 |
| Milwaukee Chief of Police Ed Flynn. |
Chief Ed Flynn is arguably the best Milwaukee police chief in modern memory. He is a rarity, combining the street smarts of a beat cop (which is how he got his start) with the social science knowledge you might expect of a university intellectual.
William Bratton, the police chief famed for slashing crime in New York, calls Flynn a “leading light in American policing.” Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission Executive Director Michael Tobin, who worked for years as a police officer and then as an assistant city attorney, says Flynn has been the biggest change agent of the six Milwaukee chiefs he has worked with: “Ed Flynn has started more initiatives in the department in one year than I’ve seen (by) all the six,” he told Milwaukee Magazine.
As soon as Flynn arrived, he began transforming a department that was woefully behind the times. In an age of increasingly sophisticated computerized crime data, the police here “were analyzing crime trends by reading printed incident reports and sticking pushpins representing weeks-old crimes into maps,” as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. “It was the dark ages. We had no data,” Assistant Chief of Police John Hagen told this magazine.
So Flynn approached the Milwaukee business community for help in upgrading the department’s computer technology, and created one of the most sophisticated systems in the country. Police now meet daily, getting up-to-date information on crime and strategically targeting hot spots with officers. “We have lots of meetings, lots of information sharing, lots of briefings,” Flynn says.
Targeting hot spots, however, can alienate residents in low-income and minority areas where crime is more likely to occur. “The same neighborhoods that need police attention are also those who have suffered police insensitivity,” Flynn once told me. “The great challenge is responding to violent crime without losing the support of that community.” And that support is needed so residents are willing to share information and tip police off to potential crimes.
Flynn also boldly took on the detectives, the elite members of the department, and pushed them, as one observer told me, to be less desk-bound, less hierarchical and more willing to work cooperatively with beat cops. The detectives reacted negatively at first. “There’s still some of that, but less then there was,” Flynn told me back in March.
Meanwhile, Flynn increased the number of beat cops (including bicycle cops), pushing to get more officers on the street, making stops and gathering information. The annual number of traffic stops and subject stops rose from 14,424 in 2007 to 47,614 in 2010.
Flynn sought to transform the department’s style from reactive enforcement to proactive problem solving. He announced his bold goals in a speech on January 7, 2008:
“Our measure of success will not be the number of arrests. Our measure of success will not be the number of traffic citations issued. Our measure of success will not be our response time to non-emergency calls. Our measure of success will be the reduction of crime, fear and disorder in Milwaukee.”
Statistics show crime has dropped by 19 percent on Flynn’s watch, while violent crime has declined 22 percent. This was accomplished with the same size police force and less spending on police overtime, which had been driving the Milwaukee Common Council crazy prior to the arrival of Flynn. Under him, the costs dropped from $17.4 million in 2007 to $10.5 million in 2009 and $11.4 million in 2010.
Impressive numbers. The Journal Sentinel, however, decided it would measure success in a quite different way.
A Questionable Watchdog Story
The JS has won three Pulitzers since 2008 and has invested considerable resources to investigative stories. Meanwhile, it has put less emphasis on beat reporters. A beat reporter covering the police is likely to know more about the department and will have an influence on how editors view the department. An investigative reporter such as Ben Poston, by contrast, swoops in on one story he may have suggested or may have been assigned by the paper’s enterprise editor Greg Borowski. And once the paper has put all kinds of time into the story, there is a strong incentive to run it – even if the thesis is faulty.
That’s the most charitable rationale I can give for the wrongheaded story on the front page, top of the fold on Sunday. It ran more than 120 paragraphs, plus three graphs taking another half page, suggesting this is a very major story.
But it merely documents a decline in the police department’s response time to calls from citizens. That’s hardly news; Flynn has made it clear this is not his priority. So the story tries to judiciously balance its findings, declaring that while crime is going down, “many victims [are] waiting longer for help.”
But how much longer? And how many victims?
Buried in the story at the bottom of a graph is the average response time for all dispatched calls: it went up from 39 minutes, 25 seconds in 2007 to 41 minutes, 33 seconds in 2010. That’s less than a two-minute increase in the overall response time. That hardly merits a 10-graph story in the metro section.
Ah, but the story also separates out the response time for major crimes, showing it went up by 15 minutes for theft, seven minutes for strong armed robbery and six minutes for sexual assault. But the fact that response time to theft went up more only proves Flynn is doing what he promised, giving less priority to non-emergencies and prioritizing violent crime.
But if he is prioritizing violent crimes, why has the average response time gone up for sexual assault and armed robbery? The answer is that all violent crimes are not equal: The dispatcher gives priority to a crime “in progress” versus one where the criminals have already left the scene. But the JS data offers no way to measure how successfully the department is making such distinctions.
Ironically, the story’s main anecdote shows that police are in fact making judicious distinctions. Poston writes about an 82-year-old cancer survivor who was in an auto accident and died two days later in the hospital from the injuries. But paramedics were on the scene within five minutes and the crash victims were taken to the hospital. So what does it matter if police (who may have been busy that night with murders, shootings and rapes) arrived two hours later? Poston speculates that “the two-hour delay may have hampered investigators’ ability to hold anyone accountable for his death.” But he never proves this. And even if he did, it wouldn’t prove the police were wrong for giving this accident less priority (it was ranked by the dispatcher as “Priority 2”) than other incidents that night.
Meanwhile, the story ignores all kinds of information from Flynn about response time. The chief publicly addressed the issue in a presentation to the Fire and Police Commission back on June 23, to which Poston was invited. Flynn made these points:
-Research has conclusively proven there is no correlation between response time and reduction in crime.
-Most citizens, whether victims or witnesses, delay somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes before calling police. (That seems to undercut the importance of quick response by police.)
-A 1977 Kansas City study found there was no correlation between making an immediate arrest and response time once it exceeded nine minutes.
-Citizen complaints about the Milwaukee police department have plummeted from 489 in 2007 to 363 in 2009 and 308 in 2010. (An amazing statistic considering the huge increase in traffic stops and subject stops.)
-Citizen complaints about the response time by Milwaukee Police are quite rare but have also dropped slightly from 10 in 2007 to eight, seven and nine in 2008-2010.
None of this information is included in Poston’s story. The story tells us a dozen residents interviewed by the paper “expressed concern about a lack of police response time to non-emergency calls,” but never tells us about the decline both in overall complaints and complaints about response time.
The story notes the size of the police force has been stable from 2007 to 2010 but leaves out the big reduction in police overtime, another sign of prioritizing resources while cutting crime.
I am only hitting the high points here. The article is deeply flawed, but the casual reader may simply respond to the headlines and the story’s huge size and conclude there is a problem with the police department. The success of a police chief depends upon the community’s perception of the job he or she is doing, so this story could be damaging to Flynn and the police – and all for no good reason. That’s the opposite of what you’d expect from a community watchdog.
The Buzz
-A story last week reported that Gov. Scott Walker is not supporting efforts to get some $9 million in federal health grants. Why would he oppose a Madison nonprofit’s effort to get federal funding for a program that locates and signs up people eligible for the BadgerCare Plus health program? Perhaps because if they aren’t signed up, that will mean fewer costs for the state.
-Milwaukee is a leader in mixed martial arts and The Ultimate Fighting Championship makes its Milwaukee debut Sunday. Is the sport bloody good or just plain bloody? The Sports Nut ponders.
