Erik Gunn is a freelance writer based in Milwaukee.

I grew up in this city. Hated the police.” Terrence Gordon pulls the unmarked Ford over to the curb and jerks the car into park. It’s a late October afternoon, two days before Halloween, and the occasional pumpkin dots this inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. He points to a modest two-story frame house—his boyhood home in the ’70s and ’80s.

Gordon is 46 now, a deputy inspector with the Milwaukee Police Department, but he still remembers the strangers with badges who took pleasure in hazing black kids like him, who looked at people in this community as mere statistics, who didn’t seem to care. He also remembers kids who never made it into adulthood because they got lost in the life of the streets. “Three of my friends were killed in one summer—1988,” he says. “Two were shot. One was strangled by her pimp. … So many kids grow up in neighborhoods with so many landmines. So much depends on where you happen to step.”


That was when Milwaukee was Killwaukee, one of America’s most dangerous cities as well as one of its poorest. When crack cocaine was just beginning to take hold and murders were about to hit an all-time high.

Gordon escaped, boosted by a mom who made sure her son stayed out of trouble, and eventually he realized that you can either live by the law or die flouting it. “I knew things could change [within the police department] and I knew I could do more from the inside than standing on the outside and yelling with a sign,” he says now.

His Milwaukee today is in fact a place that has evolved. Crime rates here—as across the entire country—have been falling for the past two decades, as new national crime statistics out this week from the Justice Department once again underscored, and the city is indeed is a safer place today. Violent crime is down by 11 percent since 2008, department records show; property crime has dipped by 30 percent.

But what makes Milwaukee stand out is not just that crime has fallen—that’s happened everywhere—but that it has done so in a town where 28 percent of the population falls below the poverty level, far, far above the national average, and where conventional wisdom has it that the entrenched problems that go along with such long-lasting economic deprivation make it much harder to do anything about crime. The secret? A reforming police chief named Edward Flynn who’s determined to make Milwaukee an unlikely textbook demonstration for just about every innovative policing idea out there: using Big Data to identify crime hot spots, throwing cops out of headquarters and back onto beats, deploying officers to the homes of recently released offenders to offer guidance on education and work possibilities.

Flynn is no mere quant in uniform. He talks with passion about “nation-building at home,” about the MPD as an “agent of economic development,” of his officers promoting “civic activity and democracy.”

The stats, the technology, the cops back on the beat—it “all ties together,” says George Kelling, co-author of the famous “Broken Windows” theory of policing and a Milwaukee native who in 2007 helped persuade the city to hire Flynn. “It’s part of a whole, coherent vision” of what modern urban policing needs to be.

WATCH: The Streets of Milwaukee

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Ed Flynn didn’t start off wanting to be a cop. He entered LaSalle University in 1966, after graduating high school in New Jersey, intent on becoming a history professor. But then he came across “The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society,” the 1967 report from the Johnson administration’s National Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, in the wake of the Watts riots. That “really opened my eyes up to the critical importance of police in a democratic society, policing the negative consequences of poverty in our cities,” Flynn says.

Years later, reading the 1982 “Broken Windows” study that Kelling wrote with the late political scientist James Q. Wilson, was another eye-opener. For Flynn the takeaway was that “stabilizing neighborhoods means paying attention to the stuff that police think is a distraction from crime-fighting.”

The “Broken Windows” idea—take care of the little things and order will follow—has been controversial. It came to national prominence in New York City during the mid-1990s under New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The crackdown on squeegee men and turnstile jumpers was a precursor to a dramatic drop in crime, but there was then a backlash, with some critics claiming it exacerbates conflict between police and poor communities with its focus on seemingly minor problems.

Flynn disagrees.

Open In New Window OPTICS: Saving Killwaukee (Click to view gallery) | Mark Peterson/Redux

“It’s not a question of imposing middle-class values on poor neighborhoods,” he says. “It turns out that poor neighborhoods have the same damn values as the middle class: They want stability, order and peace and to not be afraid.”

But much of this was still an abstraction for Flynn until the 1990s when he was appointed police chief in Chelsea, Mass. He won for his department some of the first community policing grants doled out by the Clinton administration, which had included funding for community policing programs in the 1994 crime bill.

“I could see the power of investing our officers in neighborhoods with the purpose of building partnerships and developing the familiarity” between the residents and the police. That idea isn’t new, Flynn observes; it was among the principles espoused by Sir Robert Peel, the British statesman and two-time prime minister who reformed police work in the United Kingdom in the early 1800s. But would it work in a modern American city?

The Chelsea experience showed him that “using problem-solving tactics in partnership with communities could do two very important things: reduce community tensions and help us reduce crime.” It also gave rise to his dictum that good policing can be an economic development tool. “That’s what I saw happening in the poorest city in the commonwealth—as our crime narrative got better, so did our economic prospects.”

Flynn’s time in Arlington, Va., from 1998 to 2002, included back-to-back-to-back crises: the Pentagon attack on 9/11, the hunt for the Beltway sniper in October 2002 and, in between, the anthrax scare. “Anthrax got mailed to the Capitol building, and suddenly the entire metropolitan area was on alert for white powder,” says Flynn. “That was a very tense place to be for a year.”

But Milwaukee presented Flynn with his biggest challenge to date—and his greatest opportunity to put all that he’s experienced into practice. When he became chief in 2008, the department was relying on data from street reports that were days, sometimes weeks, old. Flynn almost immediately turned to Milwaukee’s business and tech community for help in identifying systems that could handle the kind of data gathering and analysis he wanted. Some eight months later—lightning speed in a massive police bureaucracy—he’d brought high-tech and deep-dive statistics to the force.

After his arrival, Flynn began reassigning patrol-rank officers who had been working in the centralized detective bureau back to the districts. He also slimmed down the central detective bureau itself, focusing it on narcotics enforcement. The goal, according to Assistant Chief James Harpole, who was in charge of the detective bureau before he was promoted, was to focus detective work more on crime prevention. “Their jobs were very reactive,” he says.

Flynn also revised promotional standards and brought about a genuine meritocracy in advancing people to higher command positions, says Nik Kovac, a Milwaukee alderman who’s generally supportive of the chief. One consequence has been a decidedly more diverse group of commanders. The 1,800-member force is 35 percent minority; women make up 17 percent of the force. Of the three assistant chiefs, two are Hispanic and one is an African American female.

“You want to have a police department that reflects the city,” says Mayor Tom Barrett, who is a staunch supporter of Flynn’s. “And you want to make sure that the police are not an occupying force that swoops into areas.”

The law enforcement theories, including problem-solving policing and community-oriented policing, used by Milwaukee have been around for a long time, conceptually, says Michael Jenkins, a criminal justice professor at the University of Scranton who devoted a chapter of his forthcoming book to Milwaukee. But many of these approaches “remained part of, at most, a small unit within a police department.” Milwaukee under Flynn decided to employ the approaches across the board—in all parts of the department and all sectors of the city. The city, Jenkins says, is ahead of the curve on that score.

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Open In New Window

Milwaukee was something of a pioneer on crime even before Flynn’s arrival. One example: The city’s Homicide Review Commission, created in 2005 under the auspices of Mayor Barrett and former Police Chief Nannette Hegerty. The commission analyzes every homicide in the city to understand whether there was something the police or other entity could have done to prevent it. Several jurisdictions, including Baltimore, have taken Milwaukee’s lead and moved toward a similar model.

The commission was the brainchild of Dr. Mallory O’Brien, an epidemiologist, professor at Marquette University’s nursing school and, not incidentally, the wife of a Milwaukee County prosecutor. After she had spent a number of years studying violent injury data as a public health issue, O’Brien says, colleagues of her husband in the DA’s office “asked if I would help them think through how we could prevent homicides in Milwaukee.” The commission began examining homicides in three of the city’s police districts; it now looks at the issue across the city.

From the commission’s 2013 report, we learn that in the typical case, the victim and suspect are acquaintances, the incident occurred between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. on either a Friday, Saturday or Sunday. (Mondays are the slowest days in crime-fighting; people tend to settle down after the weekend.) And, on average, homicide victims had more prior arrests than homicide suspects.

The commission’s work has led to changes in the law. Due to the commission’s study of a spate of violent incidences at some of the city taverns, Milwaukee passed an ordinance to require establishments with a history of violence to mount surveillance cameras to monitor patrons inside and outside of the bars.

Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn, pictured here in his office, was set on becoming a history professor until reading a 1967 Johnson Administration report entitled “The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society.” It opened his eyes to the “critical importance of police in a democratic society," he says. | Mark Peterson/Redux

And as has happened often in Milwaukee, when something works, it gets expanded. The members of the Homicide Review Commission are now also involved in an effort to help ex-offenders get back on track once released into the community, a program started in 2010 on Flynn’s watch. The program began in two of the seven police districts and has since branched out citywide. Supplementing the work of parole and probation officers, police officers are tasked with making random visits to the homes of ex-offenders, guiding them on how to obtain high school-equivalency diplomas or how to find a job. The commission began this work with adult ex-offenders and earlier this year moved into helping juveniles who’ve run into trouble. The pilot program for juveniles is in effect in two of the hardest-hit police districts in the city; if it produces results, it, too, will likely be implemented throughout the town.

Jason Smith, a captain in the Third District, one of the poorest sectors of the city, puts it this way: We’re not just in the crime business anymore. “We are in the housing business, the education business, the public health business.”

While the MPD has been adept at innovating, it isn’t beyond borrowing approaches that have worked well elsewhere. In 2008, Flynn brought New York City’s CompStat model to Milwaukee. Commanders gather every Wednesday afternoon to dissect data day-by-day and cop-by-cop, with the primary focus being on how many times a day each officer has a direct encounter with a member of the public. In Milwaukee, the review of statistics drills down to how individual officers measure up—or fall short.

Some internal critics complain the focus on that sort of data puts too much emphasis on numbers at the expense of more meaningful police work. “The targets end up being people that otherwise never would have been stopped,” says Michael Crivello, president of the Milwaukee Police Association union and a critic of Flynn’s reforms. “It’s very difficult for an officer to be forced into that situation.”

Yet department leaders insist that’s the wrong idea. Smith, commander of District Three, says the attention to numbers reflected in CompStat is very different from the department he joined 24 years ago. Then, the leadership was “very focused on stops and citations and arrests and traffic tickets.” Now, he says, the use of data focuses much more on monitoring crime trends and then developing strategies in response.

Link analysis software that ties offenders and even just “people of interest” in various incidents—think of this as Google+ for crime—also provides a much faster way to grasp what’s going on. This technique enabled the department to identify a network of more than 30 people this year who were responsible for well over 100 robberies and carjackings, Harpole says.

Then there’s the ShotSpotter—a system that uses sensors placed throughout the most crime-ridden parts of the city to pinpoint the origin of gunshots so quickly that patrols can be dispatched to the scene in seconds. Milwaukee has employed ShotSpotter, which was developed by a California company in 1996, since 2011.

On the left, a ComStat meeting at police headquarters in Milwaukee. On the right, the ShotSpotter program uses sensors placed around the city to pinpoint the origin of gunshots. | Mark Peterson/Redux

Ironically, it was the success of ShotSpotter that highlighted the need for the department to continue the less glamorous work of connecting with the community. Flynn notes that only 14 percent of the shots detected with the technology had been called in to 911. “People who live in those neighborhoods had come to accept the fact that gunfire was part of the background noise of their lives,” Flynn says incredulously. “What? Who lives like that?”

It could, of course, also suggest that residents in these crime-ridden neighborhoods haven’t yet come to trust officers enough to call them in.

***

The Crime Slide According to the FBI, the years 2009-2013 witnessed a steady decline in violent crime across the country.

For decades, Dr. Martin Luther King Drive, a broad north-south thoroughfare, had been the soul of Milwaukee’s African American community. “When my mom was a kid, it used to be a big shopping area. It died when I was a teenager,” says Gordon, who grew up nearby.

But King Drive is starting to come back now. One reason is a business improvement district that steered additional funds to help pay for rehabbing commercial buildings, drawing new shops and other businesses. And Gordon suggests another reason: the Milwaukee police captain who was in charge of this area from 2009 until 2013.

Capt. Edith Hudson deployed officers on bicycles so they could patrol more effectively; she also reached out to connect with the business owners on King Drive and the residents who lived just off it. Before Hudson was sent there by Flynn, officers responded to 911 calls, sure, but the thought of really trying to prevent crime, of being a force to turn things around, just wasn’t on the agenda. Hudson’s efforts, Gordon says, helped to bring the street “back to life.” Today Hudson is one of three assistant chiefs in the Milwaukee Police Department.

But as in so many cities, suspicion still pervades the relationship between the Milwaukee police department and many in the community.

James Hall, president of the Milwaukee chapter of the NAACP, says that for black Milwaukeeans, the shadow of old cases and injustices lingers—a man killed by police, who then planted a pistol on his body to corroborate their claims of self-defense; the reign of Police Chief Harold Brier, who presided over the department from the early 1960s to the early 1980s and was notorious for heavy-handed tactics aimed at blacks; the 2005 beating by off-duty cops of Frank Jude, a mixed-race man.

“These incidents have created collectively a feeling of distrust,” Hall says.

Flynn and his department have also come under scrutiny over deaths in police custody.

In July of 2011, Derek Williams, 22, died in the back of a police squad car. Months later dash-cam video of the incident was released, showing Williams gasping for air and pleading for help. The medical examiner, who had originally concluded that Williams died from natural causes, ultimately ruled the death a homicide because it might have been prevented had the officers called for medical help. A special prosecutor declined to bring charges against the officers.

In April, a white Milwaukee police officer fired 14 rounds and killed Dontre Hamilton, a mentally ill, unarmed black man in a park across the street from City Hall. The officer accused Hamilton of grabbing his baton and attacking him. Flynn initially defended the officer, but he later dismissed him, saying that the officer did not follow police procedure in dealing with mentally-ill individuals and that an unauthorized pat-down of Hamilton is what triggered the violence. The incident spawned small-scale protests in the months that followed, but passions were reignited after the August shooting death of an unarmed black man by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., although demonstrations in Milwaukee never reached the intensity or size of those in Missouri. The Hamilton case is under review by a panel of veteran investigators appointed as part of a new Wisconsin law that mandates all death-in-custody cases go be independently investigated.

An officer at a CompStat meeting at police headquarters. | Mark Peterson/Redux

“I think the mayor needs to find a new chief,” says Hamilton’s brother, Nate, who wants to see the officer criminally charged.

Flynn says he understands the criticism: “It is a volatile business. We deal with critical incidents, violence, things go wrong and it turns into a tragedy. The military sometimes drops shells on the wrong village; we sometimes handle a critical incident in the wrong way. One critical incident can undermine a lot of community work.”

Flynn quietly initiated meetings with the NAACP, the Urban League and other organizations in the black community. Hall says “the idea is to have a continuing dialogue and an exchange of information.”

“On the other hand,” he says, “there’s a lot of work to be done, a lot of bridges to be built.”

Mark Peterson/Redux

For Gordon, the hometown kid turned cop, it’s not surprising that some in the community still harbor deep suspicions about the police. He probably would, too, if he hadn’t dedicated the last two decades of his life to this police department in a job that has turned into equal parts social work, shrink and statistician as it is cop. Over the last few years, he’s seen crime go down and neighborhoods torn apart by violence start to turn around.

“It may seem right now that we’re going through a period of hard times, but I think we’ll come out of it even better than we were,” he says, steering the unmarked car back to the station as night falls. “There’s so much more to our mission than kicking ass and taking names.”