Blaska on Meadowood Crime: A Disappointment

When Marc Eisen of Isthmus called to request that I write a few words on solutions to Meadowood crime, I jumped at the opportunity. When he added that he made the same request of Dave Blaska, a conservative who once represented the community on the Dane County Board, I figured it would be interesting.

Wrong.

When I opened my Isthmus on August 30, 2007 I found this from Blaska:

Giuliani's police chief in New York, William Bratton, upended the conventional wisdom that "crime...was caused by societal problems that were impervious to police intervention," reports the August edition of Governing magazine. He proved that effective policing does not respond to crime, it actually prevents it...

...Yes, send in the surge — hire more police. But give them the Giuliani-Bratton marching orders: drive, walk, bike, and bus the beat. Issue citations for littering, public drunkenness and vandalism. Respond to every noise complaint, crack down on loitering, throw the pissers off the bus and, yes, bust minor drug users.

This is pure nonsense. Just add Blaska to the long list of conservative pundits who do not have a clue as to what Bratton did in New York City.

Three days earlier, I posted: Misinformation: From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel to Charlie Sykes,  where I took them to task for relying on the Governing Magazine article and not having a clue as to what Bratton did in NYC. Everyone is picking up on Bratton's assertion:

Crime, the theory went, was caused by societal problems that were impervious to police intervention. That was the unchallenged conventional wisdom espoused by academics, sociologists, and criminologists. I intended to prove them wrong. ----  New York City Police Chief, William Bratton, in his book, The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic.

The problem is they are not reading the entire book but just taking he filtered material from Governing Magazine. This misses Bratton's point.

As noted in that post:

There is no bigger an advocate for Community Policing than Bratton.  He understands that quality of life variables influence crime, and that law enforcement needs to acknowledge that. Bratton used neighborhood police officers, decentralized command and gave more authority to the precinct officers. Referring to his mentor,  Bob Wasserman, a firm opponent of racial profiling, Bratton wrote:

Wasserman explained that police can't be an island, that we have to work in partnership with the community...He was one of the first in the profession to understand and define the elements and potential of what we came to know later as community policing...

...But the central point of this post is that Slaske's op-ed piece and Sykes' blog post is a far cry from what William Bratton did in New York.

If the Milwaukee Police and Fire Commission uses Slaske and Sykes as a measure for hiring a new police chief, they will not get a William Bratton.

Bratton worked with the academics, sociologists, and criminologists; he simply did not allow their analysis to leave his department feeling that police intervention was meaningless and ineffective. But he used the tools of those other professions in building his overall strategy to combat crime.

By the way, Bratton supports gun control laws and firmly opposes conceal and carry.

Comments

[nichole]

Furthermore, "We Must Be Giants"??!

[FOM]

What, you expected Blaska to be accurate?

[David Blaska]

Paul, do be part of the solution, not of the problem. Everything you wrote in your Op Ed has been tried except the aggressive policing part. Muddying the water with the racial profiling accusation is a non sequiter designed to fire up the liberal base. I oppose racial profiling; I also oppose racial anti-profiling. Example: 89% of Wisconsin's prison population is male yet men comprise only 49% of the state's population. Are we guilty of gender profiling? Hardly. Women commit more embezzlement than men; does that mean we quit prosecuting embezzlement?

[David Blaska]

And yes, too late to correct it hit me that the musical group was known as "They Must Be Giants." Got me there.