Milwaukee takes lead in response to urban violence

By Georgie Anne Geyer

ELKHORN, Wis. - When we think of big American cities and the killings that seem to be the disorder of the day, we tend to think first of Chicago. Chicago was my childhood hometown, and it's tragic to think of it now in terms of the 3,500 men and women killed, often in random murders, over only the last eight years.

I think of Chicago's glamorous, gorgeous lake shore, with its shimmering high rises, its boughs of tulips that bloom in the spring up and down Michigan Avenue, and its daring sculptures, so it is sad to hear it called America's "murder capital." In fact, much of the modern mayhem is occurring in my old South Side neighborhood.

But this last weekend, another lovely Midwestern city, a smaller city that also sits on the "sea" that is Lake Michigan, showed ITS dark side. I speak, of course, of Milwaukee, whose respected sheriff, David A. Clarke Jr. commented sadly after the assumed racial chaos and mayhem that tore the city apart: "Saturday night, the social order collapsed in Milwaukee."

Now, that is strong stuff. But although we still don't know exactly what happened to drive this pleasant city, with its German descendants and their beer and spaetzle, to the edge, we do know what we can readily see - and hope to change.

Milwaukee police were chasing after a young man Saturday afternoon when the confrontation took an ugly turn. The man fled his car with a gun and a policeman shot him dead. After this, the city erupted, with businesses burned to the ground and the city traumatized. Another terrible racial incident.

But was it? The dead man was, indeed, African-American, but the policeman was also African-American; and the area, around Sherman Boulevard, had for many years been a sturdy middle-class African-American neighborhood.

It has come out, surprising this longtime Wisconsin lover, that Milwaukee had 145 homicide victims last year, a 69 percent increase from 2014. This year, there have been more than 80 homicides, with five of those occurring only this last Friday and Saturday.

In the Sherman Park area, solid families had had good-paying industrial jobs for many years, until companies like Master Lock and Jay's Potato Chips moved out in the 1960s and '70s. Then, as in so much of the nation, jobs traveled away, and Milwaukee became the second poorest major city in the country and one of its most segregated.

One man from the neighborhood wrote touchingly in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel after the Saturday shootings: "The majority of people living in the area are hardworking individuals who just want to keep their neighborhood and families safe. However, in recent years many have become thankful just to make it home at night because of the violence and recklessness of some of their neighbors."

So, too bad, you say, but we've heard it all before - and we've certainly heard it in Milwaukee's neighboring "big sister," Chicago.

But while Milwaukee is surely not looking great after this sad weekend, both the city and the state have responded in interesting, and largely unheralded, ways that we might well study.

Gov. Scott Walker lost no time in declaring a state of emergency. The police immediately began thinking and talking about different tactics, like two-man teams. Sheriff Clarke's request Sunday morning for an activation of the Wisconsin National Guard was immediately acted upon, and a "rapid response team" was stationed at an undisclosed armory in the city.

Perhaps most interesting, officials stressed that Wisconsin was the first state in the nation to have a law requiring an independent investigation any time there is a shooting by an officer that leads to a death. Thus, Saturday night's mayhem will be investigated by the Wisconsin Department of Justice, not the Milwaukee Police Department.

"That is the way we do that in a just society that abides by the laws," Gov. Walker explained. "You don't ... react in the heat of the moment when people don't know what all the circumstances are."

Perhaps most touching, on Sunday morning, the people themselves responded. Hundreds of Milwaukeeans came out, with plastic bags and tools readily in hand, and started cleaning up their city, damaged by fires lit by the hatreds that should no longer have such free rein in this country.

So, maybe Milwaukee will demonstrate new ways of dealing with this mélange of problems - from underemployed workers, to race-consumed bad citizens to (above all) young fatherless black men. Certainly, other cities are not leading by example, including Chicago.

Let's pause and think honestly for a moment.

Despite our general belief, our troubled communities are not without tools to fight the murderous violence in our inner cities. If I were Chicago's Mayor Rahm Emanuel, for instance, I would activate the National Guard and close off some of the worst blocks, get the power to break up the gangs that are killing Chicagoans left and right, call together sober conferences of America's best sociologists, politicians and men and women of the cloth to analyze the situation and recommend potential solutions. For starters.

FDR fought the Depression with work at the national parks for the unemployed, and Ike sent the National Guard to integrate the schools. There ARE things to do. Maybe we ought to DO them.

Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.

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