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.
Using Levine’s method of computing unemployment, it turns out the rate for white males in Milwaukee County was 21 percent in 2008, rather than the 5.8 percent that was typically reported. That gives you some sense of how this method of reporting exaggerates joblessness.
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.”
I would add this complaint: Levine’s preposterously high unemployment figure provides a misleading portrait of Milwaukee to the rest of the world, from publications that pick up the statistic without understanding how it was derived. There’s no doubt the city has a big problem of black male unemployment, even at the standard rate of 18 percent. Why exaggerate it to the point where the problem seems so drastic nothing can be done to solve it?
Levine can play a useful role as a devil’s advocate, and his research on Milwaukee’s potential to become a water hub was one such example, as a feature in the May issue of Milwaukee Magazine contended. In the case of black unemployment, Levine argues that traditional ways of measuring it understates the joblessness. Perhaps. But his solution seems to be a method that greatly exaggerates the rate and that never explains to readers (at least in his most recent report) why it’s so much higher. That strikes me as quite misleading.
Update 2:00 p.m. May 4: Levine responded via e-mail to say he does not use the word unemployment but “joblessness” in his study. True. But that routinely gets turned into the word unemployment by the media, film producers, etc. I think in his zeal to dramatize black unemployment, Levine ends up misleading people. While it may be true that standard statistics on black unemployment are understated, it’s also quite likely that Levine’s “jobless” figure includes many who can’t or don’t want to work because they are retired, disabled, etc.
JS Muffs Story on Police
On Sunday, a front-page Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story told us how the Milwaukee Police Department has improved its use of computer technology to combat crime. Department officials told the paper that “a new commitment to technology is a key factor” in recent statistics showing a 40 percent drop in violent crime.
This is not a small change for the department. As a 2008 column of mine documented, Milwaukee’s police department had an inadequate computer system for more than 20 years, going back to the mid-1980s and continuing through the reign of at least four police chiefs. Which raises an interesting question: Why did the department finally improve its system?
The JS story all but punts the question. How the new system works is documented in great detail. But why it was improved is never really answered. The story briefly notes that Chief Ed Flynn appealed to the private sector for help in improving the department’s system, but otherwise quotes officers talking about what “we” the police do now versus what “we” used to do. And who is this we? Which leaders pushed for the change? The story trails away with no clear answer.
The improvement in the department’s crime-fighting technology is old news by now and was reported by Milwaukee Magazine in a May 2009 feature story. The story quoted department higher-ups criticizing past chiefs and praising how Flynn pushed for changes in how computerized crime data is handled.
Ah, but this was the by-now notorious feature by Jessica McBride, who had an affair with Flynn some three months after turning in her story. This was the story frequently derided as a “glowing profile” by JS columnist Daniel Bice. So did the Journal Sentinel deliberately trim any quotes from officers crediting Flynn for improving the department’s computer system to avoid looking like it was praising the chief? Or did reporter Ryan Haggerty and his editors simply forget two of the “five W’s” and leave out the “who” and “why” behind the department’s changes? I have no idea which is the answer, but the result is a weirdly ambiguous story that leaves readers – and city residents – without the information they need to fully evaluate the police chief.
The Buzz
-Just before he withdrew from the race for lieutenant governor, Ald. Tony Zielinski called for a task force to address the fact that joblessness for African-American males “approaches 48 percent.” Marc Levine – and those “news reports” repeating his statistics – strikes again.
-If JS columnist Patrick McIlheran left his ideological cocoon for a minute, he’d realize that most people see the clergy abuse scandal as a deplorable situation that is not particularly ideological. But McIlheran continues to labor mightily to explain why the scandal is not the fault of conservatives. His latest column is silly in too many ways to cover. Most laughable: He denies that celibacy could be, in any way, a cause of the scandal because “most of the abuse was of boys. … It’s absurd to claim that the love of a wife would have made abusers switch sexual preferences.” The argument, Patrick, is that an end to celibacy would give the church the pick of many more potential priests – all the men who want to marry – and would have strengthened the church’s hand in weeding out questionable candidates.
-Mayor Tom Barrett and city officials have been carefully guarding the proposed route – and annual cost – of the proposed Downtown streetcar circulator. But NewsBuzz has unearthed the details.
-And is former Marquette star Wesley Matthews the real NBA rookie of the year? The Sports Nut offers a novel theory.
