The Milwaukee problem: We don’t stick with what works when it comes to reducing crime and preventing violence

As homicides spiked in the summer of 2015, the director of the city's Homicide Review Commission — tasked with analyzing deadly violence here — was booted from her office inside Milwaukee police headquarters.

Mallory O'Brien's removal from the building brought an end to the 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 together to identify solutions.

Created in the aftermath of an uptick in crime that landed Milwaukee on a list of large cities with the worst rates of lethal violence, the commission was responsible for a 43% drop in homicides when compared to control sites that did not use the model, according to a 2013 study submitted to the National Institute of Justice.

The commission’s work has resulted in efforts geared toward witness protection, prisoner re-entry and social services for children who witness homicide, among others.

But Edward Flynn, then the Milwaukee police chief, saw less value in the commission as he built up the department's technology and crime analysis capabilities.

Police officials stopped showing up at the monthly meetings.

Not long after O'Brien was kicked out of the police station, her real-time access to the department's information was revoked.

The commission, which had become a national model duplicated in Chicago and New Orleans, found itself on life support.

A predictable pattern

Since the 1980s, other major cities have seen transformation when it comes to crime and quality of life.

Parts of New York, once overrun by crime, have become tourist destinations. Southern cities such as Dallas and Houston have benefited from an ongoing energy boom and population growth, and have seen corresponding decreases in violence.

But in Milwaukee, the same problems have continued to plague the same neighborhoods.

The pattern is predictable: There’s a spike in violent crime. People are outraged. Someone finds or creates an innovative strategy designed to make the city safer. 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 exact same programs that were allowed to languish years earlier.

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Every time a promising effort stalls, politicians, law enforcement officials and community leaders blame tight budgets or try to shift the public’s focus to the next new project. They don’t mention the perennial lack of commitment, cooperation and leadership.

"How many decades has it been that we've had 100 or more murders?" asked Earl Ingram Jr., who hosts a radio show on News/Talk 1510 AM. "As somebody who has lived in the city for 63 years, there's not a commitment to make a real change."

Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm has traveled to many other places where people are trying to implement long-term public safety strategies. Often, they tell him they learned from Milwaukee, or found inspiration here.

"The 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.

Today, Milwaukee has an unprecedented opportunity to learn from the past. A new police chief, a new sheriff, and a state plan to build new programs and facilities for juvenile offenders could allow the city to make improvements that keep people safer over time.

Such an outcome requires an honest answer to this question: Why do solutions that work in other cities — solutions sometimes created in Milwaukee — keep falling short here?

Community prosecution units: From 7 to 3

In some cases, the problem really is money.

One of the city’s most successful crime prevention initiatives — one that also builds trust in the criminal justice system — is on the brink of extinction because no one is willing to pay for it.

Since 2000, the Milwaukee County district attorney's office has stationed prosecutors in city neighborhoods. Each prosecutor works in tandem with a police officer and a community organizer. The teams focus on blight and take action designed to improve quality of life, such as shutting down drug houses, holding absentee landlords accountable and making sure tavern owners follow the rules.

Known as Community Prosecution Units, the model has been replicated in several other cities and has received national media attention. A study of the program in Chicago, published in the American Law and Economics Review in 2014, showed decreases in murder, rape and aggravated assaults.

In Milwaukee, the proactive approach to solving problems before they turn into crimes has helped build trust among prosecutors, police and residents, according to Deputy District Attorney Jeffrey Altenburg, who helped pioneer the model.

At its height, there were seven Community Prosecution Units here, one in each police district. Now, there are three.

That’s because there’s a funding problem: Although prosecutors work in the city and county, their salaries are paid through the state. When money gets tight, convicting people in court becomes the top priority for tough-on-crime lawmakers.

Federal grants that have paid for community prosecutors in the past don't always come through. Now, the city is funneling federal block grant money to cover two community prosecutors.

The third is paid for by a group of private companies on the city's near west side, which modeled their collaboration on Washington Park Partners. There, a group of residents, organizations and businesses working to improve the neighborhood won a federal grant to improve public safety in 2013. In the initiative’s first year, crime in Washington Park dropped by about 30%.

Shortly after Alfonso Morales took over as interim police chief last month, he told a Common Council committee he wants to use Community Prosecution Units as a core part of the department's strategy.

His suggestion for how to pay for them? Seek new federal grants.

"It’s a money thing, but I’m looking at working closely with the district attorney’s office to bring that back and have one for every district," he said.

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Altenburg is frustrated by the funding situation.

"We build this program that is a national model, is liked by neighbors, liked by the police department, liked by aldermen, and yet we have not been able to figure out a way to sustain it other than these temporary grants — and it's not like we haven't tried," he said.

Allowing an effective strategy to fade away breeds negative consequences — and not only on the crime rate, according to Michael Scott, director of the New York-based Center for Problem-Oriented Policing.

“If the community feels there is still more work to be done, there’s a need for continued effort here, and the perception is that the police and prosecutors abandoned us prematurely, historically that would end up in the negative column,” he said. “Trust is eroded over time and it’s built over time.”

Conflict among leaders

Lack of funding can't explain every failure.

The Homicide Review Commission, for example, didn't end up in jeopardy because it ran out of money.

Instead, Flynn and other police officials didn't value the commission's collaborative efforts.

Because he was in charge of who got access to the Police Department's data, Flynn could unilaterally cut off O'Brien's access even though the district attorney and others disagreed with him.

It wasn’t the first time one of Milwaukee's strong personalities got in the way of collaboration. The area’s history is filled with conflicts among its leaders.

Former Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. and County Executive Chris Abele had epic arguments, including one in which Clarke accused Abele of “penis envy.”

Members of the Common Council have railed against Mayor Tom Barrett, criticizing his budget proposals, accusing him of being soft on crime and ripping him for his support of Flynn.

Flynn criticized Chisholm for not charging people cops believed were criminals. Chisholm countered that police hadn't brought him enough evidence to prove cases.

The fatal police shooting of Sylville Smith in 2016 and the riots it sparked in the Sherman Park neighborhood didn’t help matters.

When community activists went to the scene of the riots — insisting they were trying to defuse the situation — some police and city leaders saw them as stoking the unrest.

COMPLETE COVERAGE: Sherman Park Turmoil

After the riots, Flynn and the Fire and Police Commission publicly clashed on issues from car chases to racial profiling. In the waning days of Flynn’s tenure, he and the executive director of the commission traded accusations of misconduct.

During a talk at Marquette University the week before he left his post, Flynn acknowledged that his brusque approach could sometimes exacerbate conflict.

“One of my weaknesses in government life is suffering fools gladly,” he said.

Within days of being appointed interim chief, Morales gave O’Brien back her immediate access to the Police Department’s data.

Leading effectively can be a challenge in places where people don’t agree on what kind of law enforcement they want, according to Scott.

“You always want to start with somebody with an ability to help people see their common interests,” he said. "When it comes to public safety, that’s less difficult than in some other aspects of society. Almost every person, every group in Milwaukee would say, ‘We want to be safe.’”

Quick fixes vs. long-term gains

To make sustainable change, Milwaukee must fully confront the systemic issues underlying crime, such as poverty and racial equity, said Tammy Rivera, executive director of the Southside Organizing Center, a neighborhood organization focused on safety and economic development.

"Any time you apply a bandage to a wound or a quick-fix solution or some positive energy to a symptom, there’s some initial relief," she said. "If you never address the root causes of that, the illness continues and the problem will seep out."

People can become paralyzed by the complexity of the issues, said Paula Penebaker, president and CEO of YWCA Southeast Wisconsin.

"I don't think people in powerful positions are evil and uncaring and don't want to solve these problems," she said. "It's really just easier to throw your arms up and say we can't solve them."

To reduce crime, the people in those positions must work with neighborhood groups to tackle the underlying issues, according to New York University professor Patrick Sharkey.

In his book, "Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence,” Sharkey examines how community groups, nonprofits and business improvement districts impacted nationwide crime rates.

His research found a correlation between an explosion of such efforts around the country in the 1990s and a reduction in violent crime.

"We should be talking about the effect that they had in reducing crime in the same way we talk about the effect of police and the criminal justice system,” he said of neighborhood groups. “They are a huge part of the reason why crime fell."

One reason we’re not talking about it, he said, is this: Society has never made a sustained, durable commitment to these organizations.

Sharkey, who spoke at a conference here earlier this month, previously visited Milwaukee in 2016.

"You see neighborhoods where there are active and very engaged organizations and residents who are working together," he said of Milwaukee. "But then we drove through neighborhoods where houses are boarded up and it just looks like they're abandoned."

While such areas still exist, things have changed since then, according to Reggie Moore, director of the city's Office of Violence Prevention.

Over the past two years, more people and groups have come together to talk about prevention. He believes the shift is partly the result of what happened in Sherman Park.

"Not since the '60s have we seen that level of people demanding change and every part of the community being concerned and wanting to understand how did this happen and how do we prevent it from happening again," he said.

"The community had been crying out forever, and it was falling on deaf ears."

From 'game changer' to missed opportunity

Even when organizations get funding and agree to work together, success isn’t certain.

A strategy once hailed as a game changer — with $8.2 million in private funding — ended with hard feelings, little impact and $800,000 left on the table.

The Violence Prevention Initiative was launched with much fanfare in 2010. Instead of leaving nonprofits to fight over small grants, it brought more than 30 of them together with a large upfront investment.

In a report written after the effort folded in 2015, outside evaluators wrote that the "disappointment was palpable."

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About $3.9 million went to pay staffers at the Medical College of Wisconsin, who were tasked with leading the effort, providing programming and analyzing impact.

That was more than the $3.5 million spent on programs to teach teens conflict resolution, connect young people to jobs and convene citywide forums on youth gun violence.

The key step of figuring out what worked best and duplicating those efforts over the long term didn’t happen.

The evaluation noted modest successes, such as the reopening of the Holton Youth and Family Center, which had been shuttered two years earlier.

Even that didn’t last.

The year after the Violence Prevention Initiative ended, the youth center, which provided tutoring and after-school activities to young people from the Riverwest and Harambee neighborhoods, closed for four months.

It later reopened again, this time under the leadership of a different nonprofit.

A new plan, familiar strategies

In November, city officials unveiled the Blueprint for Peace, billed as a comprehensive violence reduction plan.

The Advancing a Healthier Wisconsin Endowment, which also funded the Violence Prevention Initiative, spent $93,000 to bring in consultants from California to help Milwaukee create the 96-page plan.

Many of the strategies in it are familiar.

In 2015, for example, Milwaukee paid a group of trusted community insiders to work as violence interrupters, tasking them with anticipating trouble and taking action to prevent it.

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The model gained fame in Chicago after a documentary film showed it in action: A woman who once worked for a drug crew supporting the family of a homicide victim; the son of a murdered father convincing a younger man not to enact revenge; a man once in prison for homicide working with kids.

As evidence of its success, the Chicago group has pointed to reductions in shootings ranging from 41% to 73% in the seven zones where it was implemented.

Milwaukee’s effort fizzled amid funding problems and questions about whether the people involved had received proper training.

According to the Blueprint, it’s time to try again.

Jamaal Smith, racial justice and community engagement manager at YWCA Southeast Wisconsin, is hopeful it will work better this time because the community was involved in developing the Blueprint.

"That was the missing piece before," he said. "The public is more invested now than they were. The suggestions were not coming from those who would be labeled as experts; they were coming from the people who experienced these dramatic events every day."

The Blueprint recommends that the violence interruption model be rolled out in 10 Milwaukee neighborhoods plagued by high rates of homicides, shootings and assaults.

So far, there’s enough money to implement it in one of them.

Requirement: Work together

Three months ago, officials from the U.S. Department of Justice and the New Orleans Police Department came here to learn from the Milwaukee Police Department.

In 2016, Milwaukee lowered its violent crime totals by focusing on just 2.3 square miles known as the Center Street Corridor. Despite its small geographic area, the corridor was the scene of 10% of all violent crime in the city.

If they could reduce crime there, officials believed, they could positively impact the city as a whole.

In the first nine months of the program, which kicked off in 2016, nonfatal shootings in the corridor dropped by 28%, helping drive a lower citywide total for the year.

Milwaukee police told the New Orleans officers what they’d learned, admitting they lost ground after moving resources to other neighborhoods after the initial success.

They explained how the FBI and other federal agencies involved in the program, known as the Public Safety Partnership, helped Milwaukee achieve results.

City police and the federal agencies collaborated to identify and arrest people wanted for violent crimes. Two suspects wanted for brazen homicides were placed on the FBI's Most Wanted List.

Both were quickly caught.

The federal program didn’t come with any grant money.

It just required people to work together.