been previously arrested. One in five was on probation or parole at the time of the slaying. “It’s shocking to see the criminal histories of the people in these cases,” says University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee professor Steve Brandl, one the commissioners. “They seem destined for a life of imprisonment.”

The majority of the parolees entered prison in their early 20s or late teens. Most never finished school or held a job, and they lack the skills to do so. In Wisconsin 70% of prisoners struggle with drug or alcohol addiction. “If we don’t want to see them again and again, we’ve got to offer them more than the clothes on their backs, a Greyhound ticket and $15 in their pocket,” says Dolan, referring to aid cons receive when they leave prison. Even those who participated in substance-abuse counseling and the few education and job-training programs available while inside say those initiatives didn’t prepare them for life back on the streets.

Resources outside are even more limited. Milwaukee has 160 halfway beds for recently released inmates, but those beds are so in demand that a parolee can stay a maximum of just 90 days. “Ideally we’d have five to 10 times the number of beds we do, and we could tailor the stay for each ex-offender,” says Steve Swigart, whose nonprofit Wisconsin Community Services runs such facilities. Often the alternative is sleeping on a drug-house sofa or rejoining a gang simply for a place to bunk.

When Annie Schrader, 46, was released from prison in 2002, her only employment had been running an escort service and dealing drugs. A long job search yielded no possibilities and a deepening depression. “It’s a huge problem because you know you can flip some dope and make a lot of money,” says Schrader, who now counsels other ex-cons through a ministry called StretcherBearers.

HIGHER UNEMPLOYMENT

Since 1998, Wisconsin has lost nearly 90,000Â manufacturing jobs. Milwaukee has suffered the brunt of that, hemorrhaging 7,500 positions in 2005 alone. The unemployment rate hovers around 7%, up from 2.6% in 1998 and nearly double the national average. In inner-city neighborhoods, the level rises to nearly 60% for working-age males. With only half of adults earning more than a high school diploma, the city’s residents aren’t well matched for the white-collar jobs most common today. The number of able men wandering the streets in the daytime is striking.

Barrett’s administration has tried to address unemployment through a huge investment in real estate development and tax incentives to attract business. The mayor says those efforts have created more than 10,000 local jobs. Most of them, however, are either high-tech positions beyond the skills of many Milwaukee residents or low-wage service slots in retail shops and chain restaurants that pay less than needed to support a family.

“People who have put in a full day’s work are generally too tired to go out and terrorize the neighborhood by night,” alderman Willie Wade says. Employment can assuage other social ills. It leads to more homeownership–meaning fewer absentee landlords and the drug houses that can go with them. And a job can anchor an entire family. Says Wade: “A little money in his pocket can convince a man to be a father to his children instead of stealing his neighbor’s Cadillac.”

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