Here are excerpts from the full story found at the above url. I encourage you to read the entire article first before reading my responses to it. I'll attempt to give background information as needed but apologize in advance for any shortcomings on my behalf....
Assaults were up from 43 last year to 72 this year. Burglaries and robberies were down.
Administrators at UWM said they have stepped up patrols, too.
At face value a numerical jump from 43 to 72 within a year seems like a lot. It's important to take a step back and realize what's going on in the area. In the past couple years, the Milwaukee Sheriffs department has increased it's presence both in the parks and along the lake front. The increased police presence along the lake is in the geographical area that is in question. How many of these assaults were recorded by the Sheriffs dept which was policing a geographic area that is clearly not part of the campus? What then could cause these numbers to spike so drastically within a short time period?
I believe it's the increased patrols not only by UWM but MPD (Milwaukee Police Department) too. It's quite simple really. If you flood an area with officers then there will be an increase in police contacts (citations, arrests, etc). That being said, if you increase police presence in a given area then you will see a rise in these contacts. These contacts are the basis of crime statistics. If a person gets hit with a baseball bat and has their wallet taken but then doesn't call the police because they didn't have any money in the first place and are not that injured, did a crime in fact happen? YES they were robbed but the statistics don't reflect that. If there had been more officers in the neighborhood which would imply a better chance at catching the perpetrator, then maybe the victim would have been more inclined to report this.
What i'm saying is that if you send officers into an area, then they'll come back with results. We need not look any further than the suburbs. Everyone knows to not speed in them because the cops are always clocking for speeders. Yet the overwhelming majority of people speed within the city of Milwaukee. Why there and not in the 'burbs? Because we have this belief (rightfully so) that Milwaukee cops are too busy to catch you doing 38 in a 30 m.p.h. zone. So if UWM and MPD have stepped up patrols in this geographic area, is it not reasonable to believe that they would also effect the number of reported incidents?
It's my belief that these assaults were happening before this and they only recently started to be recorded.
Monday's shooting victim, 21, was pistol-whipped and shot in the leg as he fled from two people who demanded money as he walked toward his home in the 2700 block of N. Murray about 11 p.m., Schwartz said. Police recovered suspected marijuana from the victim. He was reported in satisfactory condition Tuesday afternoon at a hospital.
The pistol-whipping, shooting and possession of marijuana strike me as unsettling coincidences. So the perpetrators got his wallet but not his stash? To me, the act of pistol-whipping someone is very symbolic. They were clearly close enough for physical contact and so his life could have ended right then and there. Luckily, it did not. The assailants pistol-whipped him and then shot him in the leg as he fled? Why didn't they just shoot him on the spot at close range? They already physically hurt him bad enough that he wasn't going to forget easily. Something doesn't add up.
Journalists are supposed to deliver just the official facts and so i look forward to hearing more of this case as details surface. One can't help but have a nagging feeling that this college student wasn't as innocent as everyone thinks.
Police said the assailants were described as two African-American men in their 20s, one about 5 feet 11 inches tall, wearing dark, baggy clothes and carrying a small, silver handgun; the other man was about 5 feet 9 inches tall and wearing dark, baggy clothes and a white do-rag.
So one of the suspects is slightly taller than the other...? Dark baggy clothes but no mention of color of clothing? They've ruled out orange, yellow, most shades of green, white, and pink so far. This should really narrow the search down! Not even a mention of if one of them was stockier than the other one. Once again an excellent description of most black males in this city. I guess if i get held up tonight by someone who isn't using a silver handgun, then it's not one of these two guys!
Why do i have a feeling that the victim knows his assailants after a description like this?
Students such as Franke can't help but notice the increase in campus safety alerts. From Oct. 2 to Nov. 5, the university posted a dozen alerts, including the shooting, an armed robbery, an attempted armed robbery, two attempted strong-arm robberies, two reported incidents of battery and several other arrests.
The increase in campus safety alerts comes as a result of the Virginia Tech shootings on April 16th 2007 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_massacre). The faculty of Virginia Tech were blamed by a lot of people (media included) for not notifying students of what had already happened that fateful morning. UWM in turn started broadcasting campus safety alerts every time something happened in the neighborhood. Of the students who bother to check their email in the morning, most disregard these alerts for various reasons.
Have you ever read the story of the Little Boy Who Cried Wolf?
The department has 34 armed officers and plans to hire five more..... About a year ago, Marquette converted a university-owned house at N. 21st and W. Wells streets into a police substation that is manned 24 hours a day. The university has 48 armed officers on staff.
Both universities are in Milwaukee and so they are naturally compared to one another. The end of the article where this is brought up is what bothers me the most. The writer is literally comparing apples and oranges here. You have a private vs public school being compared. Cost of tuition per student is woefully out of proportion:
http://demo.mu.edu/edu/about/studenttuition.shtml
Undergraduate tuition per year — $26,270
http://www4.uwm.edu/financialaid/CostOfAttendance/index.cfm
http://www.bfs.uwm.edu/fees/Fall%202007/tuitionschedule.htm
| Resident Undergraduate Tuition* | Based on 12-18 credits both semesters | $6,860 |
How is an underfunded state school supposed to compete monetarily with a private university like that? Consistently, every year the budget for the UW system gets cut while tuition costs rise for students? I would also like to point out that Marquette is located in an economically weak area which is why they can buy neighboring property easier than UWM. So you have a school that brings in more money and is in a cheaper area vs a school that is a more affluent area and suffers from budget problems. How is this a fair comparison? Same city. Both are major universities. From there, the similarities end.
****************
What's my point to all of this? My goal is to point out how badly the media has blown an incident out of proportion and topped it off by making unfair comparisons. The alleged facts that they used MUST be questioned. Go beyond asking what their sources are. Learn how their sources gather data in the first place. In the end if the methodology of gathering the info is flawed, does that not make the data flawed too? How then can you accept this outlet as a viable source if they consciously choose to use tainted data?
Not only is it sad that someone got shot but it's even more sad that we as a society brush this off so callously. We as a collective people have such little regard for human life that it's very disturbing. Some might say they do but they truly don't. If they did then they would be outraged every time they turn on the the TV and see another name get added to the murder count for the year while politicians pat each other on the back (as though they actually had a hand in this) congratulating each other because the number of deaths is lower by two or three when compared to last year at the same time.
No comments:
Post a Comment