Law enforcement does not keep Milwaukee safe
Many in Milwaukee, even those who participated heavily in protests against police brutality, and especially those in political office, have turned their back on the movement inspired by George Floyd’s murder in 2020, and its demands. This month Milwaukee Beagle is covering the city and county budgets, joining activists in reviving the once-popular call to redirect funds away from law enforcement and into human needs. People in power simply do not want to hear about defunding the police anymore, even though, in Wisconsin, police killings and the incarceration rate are rising dramatically.
That’s why we took a hard look at Milwaukee law enforcement and put together two articles. One explaining the ways law enforcement hurts Milwaukee, and this article, focusing on how law enforcement does not keep Milwaukee safe.
The illusion of safety
Law enforcement works under the general assumption that their role is public safety. They tell us they exist to “serve and protect” the public. They get dispatched to us when we call 911 in an emergency. Sometimes, they are helpful, or at least appear to be. But helping people is only a fraction of what police actually do.
A number of research projects have examined police work in great detail. Every couple years, when a particularly egregious police murder sparks a massive protest movement, the mainstream media will write articles summarizing myths about policing, and explaining reports on police work hours. If you actually want to look at numbers, this website from the Vera Institute gathers the data in a very user friendly way. To summarize, though, we know police spend relatively little of their time dealing with crime, especially those doing “community policing” work. Instead, they are often doing administrative work, driving around, hosting “copaganda” events, or doing crimes of their own. We also know that police clearance rates–the number of crime reports that lead to arrest and conviction–are very low. Some research suggests as little as 2% of serious crimes are “cleared”. We also know that a tiny fraction (1% federally, 3% in many states) of those convictions involved an actual trial where someone was proven guilty by a jury. The vast majority are resolved by plea bargains and overcharging.
Milwaukee Police Department claims to have an 83% clearance rate for homicide, though it was recently much lower, and remains low for other crimes. They also have some fancy maps and dashboards, tons of cameras, and sensors monitoring the communities they target. All of that claptrap is unreliable and often based on conjecture. In reality, crime is very hard to measure.
Most people doing crimes obviously don’t talk about it, and more than half of people hurt by crimes don’t report them to police. Also, the police lie. They lie a lot. It is part of their jobs. They frequently neglect to report crime stats and have a very strong self interest in misrepresenting them. Then politicians and pundits constantly spin crime data to tell simple stories about complex situations so they can offer false solutions, mislead the public, win elections, and benefit their powerful police union friends.
Police are very bad at public safety, they mostly don’t do it, and they deeply misrepresent what little they actually do.
A big piece of the disconnect between the perception of law enforcement and the reality comes from the different ways that police behave in different communities. Sociologists Monica C Bell, and Daanika Gordon, found that in the suburbs and wealthy communities, police more often respond to calls, whereas in urban and low income communities, police tend to patrol and initiate stops, too often escalating them to violence. These practices not only reinforce segregation and structural inequality, but also skew perceptions. They lead affluent, high voter turnout, white communities to trust and value police, while low income, low voter turnout communities of color have a completely different experience.
Public safety through policing is an illusion of safety. Bestselling abolitionist author and organizer Mariame Kaba has written excellently about this illusion and what policing actually does. “Policing simply creates more precarity and fear, especially in marginalized communities,” she found. “Being constantly threatened with arrest and imprisonment makes people feel less secure, not more protected.”
Real public safety
Local historian, Reggie Jackson, has written extensively about the economic violence Milwaukee’s Black community has been subjected to. In his 2019 article, When the jobs went away crime followed, he described high crime rates in the late 1980s and 90s stating that, “when a critical loss of jobs happens, people need to find a way to provide for themselves. The disinvestment in Milwaukee’s central city neighborhoods, which began in the 1970s, had left a huge impact.” This same explanation can help us understand how crime rose when the government stopped supporting people through covid, cutting us off and forcing us back to work. Of course, it’s more complicated than that, as a recent, very thorough article from the Brennan Center points out. That article cites countless reports about the role of social support, community spaces, and non-profit advocacy in crime reduction, as well as the benefit of direct financial support for people living in stress and economic precarity.
When the government’s response to crime is to further increase economic hardship, it creates a cycle that makes the problems worse, not better. As described in this companion article, law enforcement increases economic hardship, stress, and precarity. Milwaukee BBC law enforcement does this more, and in a more racially targeted way than law enforcement in most other places.
Youth programming, mental health resources, infrastructure projects, affordable housing, basic human needs okeep taking a back seat to law enforcement funding in both city and county budgets. Those things are actual sources of public safety, but we cannot invest in them when we’re giving nearly half of our budgets to the illusion of safety provided by the police.
Obviously, we can’t just snap our fingers and make police go away, but we need to continue having serious and rigorous conversations. We can’t just wait until another particularly horrific police murder leads to another wave of rebellions massive enough to provoke another “national conversation” that lasts a year or two and gets scant results. We need to keep talking about police, and even more importantly, start effectively and consistently acting against them and what they are doing to our city.
Please read this article on ways to get involved in community efforts around Milwaukee’s city and county budgets.
