On Homicide and Public Health

Because I am a conservative and because of where I live, I am already dismissed as racist. What follows is an updated column that was originally published by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel in 2003. It was hard writing. At the time my coffee table book had a cheery title -- Death in Wisconsin 2002. Since then not much has changed and possibly have only gotten worse. 

Some Wisconsin Liquor Stores also Sell “Assault Rifles,” None are in Milwaukee  

There is part of the story I left out. Throughout rural Wisconsin, particularly those places where hunting and fishing are good, the sporting goods store is often a liquor store. Rifles, shotguns, ammunition and full selection of wine, beer and hard liquor stock the shelves. Gun stores and liquor stores are both licensed. In rural, small town Wisconsin, issuing a license for both isn’t troublesome and it helps a small town store diversify its product lines. In Milwaukee there is not one liquor store that sells fire arms. 

Yet in Milwaukee, I’m told the trouble with violence is easy access to guns. Guns are the problem. It seems that’s not universally true. 

We are very adverse to risk. Hence we are quite willing to accept a new law greatly expanding the number of children who must be securely strapped into some sort of federally approved and hugely expensive car seat.  

The new law will save some lives, but not many. Smoking bans in taverns and restaurants will save some lives, but not many. Still, the Surgeon General tells us second-hand smoke is a serious public health risk.   

Ensuring Public Health and Safety 

Public health and safety is a primary function of government. In protecting public health both state and federal government have a long and broad reach. 

The US Environmental Protection Agency for example attempts to limit the number of deaths from exposure to toxic materials in the air and drinking water to one in one million over a 70 year exposure period.  

The standard for radium in well water is one that many communities in Wisconsin are having a tough time meeting. Those communities face the possibility of fines of $5000 per day for not meeting it.  

 

If seen in light of public health, the homicide rate for African-American males in southeastern Wisconsin should be absolutely unacceptable. But the problem isn't guns. 

Here’s How It Goes 

According to a Wisconsin Medical College report, in 2002 the Wisconsin firearm homicide rate among black males was forty times higher than that for white males. The mortality rates were 48.2 and 1.2 per 100,000 individuals respectively. 

At that rate over a ten or fifteen year period every Wisconsin black male faces somewhere between 150 and 200 to 1 odds of murdered with a firearm. Growing up black in Milwaukee is somewhat more risky than a marine’s tour of duty in Iraq in 2003 and it’s gotten worse.  

The Zumba Solution 

Over a recent weekend there were more than a dozen shooting incidents that left two dead and two kids wounded in the crossfire. [Full Text]

In 2003, while both Milwaukee Police Department and the Wisconsin Medical College were studying Milwaukee’s homicide rate as public health issue, going down that path quickly lead to a thicket of political correctness. Obviously not much has come from it. This time around that feeble history repeats. Mayor Barrett has set up an “illegal gun” hotline for Milwaukee residents to report on criminal neighbors in possession of a fire arms. Earlier this year he was lamely touting a gun buyback program. 

The health department, James E. Causey from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel tells us, thinks Fitness Improvement Training Zones are the answer. [Full Text]

Zumba and yoga in the streets, it seems, will send the thugs scurrying into their dark corners like cockroaches.

 

It’s time to get serious. 

In a health care setting, serious looks something like this: if it’s cancer it is cut out, radiate it, and poison it with chemo-therapy. It is killed as completely and as quickly as can be. 

Toll of Social Pathology 

Death on the streets is a different thing. The pathology isn’t physical, it’s social. The current treatment isn’t decisive. It’s an inadequately funded, ill-conceived and unfocused patchwork of social service, educational and law enforcement programs.  

If we are to address urban homicide as a serious national public health issue we will have to take that patch work of programs and knit them into cohesive policies to address the problem.  

And identifying the nature of the problem is easy. A handful of bad actors can suck the life out of a neighborhood. They are easy to identify if you are a carpenter in the hood. 

For nearly six years I worked for one of my neighbors off and on as a contract employee. At the time Bill worked for a handful of home builders, bidding on finish work, decks and porches. He also bid on building infill housing and rehab work in the City of Milwaukee on contracts listed by various non-profit agencies administrating urban renewal and housing grants.

Among his other contract employees were Rick and Angelo. Both were minority young men from the central city. Both were good men trying to build careers and raise families. Both were smart, reliable and hard working. Both had checkered legal backgrounds. Both had knowledge of arithmetic that fell short of the fifth grade. 

Regarding the jobs he bid on in the central city, “these jobs pay pretty well,” Bill explained. “Not too many white guys want to bid on them.”

In that simple sentence Bill hit on about half of what’s wrong in the City of Milwaukee with minority unemployment. That’s big. You can’t get a license with fifth grade test taking skills. That’s big too. These and similar license restrictions are spread in a perverse way to block the formation of a variety of small businesses and very local job creation.

 

In short, too many young men in the “hood,” by the time they are in their late teens and early twenties both due to academic failure and rubs with criminal justice system, find themselves locked out of meaningful participation in the economy. 

If someone wants to look at urban gun violence as a public health issue, they’ll need to look at the pathology that leads to it: failed families, failed schools, failed policing and a failed criminal justice system. All combine to lock young men out of the mainstream economy. The only thing left is the underground and often criminal economy. 

Taking on those pathologies is a tall order and worse, the solutions are often shot down by the politically correct and a status quo bureaucracy and entrenched politicians who thrive on the continuation of that pathology.  

Instead for example if illegal weapons are an issue, let the police use any violation as an excuse for searching for weapons. But there will be loud complaints about racial profiling and harassment. Yet in the name of public safety we are all searched at courthouses and airports. Why shouldn’t that happen to all of us stopped on the streets?

How about restoring the safety net of traditional neighborhood institutions: the neighborhood schools, the neighborhood police precincts, the churches and the small town like commercial centers? It’s about the hard stuff of building environments for families.

How about outlining a path for young men with “criminal pasts” to fully reengage in the economy? Part of that is focused education but at some point the most crippling economic implications of a criminal conviction should be erased. 

Finally and this is the hardest on our liberal sensibilities, but it is life and death. We have abandoned the hard rules of marriage and family. Let’s have our non-judgmental no-fault divorces, bless the unwedded mom, then Band-Aid our fractured families and hope for the best. Let’s rewrite our social welfare codes in such a way to tilt heavily toward traditional nuclear families. 

Ultimately, the urban homicide rate reflects the breakdown of families. To repair that damage, good people from all over southeastern Wisconsin need to step in as big brothers and sisters, grandpas and grandmas and the afterschool book readers, tutors, pick up team coaches and mentors of all sort. As I recall, Rick Majerus got his coaching start on the Neeskara playground.