In Milwaukee, most of the victims and the suspects in their killings are black men under 30, police data shows, who come from neighborhoods where foreclosures, joblessness and poverty are also high. Most involve guns and people — both victims and suspects — who have been arrested before. The most common motive in the slayings was not robbery or gang rivalry but an argument, according to the data.
On July 3, as an annual fireworks display along Lake Michigan ended, Tariq Akbar, 14, was shot in the back of the head while he was leaving the crowded celebration to meet his mother, who was parked not far away.
“The police were right there — not even 50 feet away,” his mother, Arifah Akbar, said. “This is when you know how bad Milwaukee has gotten.”
The police said the shooting had stemmed from a dispute on social media. A 15-year-old has been charged.
Chief Flynn was among those close enough to hear the shots that night. He said that dozens of officers were near the lake, but that was not enough to deter the shooting.
As in places like Ferguson and Baltimore, tensions over race and police conduct have risen in Milwaukee, where the population is 40 percent black, compared with 6 percent statewide. Demonstrators took to Milwaukee’s streets after the death of Dontre D. Hamilton, 31, a black man who was shot in a downtown park last year by a white police officer. Mr. Flynn fired the officer, but local prosecutors did not file charges against him. Witnesses said Mr. Hamilton, who had been sleeping before the encounter, had grabbed the officer’s baton and hit him or was trying to do so.
Chief Flynn said that his officers were responding to crimes as they always have, but that they were making fewer traffic stops and conducting fewer field interviews, a fact he attributed to “free-floating anxiety” among officers around the nation.
“This is a job that requires judgment, but it requires judgment being exercised under pressure in ambiguous circumstances,” he said. “In that context you are going to sometimes, trying to do the right thing, still make the wrong decision.”
Along the streets on this city’s North Side, residents said the problems reached far deeper than guns or fights on Facebook.
“Everybody’s struggling out here, trying to stay afloat, with no jobs, no opportunities,” said Bethann Maclin, whose 13-year-old daughter stays mostly inside these days. “The violence won’t end. Where do you start?”
