As car thefts and other offenses soar, city officials are sitting on their hands.
As car thefts and other offenses soar, city officials are sitting on their hands.
J ust 64 days after I moved to Milwaukee, my apartment building’s security called to say that someone had been seen trying to steal my car. The thief had been interrupted, and the car wasn’t taken. But the passenger-side window was smashed, the glove compartment was ripped out, the base of the steering wheel was dismantled, and the ignition was toast.
Unfortunately, I have learned that such experiences are common. Social media is full of stories of people who have been victimized this way. Just hop on Facebook or Nextdoor, and you’ll see post after post reporting stolen cars. A friend even casually mentioned to me that three of her med-school classmates had had their rides stolen in the previous month. This is the sort of petty crime that makes a place unlivable.
Milwaukee Police Department statistics indicate that 9,636 vehicles have been stolen in the city so far this year. That averages out to 29 cars stolen every day. Car theft in Milwaukee is up 157 percent from this time last year — and 2020 already represented a 29 percent jump over the previous year. Moreover, it’s unclear if the official count of “motor-vehicle thefts” includes merely attempted thefts that may nevertheless damage or render a car inoperable.
In this respect, Milwaukee really is an outlier. In Chicago, a much larger city famous for its crime, car thefts are up just 6 percent from this time last year, with 9,458 recorded so far in 2021, fewer than in Milwaukee. Baltimore and Detroit, cities with roughly as many people as Milwaukee, have reported 2,893 and 6,001 car thefts this year, respectively.
It’s easy to let the statistics be just that — numbers on a page. But consider anyone responsible for running children to day care or school or checking up on aging parents or commuting to a job that’s distant from any public-transit stop. Losing a car can have enormous ramifications for a person’s life.
Even recovered vehicles are often damaged to the tune of hundreds or thousands of dollars. Dorothy Smith’s Hyundai Elantra was stolen after she missed one insurance payment, the Journal Sentinel reported; her car was then found “with a broken back passenger window, damaged rear bumper and passenger quarter panel, and peeled down steering column” — $5,000 worth of damage that she was liable for, in addition to the $10,000 she still owed on the car.
This is a crisis. And what is perhaps most disappointing is the response from city leadership. Instead of targeting criminals, two members of the Milwaukee Common Council have laid blame on car manufacturers. An open letter sent by Alderman Khalif Rainey and Alderwoman Milele Coggs to Kia and Hyundai urged the automakers to “do something to lessen the drain on police and other resources that seems directly attributable to certain defects in [Kia’s and Hyundai’s] locking system.”
Last summer, those two council members plus nine of the other 13 voted to cut the police department’s budget by 10 percent for this year. A budget that cut 120 police-officer positions ultimately passed, eight votes to seven, despite objections from some on the left that it didn’t go far enough in defunding the department.
Mayor Tom Barrett, meanwhile, has been MIA on this issue. In his 17 years in the position, Barrett has overseen both dramatic increases and decreases in crime and has a record of cherry-picking evidence to take credit for the decreases. His criminal-justice policies themselves, meanwhile, have seemed to vary wildly with the political winds. In 2014, he bragged about a budget that funded 100 new police-officer hires, ensuring that the Milwaukee Police Department “has the staffing and the resources needed to effectively address crime, fear and disorder.” These days, he’s proposing a 2022 budget that would result in a net loss of another 25 officers.
Mayor Barrett does seem to have less enthusiasm for the “defund the police” movement than many on the left. He has said that he’d rather not countenance further cuts to the police department’s budget, but he can’t see another way: Financial realities and a lack of support from the Republican-led state legislature, he claims, have tied his hands. “We want to have the resources to address this, but we need to have the legislature as a partner,” he has said.
It’s dispiriting to watch this failure of leadership: Barrett refuses to increase the police presence in his city, thereby avoiding backlash from the Left, but finds a way to blame Republicans for the crime spike, refusing to own the consequences of his own decisions. Given that Barrett was nominated to be President Biden’s ambassador to Luxembourg back in August and is only hanging around until the Senate can confirm him, one might have expected him to show a little more political courage.
Milwaukee leaders insist they are trying to attract young people and grow a city with an aging population. But this is no way to do it. Cheap slogans and shiny investments in the city’s downtown will be meaningless if the crime wave continues to go unaddressed. And no amount of advertising or good feelings resulting from an NBA championship can paper over the day-to-day lived experience of a community suffering from rampant car thefts and record homicides.