Tracking The Wrong Metrics -- The Milwaukee Experiment -- May 7, 2015

Updates

August 15, 2016: Milwaukee spiraling out of control after a black police officer killed a black criminal with a long rap sheet, carrying a stolen gun with 27 rounds of ammunition while on probation; a gun that had been stolen in a burglary in March. People burning down their own city over low-life like this. Milwaukee is the nation's most segregated city.
 

Original Post

 

This week's issue of The New Yorker has an in-depth article (generally, all New Yorker Magazine articles are 'in-depth") on the judicial system (I guess you would call it that) in Milwaukee County, led by the District Attorney, John Chisholm.

It's a long article, and like most New Yorker Magazine articles it tends to meander; the writing is excellent but it is easy to lose sight of the facts.

What I get from the article is this: in 2007, John Chisholm became the District Attorney for Milwaukee County. The primary job of a district attorney is to decide which cases will be tried, which will be dropped, and of those that will be tried, how to proceed: plea bargaining or trial.

Chisholm was concerned about the high rate of "black" incarceration and wanted to see if the district attorney of a county could make a difference. So, he initiated his experiment, which can be described as "catch and release" except for "truly violent crimes." Stealing cars, for example, is not a "truly violent crime."

In the author's own words, p. 30, "Chisholm [the district attorney] has an aversion to incarceration."

Near the end of the article we are provided with the results of Chisholm's experiment:

The vast majority of the murders in Milwaukee take place on the north side, which is overwhelmingly African-American, with an unemployment rate above forty per cent. In 2014, there were eighty-seven homicides in Milwaukee, which has a population of just under six hundred thousand.

If New York City had Milwaukee’s murder rate, there would have been more than twelve hundred homicides in 2014; the actual number was three hundred and twenty-eight.

In Milwaukee, this year has got off to a dismal start. By the end of April, there were forty-eight homicides. As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted in a recent headline, “How Could This Happen? No Easy Answers to Milwaukee’s Spiraling Violence.”

Chisholm told me, “This last patch has been a tough one.”

Eighty-seven homicides in Milwaukee in all of 2014 (four times the NYC rate) and in the first four months of 2015, there have been 48 homicides in Milwaukee County. That rate annualized is 144 homicides for 2015 which is an increase of 66%, year-over-year.

The last paragraph of the article:

To explain this year’s crime rise, as well as the persistent racial disparities, Chisholm cites forces beyond his control—poverty, hopelessness, lack of education, drug addiction, and the easy availability of guns. In this way, Chisholm’s greatest lesson may have been in humility. “We redesigned our system, but we learned that no individual actor can change the dynamics of what goes on in a complex larger system like a city,” he said.

The question not asked: why is the homicide rate so much lower in NYC? The second question to ask is whether NYC has a "catch and release" program similar to Milwaukee's?

One could argue that his experiment did work if the goal was to reduce incarceration.

A third question should be asked: who are the homicide victims? Maybe the experiment is more successful than we realize; maybe we are simply tracking the wrong metrics.

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Perhaps The Police Have Been Ordered To "Stand Down"

Tweeing now: 9 people shot in 7 shootings Thursday in Baltimore, police say; 2 victims died, local media reports.