As Milwaukee homicides spiked in 2015, the director of the city’s Homicide Review Commission was removed from her office at police headquarters, ending a collaboration that had been the commission’s hallmark since its formation in 2005. For more than 10 years, police, prosecutors, judges and parole officers had been meeting monthly to review homicides and shootings, trying to figure out why they happened and working to identify solutions. The commission was responsible for a 43 percent drop in homicides when compared to control sites that did not use the model, found a 2013 study. Then-police chief Edward Flynn saw less value in the commission as he built up the department’s technology and crime analysis capabilities, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.
Since the 1980s, other major cities like New York, Dallas and Houston have seen transformation when it comes to crime and quality of life. In Milwaukee, the same problems continue to plague the same neighborhoods. The pattern is predictable: There’s a spike in violent crime. People are outraged. Someone creates an innovative strategy. Money and resources pour into it. People get involved and are buoyed by early success. Then it’s abandoned. In time, crime increases again, and the cycle repeats — with officials sometimes implementing the same programs that languished years earlier. When Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm travels to other places where people are trying to implement long-term public safety strategies, often, they tell him they learned from Milwaukee. “That frustrating thing is, they’re telling me about what they’re doing and I’m like, ‘That’s awesome; we’re no longer doing that,'” he said. One of the city’s most successful crime prevention initiatives is on the brink of extinction because no one is willing to pay for it. It is a program of the district attorney’s office to station prosecutors in city neighborhoods.