Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett may be inept at leading the charge against his city’s rampant gun crime, but he sure is good at making excuses for his failure and pointing the blame at law-abiding citizens.
Reporting that Milwaukee police seize guns in the southern Wisconsin city at a rate nine times of police in New York City, Barrett once again claims this isn’t due to MPD Chief Ed Flynn’s failure to solve crimes or DA John Chisolm’s inability to prosecute criminals, it’s because there are just ‘many guns on the streets’ of his city.
“There’s more gun capacity that the criminals have than the police have,” said Barrett. “And that’s a concern that I have. I don’t want our police officers to face individuals who can outgun them.”
According to Barrett, MPD seized 2,419 guns in 2016. So far in 2017, police have seized 337 guns, all while investigating a crime.Compared to other major cities, MPD seizes guns at a rate of about 407 per 100,000 people. Los Angeles Police seize guns at a rate of 156 per 100,000 people, Chicago at 246 per 100,000, Philadelphia at 253 per 100,000 and NYC at 44 per 100,000 people.
Instead of confronting, owning and working to fix his city’s failure to get a handle on the crime afflicting Milwaukee, Barrett used a press conference to claim ‘the state of Wisconsin isn’t doing enough’ to help his city deal with the problem.”The financial relationship is basically broken, because the money we receive that by and large goes into the police department has been frozen or shrunken over the last 15 years,” Barrett said, stating the more than $300 million budgeted to the police department is greater than the city’s tax levy of just more than $263 million.
Sounds to me like Milwaukee voters should wake up and stop electing people to office who can neither manage state aid nor effectively do their jobs. But that just makes too much sense, doesn’t it?
Milwaukee, Wisconsin first made it onto the list of the Top 10 Most Dangerous Cities in 2014 and made it up the list to its current position as the #7 Most Dangerous City in 2015 with a violent crime rate of 1,364 violent crimes per 100,000 people. The City of Milwaukee has been run by Democrats since 1960, with 1908 being last year a Republican was mayor.
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