As elsewhere, Milwaukee unrest decades in the making

MILWAUKEE — As residents took a step back from the unrest after Saturday’s fatal police shooting of 23-year-old Sylville Smith, two questions were repeated over and over:

• Why did this happen?

• Why didn’t it happen sooner?

That the questions come from people with opposite perspectives, often determined by race, says a great deal about Milwaukee’s culture and climate.

To people asking the first question, the shooting — as city officials have detailed so far — seems justified and unworthy of violent protest. Under police department rules, if a fleeing suspect has a gun and an officer fears for his safety, he is allowed to shoot.

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Smith was armed and turning toward the officer when he was shot, according to authorities. Following police procedure, the officer, whose name has not been released, activated his body camera before chasing Smith, who fled a traffic stop.

And unlike other controversial police shootings around the country, in this one, both the officer and the suspect were black.

What’s more, the department in recent years has put  in place a series of reforms designed to hold officers accountable when they use deadly force — changes resulting in part from advocacy of the family of Dontre Hamilton, a black man with a history of mental illness whom a white Milwaukee police officer shot and killed in 2014.

To the people asking the second question, a series of obvious and relentless factors contributed to the unrest Saturday and Sunday nights: concentrated poverty, high unemployment, broken families, pessimism about the future, and a sense that people with power don’t care or have turned their backs. Smith’s shooting was the spark.

He was well known and fleeing in daylight through Sherman Park, a once thriving neighborhood where quality of life has diminished and tense episodes involving residents, businesses and law enforcement have become almost routine. There and in some surrounding neighborhoods, police are struggling for the public’s trust as homicides and shootings tick upward.

“When it finally all over-boiled and people got tired of the oppression, that’s what happens: People just take out their anger the best way they can,” said Tay Smith, 23, who lives about 3 miles northwest of where the shooting occurred. “If they ain’t got nowhere to go, they tear up their own neighborhood, tear up their own things.”

In a call for peace Monday, Milwaukee Alderman Khalif J. Rainey emphasized socioeconomic factors as another catalyst.

“My plea to my neighbors is to do everything they can to stop the violence immediately,” Rainey said in a statement. “In a neighborhood where the opportunities for employment are so few and far between already, it is foolish and counter-productive to take out your anger on the few businesses that choose to operate on your block. Looting and burning won’t create opportunities to get a job and get ahead in life.”

Decades of problems

The wide-ranging reasons for that lack of opportunity go back decades.

Milwaukee is among the most segregated metropolitan areas in the nation. As in many other cities, racially discriminatory housing policies persisted for decades.

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Milwaukee’s biased policies were not overturned until numerous nonviolent protests culminated in a riot in 1967.

Forty years after desegregation, the vast majority of schools in the city — public, private, charter and choice — lack diversity. A majority of students at each one share the same racial and ethnic background.

Wisconsin’s gap in graduation rates between black and white students was the largest in the country during the 2013-14 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Wisconsin’s African-American incarceration rate is disproportionately high, according to an analysis of 2010 census data from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The state locks up about 1 in every 8 black men of working age, a higher rate than anywhere else in the nation.

The researchers also found that two-thirds of Milwaukee County’s incarcerated African-American men came from six ZIP codes in the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee. Two of them include Sherman Park.

And no major urban center in America suffered as much as Milwaukee from the economic upheaval of a globalizing economy and changes in manufacturing, an exhaustive analysis that the Journal Sentinel published in 2004 found. At that time, Milwaukee’s working-age black men had suffered almost twice the drop in employment that the nation endured in the Great Depression.

Since then, they've seen little evidence of improvement.

"People think of it as: 'This is your neighborhood and this is mine,' and that's all it is. No. Segregation can be an emotional and spiritual construct,” said Venice Williams, a longtime Lutheran youth minister who runs the nationally known Alice's Garden in the central city and the Body and Soul Healing Arts Center in the Sherman Park neighborhood.

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“It's not just about boundaries. It's about access," she said. "It's about access to all of the abundance of life that many white people in this city have that many black people do not.”

Earlier this summer, Fred Royal, president of the NAACP’s Milwaukee branch, said institutional racism continues to divide the community.

“If you want to really address the disparity in treatment and perceptions of law enforcement, then you have to do something about the income and social conditions,” he said.

Police response

Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn has argued numerous times that the city’s first line of response to such pressing social issues has been law enforcement, a group focused on public safety and ill-equipped to deal with those problems on its own.

A series of officer-involved deaths going back years and police and prosecutors' responses to those deaths have widened the rift between authorities and city residents, particularly those in high-crime neighborhoods.

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In 2011, Derek Williams, 22, who was black, died after begging for his life and telling officers he couldn’t breathe while handcuffed in the back of a squad car.

The initial investigations into Williams’ death — by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, the Milwaukee Police Department and the city’s Fire and Police Commission — all cleared officers of wrongdoing. Even when the case was reopened a year later, no officers were criminally charged or disciplined.

Williams’ death sparked numerous marches and demonstrations, all of them peaceful. It was also one of the cases that inspired a state law — the first of its kind in the nation — that requires outside agencies to lead the investigations into officer-involved deaths.

The other two cases that legislators cited were Michael Bell in Kenosha, Wis., and Paul Heenan in Madison. Both were white.

The first officer-involved death to be investigated under the new law was that of Hamilton, fatally shot in 2014 after police received complaints about him sleeping in a downtown park. Two other officers went to the park twice and determined Hamilton was not doing anything wrong.

Later, Officer Christopher Manney confronted Hamilton, prompting a struggle that ended in the shooting.

Manney was not criminally charged, but he was fired — the first Milwaukee officer to be fired as a result of an on-duty shooting in at least 45 years. At the time, Flynn said he fired the officer not because he used excessive force but because he did not follow department rules in the moments leading up to the shooting.

After Hamilton’s family and their supporters advocated for change, City Hall and the Police Department made reforms not seen elsewhere around the country.

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Milwaukee was the first city to require Crisis Intervention Training, which teaches officers to de-escalate situations and deal with those in psychiatric crisis, for all 1,800-plus officers on the force.

Milwaukee also last year began equipping uniformed patrol officers with body cameras. By the end of 2016, all patrol officers are to have them, a pace that outstrips most other large police departments using the technology.

Perhaps most significantly, on the day federal prosecutors announced they would not seek charges against Manney, Flynn requested the U.S. Department of Justice review the Milwaukee Police Department. An initial report is expected to be released this fall.

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Among other things, the review will include an examination of the police department’s procedures for stopping and searching citizens.

Four officers were convicted in 2013 in connection with illegal strip and cavity searches of black men during a five-year period. The case drew public outrage — not only because of the behavior itself but because it was allowed to continue for so long.

The first documented complaint about an invasive search was received in 2007. The officers were not charged until 2012.

As part of the federal review process, officials have sought input from the community.

More than 700 people packed the Justice Department’s first listening session and described their experiences with law enforcement. A few offered support, but most who spoke expressed anger and frustration with Milwaukee police.

Relations strained

The neighborhoods where police-community relations are most strained are often those with deeply entrenched crime problems.

In Sherman Park, a homicide was reported less than 24 hours before police shot Smith.

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Police shootings of black men in communities such as Ferguson, Mo., could have added fuel to a sense of “legal cynicism” already present, according to Thomas Abt, former New York deputy secretary for public safety and a senior research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

That dynamic can perpetuate crime and distrust. When a crime occurs, neighborhood residents who don’t trust the police are unlikely to cooperate in the investigation.

Without cooperation, police can’t solve crimes. As the number of unsolved crimes goes up, citizens stop believing police can help them.

When police fatally shoot someone in that type of environment — whether or not the use of deadly force is justified — tensions build and the cycle repeats.

That strain was clearly evident in the aftermath of Smith’s death.

The day after the police shooting, longtime Sherman Park resident Tyrone Joiner recalled his first interaction with police. When he was 8 years old, an officer spotted him walking down the street with plastic toy nunchucks and threw him in a squad car.

Forty-three years later, Joiner doesn’t trust the police and doesn’t want his children to interact with them.

“I tell my kids to come inside if I see police in the neighborhood," he said. "I’m afraid they are going to kill one of them.”

Community members want people in authority to recognize that they are suffering.

“We just want Milwaukeeans to understand that we are hurt. I’m a parent, and these young men are hurt,” said Marie Polk, 50, who is black and works at a north side elementary school. “We need businesses. We need loans. We need our community to come together.”

Contributing: Jacob Carpenter, Annysa Johnson, Raquel Rutledge and Mike DeSisti, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Follow Ashley Luthern and Gina Barton on Twitter: @aluthern and @writerbarton