Middle America's Crime Wave

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In Milwaukee, COPS universal hiring funds dropped from more than $1 million in 2002 to zero last year. That has left more than 200 police vacancies out of a force less than 2,000 strong. The city is hard pressed to fill the gap, since the police budget eats up nearly the entire Milwaukee tax levy of $213 million. Mayor Tom Barrett is hoping that the feds will start pitching in again. "We've spent five years on homeland security," Barrett says. "Now we need to focus on a little hometown security."

Further exacerbating the city's police shortage is the redeployment of cops from the streets of Milwaukee to those of Baghdad, Mosul and Kabul. As many as 135 officers at one time have gone on leave to serve in Wisconsin's National Guard or military reserve units in Iraq and Afghanistan. "It's difficult to manage a force that's always coming and going," says police chief Nanette Hegerty. Those left to hold down the fort at home feel overstretched and underappreciated. "Morale is low," says Officer John Balcerzak, head of the police union. "We're racing to a new crime before we've investigated the last. That leaves criminals out there on the streets."

Residents feel equally frustrated. "The police simply showing up can be half the battle in many people's minds," says Steve O'Connell, who lives in the working-class Sherman Park neighborhood. This summer, Milwaukee's 911 dispatchers received, on average, 1,700 calls a day. As police captain Donald Gaglione told a community meeting, "If your 911 call is not a high priority, it may take several hours before we respond, if at all." But people who live in volatile neighborhoods say they need police to intercede before minor disturbances become serious matters.

If police are struggling to answer 911 calls, they have even less time to patrol neighborhoods, so they can't build the trust essential to preventing crime. Tensions between the city's African-American community and police are particularly high--40% of the population is black and 47% is white, but there are three times as many white cops on the force. As Alderman Ashanti Hamilton explains, "If the only time people in black neighborhoods see a police officer there it is to arrest somebody, then, of course, they're going to be nervous." Chief Hegerty says repairing this relationship is critical. "We have to count on law-abiding residents to tell us what's going on in their neighborhoods," she says.

Ester Hodges learned that the hard way. A former construction worker who moved into a west-side Milwaukee home three years ago, she says a neighbor's young daughters terrorized her street and, more personally, bullied her children. Hodges, 48, became a one-woman block watch, calling the police regularly, buying surveillance cameras with her own money and speaking out at community meetings. "I let the police know time after time that trouble was coming," she says. Briefly last spring the police monitored her area more closely. Three weeks after the patrols stopped, however, Hodges says, a threatening group showed up at her house. Police still haven't sorted out exactly what happened next, but by the end, Hodges had been shot in the stomach. No charges have been brought in her shooting. She survived, and her neighbors eventually moved, but police are investigating whether Hodges may have taken justice into her own hands by firing at her antagonizers. No one else was hit.