Posted on Sun, Jul 25th 2010 at 08:07 AM by Patrick Dorwin
Ryan Haggerty of the Journal Sentinel has an outstanding piece looking into the crime numbers that the Milwaukee Police Department has been putting out under Chief Ed Flynn. Calls for police have increased drastically, yet fewer officers are actually dispatched.
As crime rate drops, calls for police soar
Some residents question department responsiveness
When a man stole items from her yard and the yards of several neighbors on Milwaukee’s north side in May, Tracy Duer became a crime victim.
She also contributed to a tide of calls for service received by Milwaukee police that began rising sharply last year and is on pace to increase again this year to more than 900,000, even as the city’s crime statistics continue to plummet.
That would be well above the roughly 817,000 calls received last year, which itself was a 23% increase over the average for the previous four years, which all fell between 646,000 and 678,000 calls, according to information obtained from the department through an open records request.
Despite the jump in calls, officers were dispatched to fewer calls in 2009 than in any of the previous four years, according to the data. Dispatched calls also are down through the first three months of this year.
With the increase in calls for service, complaints about response time are on the rise – from residents such as Duer to more than 520 representatives of city businesses who signed a petition this spring.
You might remember that a few months ago, I had someone prowling around my home, a neighbor scared the thug away as his girlfriend called police. The operator told her to check around the house herself, because they wouldn’t dispatch an officer unless she could say that someone actually got into the house. No officer was dispatched, and there seems to have never even been a report generated. Officers I have talked to, including another neighbor, and an Alderman (not my own) were all surprised by the reaction from the MPD operator. We learned that calls not made to 911 do not necessarily have a report generated.
“If you catch somebody stealing stuff out of your yard and your neighbor’s yard and you see him going up and down the street stealing stuff from your other neighbors’ yards and you call the police and they don’t come, what are you supposed to do?” Duer asked.
I would like to point out that this is not questioning the fine officers that work to keep us safe, they do an awesome job. We are calling to question the statistics and how these crime numbers are being reported by MPD’s administration. Flynn trying to deflect the question of an increase in calls vs. dispatched officers as “attributed to previous problems with the computer system that monitors the calls” doesn’t stand well with me, and apparently with many others that have seen actual police response eliminated or cut back, with our own eyes.
Along with operators/dispatchers not sending squads on many calls that they once would have, under Flynn, officers are also tasked with doing more investigating that was once done by specialized detectives as I understand it.
Still, some officers have had to shoulder the demands of responding to calls for service while also taking on an increased responsibility for some felony investigations, partly because of a reorganization of the department’s detective bureau, said Michael Crivello, president of the Milwaukee Police Association.
He argues that responsibility is stretching some officers too thin.
“The chief has said that he wants his uniformed officers to be more visible and to be out there,” Crivello said. “But then on the other hand, he’s tasking these same overworked officers with felony investigations.”
This story has brought to light many great questions, it’s going to be interesting to keep following these numbers, and to see the reaction from those in the media (will anyone else cover this?) and from inside law enforcement.
As crime rate drops, calls for police soar
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