Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn nearly teared up when confronted with the accusation that he was inattentive during a Police Commission meeting discussing the shooting death of Dontre Hamilton. Flynn said he was on his phone receiving a call about the drive-by shooting of a 5-year-old girl, who was struck in the head while sitting in her father's lap.
Watch the video below.
Flynn complained that those who attended meeting and were upset over Hamilton's death "were flogging this situation and agenda," that they ignored the First Amendment in not allowing others to speak, and that they seem to care so much more for the death of someone like Hamilton but not at all for the death of the 5-year-old he had just received a call about.
Chief Flynn: If some of the people here gave a good goddamn about the victimization of people in their community by crime, I'd take a bit of their invective more seriously. The greatest disparity in the city of Milwaukee is getting shot and killed. Hello. 80 percent of my homicide victims every year are African American. Eighty percent of our aggravated assault victims are African American. Eighty percent of our shooting victims who survive their shooting are African American.
Now they know all about the last three people that have been killed by the Milwaukee Police Department in the course of the last several years, there's not one of them that can name one of the last three homicide victims we've had in this city. There's room for everyone to participate in fixing this police department and I'm not pretending that we're without sin, but this community's at risk all right, but it's not because men and women in blue risk their lives protecting it, it's at risk because we have large numbers of high-capacity, quality firearms in the hands of remorseless criminals who don't care who they shoot.
Now I'm leaving hear to go to that scene. I take it personally, okay? We're going up there and there's a bunch of cops processing the scene of a dead kid. They're the ones who are going to be going out there stopping suspects and they have guns under the front seat, they're the ones that are gonna take the risk of their lives to try and clean this thing up.
We're responsible for the things we get wrong and we take action, we've arrested cops, we've fired cops and so on, but the fact is that the people out here—some of them—who have the most to say, are absolutely M.I.A. when it comes to facing the true threats facing this community and it gets a little tiresome, and when you start getting yelled at for reading updates on the kid that got shot, yeah, you take it personal.
Now, no offense but I'm going up there now.
More on Flynn and those "remorseless criminals" below.
Just for reference, this is what the reporters had been discussing before Flynn's outburst.
Officer Christopher Manney shot Hamilton 14 times during an incident that began when workers at the nearby Starbucks called police to complain about him sleeping in the downtown park.
A pair of officers checked on Hamilton twice and found he was doing nothing wrong, according to a summary of the Milwaukee police internal affairs investigation that led to Manney's dismissal from the department.
Manney was not aware the other officers already had been to the park when he retrieved a voice mail regarding Hamilton's presence there and responded to the call, the summary says.
A confrontation ensued after Manney tried to pat down Hamilton, who resisted. Manney tried to use his baton to subdue Hamilton, but Hamilton got control of it and swung it at Manney, hitting him on the side of the neck, according to the summary.
The portion of the autopsy released by the family confirms that Hamilton was shot 14 times, leaving 15 gunshot wounds. The autopsy also notes that Hamilton suffered blunt force injuries to his chin, scalp and neck and had bruises on his upper arm, and that Hamilton had no drugs in his system.
At least one of those wounds was in Hamilton's back. Because other officers had already been there, questioned Hamilton, and found nothing wrong, Manney was let go from the force. But no charges were filed against the officer.
Let address a couple of things first.
When Flynn says that Milwaukee has "fired" officers before that's true, as Officer Manney was ultimately fired for this shooting. But this was the first time in 45 years where that was the case.
The Milwaukee police officer who killed Dontre Hamilton in Red Arrow Park is believed to be the first officer in the city fired as a result of a fatal on-duty shooting in at least 45 years.
Even the two Milwaukee officers criminally charged in fatal shootings since 1968 — one on duty, one off — were not fired from the Police Department.
So I'm not entirely sure he gets to be so haughty about it. Meanwhile, he talks about the "risks" officers face, yet the most recent
death of a police officer killed by gunfire in Milwaukee happened in 2004, when Special Agent Jay Balchunas of the Wisconsin Department of Justice-Division of Criminal Investigation was shot. Before that you have to go back to 1994 when Officer Wendolyn Tanner was shot while chasing a suspect on foot. So yeah, sure, Milwaukee police officers are at "risk, kind of. It's only been 21 years since someone in the department was shot to death, so I suppose by luck of the draw they're due for another in the next 20 years. Probably.
The video above was posted in the comments of my diary on how frequently police fail to close homicide cases involving African American victims based largely on the book Ghettoside, by Los Angeles Times staff writer Jill Leovy.
Nationally, the percentages are nearly 2 to 1 (40 percent uncleared black homicides, compared to 26 percent uncleared white homicides). In Milwaukee it's actually much, much worse than that.
There have been 117 murders in Milwaukee so far this year. More than 80 percent (95) of the victims were black, with a clearance/arrest rate of only 29 percent (27 arrests). For murders of whites, the clearance/arrest rate is 75 percent.
Just for quick comparison, American police have killed 862 people so far this year, according to the Guardian. Of those, 178 were unarmed and 214 of them were black.
Chief Flynn can look at the number of people who show up over Hamilton's death and presume that their failure to show up over the other black murder victims means they just don't give "a good goddamn." With an arrest rate of just 29 percent for black murder victims people can, for the exact same reason, presume the Milwaukee Police Department doesn't really give a good goddamn, either.
But let's not jump to that particular conclusion.
The stat confirms what Chief Flynn states as the rate of blacks killed, but includes a point that Leovy makes. The rate of these crimes being solved is significantly lower than other types of violent crimes and murder. Here's the question: Could many, if not most, of those "remorseless criminals who don't care who they shoot" actually be the survivors or close family of black people who were previously killed and no arrest was made?
Every person shot, whether they survive or die, should be fairly considered a victim. So should their families. We know that soldiers who experience war often suffer from PTSD as they survive being wounded and see death laid upon their comrades. Is it not unreasonable to consider that the families living in the kind of shooting gallery that Flynn describes are also suffering from PTSD, even the children?
Children and teens could have PTSD if they have lived through an event that could have caused them or someone else to be killed or badly hurt. Such events include sexual or physical abuse or other violent crimes. Disasters such as floods, school shootings, car crashes, or fires might also cause PTSD. Other events that can cause PTSD are war, a friend's suicide, or seeing violence in the area they live.
Children and teens that go through the most severe traumas tend to have the highest levels of PTSD symptoms. The PTSD symptoms may be less severe if the child has more family support and if the parents are less upset by the trauma. Lastly, children and teens who are farther away from the event report less distress.
Other factors can also affect PTSD. Events that involve people hurting other people, such as rape and assault, are more likely to result in PTSD than other types of traumas. Also, the more traumas a child goes through, the higher the risk of getting PTSD. Girls are more likely than boys to get PTSD.
It is not clear whether a child's ethnic group may affect PTSD. Some research shows that minorities have higher levels of PTSD symptoms. Other research suggests this may be because minorities may go through more traumas.
It's also worth wondering how this PTSD would affect teens who are quite ripe for gang recruitment.
Teens are in between children and adults. Some PTSD symptoms in teens begin to look like those of adults. One difference is that teens are more likely than younger children or adults to show impulsive and aggressive behaviors.
Besides PTSD, children and teens that have gone through trauma often have other types of problems. Much of what we know about the effects of trauma on children comes from the research on child sexual abuse. This research shows that sexually abused children often have problems with
- Fear, worry, sadness, anger, feeling alone and apart from others, feeling as if people are looking down on them, low self-worth, and not being able to trust others
- Behaviors such as aggression, out-of-place sexual behavior, self-harm, and abuse of drugs or alcohol
We say that the American Dream is to get a good education so you can go out and build a career that can allow you and your family to prosper. But our own new front-pager Josie Duffy just
wrote a diary about how Maryland has a rate of suspension for black students that is seven times higher than whites, while the national average remains four times higher. She quotes
The Baltimore Sun, noting that:
"The most common reasons for suspension among black HCPSS students in grades K-12 during the 2013-2014 school year … were "attacks, threats, fighting," followed by "disrespect, insubordination and disruption." As of July 2015, the latter infraction was removed as a reason for giving a student an out-of-school suspension in the HCPSS student code of conduct."
That would generally be characterized as "aggression".
The Final Call documents that even in pre-K, black children face a far higher rate of being expelled.
Many experts think the gap between Black men and women can be attributed to the way Black children are treated as young as pre-school.
According to researchers at Yale University, Black children in pre-kindergarten are
This isn't absolute proof of my hypothesis, and I'm hesitant to bring this forward because of the insistent right-wing argument that the violence of black people is an inherent "cultural deficiency." But it is all fairly consistent with the idea that repeated exposure to urban violence has lasting negative effects on the people that go through it (particularly children), in the same way that men and women who experience war carry that experience with them long after the fighting has ended for them. Long after slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, segregation, and the terrorism of the KKK, there is a psychic impact that is passed down from one generation to the next, in the same way that child who experiences sexual abuse or physical abuse has a higher probability of becoming a sexual predator, or being physically abusive to their spouse or their children.
We do know, from long experience, how this story tends to play out.
This may also be why there is such a visceral response by some to violence done to black people by authorities such as police, because that is an echo, a throwback, a flashback to the racial violence of the KKK's roving gangs, to the Slave Patrols that were the precursors to many municipal police departments and the origin of the 2nd Amendment.
The patrols fell within the policing power of the state.
If there is a "deficiency," it's born in the various forms of violence black Americans have been forced to survive for generations. It now continues to bear out in the types of street gangs that every marginalized ethnic group—from the Irish, to the Chinese Tongs, to the Japanese Yakuza, to the Italian Mafia—have all had before them. Some people have responded to this violence by excelling marvelously as did Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglas, the Tuskegee Airmen, George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington, Jackie Robinson, and Jesse Owens before Nazi Germany in the 1938 Olympics. Others have responded like
Tookie Williams, who formed the first version of the Crips as an organization of self-protection in the South Central Los Angeles recreational park that still bears Jesse Owens' name.
Some people are already looking at this—even in Milwaukee.
Jonathan, suffering from wounds from .45-caliber bullets, was taken to Children's Hospital. His father, Gary Baldwin, followed the ambulance, while Jackie stayed at the scene. Jonathan went into surgery and came out with a bullet still lodged in his leg, but on his way to recovery.
While Jonathan's father was there, a hospital staff member gave him a business card for Project Ujima, a collaboration between Children's Hospital and the Medical College of Wisconsin. It was founded in 1995 in response to the increase of firearm injuries to children and now also provides services to adults.
In 1995, 161 children came to the Children's Hospital emergency department with a firearm injury. Now, Project Ujima works with 80 youth firearm victims a year out of a total of about 300 youth victims of assault, said Marlene Melzer-Lange, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Children's Hospital and a professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
Ujima provides crisis intervention, case management including home visits, mental health services, youth development in boys and girls groups and summer day camp, youth leadership, and family support.
...
Baldwin vividly remembers one time she called on Project Ujima in a panic. Jonathan had started his senior year at Rufus King High School the fall after he was shot and a fellow student had threatened to shoot him.
"Jonathan raised his shirt and showed him the gun wounds and told him to bring it on because 'I've been there and done that one,'" Jackie said.
We're not going to fix this problem simply by trying to lock people up faster than the infection and toxicity of urban violence can spread via PTSD. If we're to going solve this, we need to attack its source and recognize it for what it is. We need to create treatment and wellness options to help people heal themselves, their families, and their communities. Simply trying to jail them, or let the "remorseless criminals" kill each other off in the crossfire, is never going to work. That's already been proven over the last 50 years.
Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. It's time we tried some new and different things, like Project Ujima, to address this decades-long problem and break the cycle of generational violence.
The police sometimes contribute to the problem more than they alleviate it, but they aren't the only problem that needs to be addressed.
Sun Oct 04, 2015 at 8:36 PM PT: So after some commenters said I was a bit of an "A-hole" and taking a "cheap shot" at Chief Flynn for his honest display of emotion, which wasn't my intention, I decided to do some checking which confirmed one thing I expected, but also disproved something else.
How Chief Flynn felt about the murder of the 5-year-old wasn't initially a problem for me, it seems perfectly natural, but on reflection after what I discovered I have to say it kind of is. My initial response to this video was that despite the Chief passionate feelings, this case was probably not going to get solved.
Well, I win that bet. It hasn't been solved, but guess what else I discovered?
This is Layla Peterson, the 5-year-old who was killed that day.
I had been willing to give Flynn both cool and style points for being so emotional about what I thought was, based on the context of his comments that "80 percent of my homicide victims every year are African American", that he was so worked up - at least in part - over yet another tragic, pointless wasted black life. Except that Layla Peterson wasn't black, she's
white, and chances are the people who killed her aren't black either since
93% of white people are killed by white people, so he really wasn't all upset and emotional about what I thought at all and all his comments about 80% black crime this and that are an
accusation and an attack not a moment of empathy with that community the way I believed it was.
Technically that shouldn't matter, it shouldn't make a difference. But it does. Just as much as it makes a difference that she was only 5-years-old. But, and this is where I might get called "A-Hole" again, it's shouldn't matter how old she was. If we're going to accept the "All Lives Matter" frame, then honesty, we can't have our police playing favorites. And it's pretty clear that's what Chief Flynn is still doing in this case.
During an emotional press conference, Police Chief Edward Flynn said he would keep a photo of Laylah in his chest pocket, next to the photos of his own grandchildren, until the suspects are arrested.
'She is going to be in our hearts, like her little baby heart is going to be in somebody else's,' Chief Flynn said.
I'm tempted to see that as a heroic level of empathy, but I'm going to resist that temptation because I think the reason many people, particularly parents, are so struck by the loss of a young child is because we can so easily imagine just how we'd feel if that child was our own. That's kinda all about
us, not them, isn't it? My concern is that we oh-so-clearly don't have that depth of empathy with everyone's child across the board. It's just like when Obama said "Trayvon looks like how my son might have" it drove the right wing up the wall, imagine if Chief Flynn had said that about Layla even though both of them would be correct saying it?
Y'see, Michael Brown was also someone's child. So was Tamir Rice. So was Jonathan Crawford, and also he had a child of his own as did Oscar Grant. Dontre Hamilton was someone's child, but we don't see the Chief placing his photo in his chest pocket until the DA decides to indict now do we?
Because that's different isn't it? They were older. They weren't as vulnerable, they weren't as innocent as Layla. And consequently, in all practical terms, their lives don't matter as much. Apparently it doesn't matter quite as much to Chief Flynn, and while I agree that may seem harsh, it's also true. It shows in the results.
In 2014 when Layla was killed 66 black people were also killed in Milwaukee. 25 of those cases have been closed which is 37%, that is better than this years rating of 29% but still low compared to the national average of 55% clearances for black murder victims. That's a problem, and if the issue is because there's a wedge between the black community and the police instead of hurling insults at the black community somebody needs to take some responsibility and get on fixing that. Stat. And that includes you Ed.
8 Milwaukee murder victims in 2014 were white, including Layla, and MPD solved 4 of those for a rating of 50%. It's clear Chief Flynn is going to do everything in his power to improve that 50% by solving Layla murder, it's not so clear - at least as much as I'd initially thought - that he and MPD are going to put the same level of effort, the same level of time, the same level of care and commitment into the 41 open murder cases of black people from last year, not to mention the additional 68 open cases he has from this year because, realistically speaking, they can't. We can't because as Humans we are imperfect, we can't give every person we meet, every person in our lives all the exact same value all the time. It's not humanly possible, we play favorites, we always do - it's really only the matter of degree. It's not a question of "if", but only how much.
Maybe he'll surprise us with a string of solved cases including Layla's, but just looking at the raw data, I'm still not willing to take that particular bet.