Earlier today, an angry crowd in Milwaukee sought vigilante justice against two alleged sex traffickers. Milwaukee police faced accusations of laxity and inaction, adding further fuel to thefire of a debate raging in the mainstream media bout whether or not black communities are underpoliced or overpoliced.

A crowd of people angry about the disappearance of two girls burned a vacant home and a van in Milwaukee on June 23, after people accused police of not responding quickly enough to concerns the girls were being sex trafficked at the dwelling. You can watch videos from the scene later in this article. Be aware that some of the videos have graphic language.

Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales said in an evening press conference, which you can watch below, that “several shots were fired in the crowd. Three individuals were shot during this event. None by police. Those three victims are at a local hospital getting help for their non-life-threatening injuries, and we’re still investigating that.” He said that one of the two missing girls was located, and police were still trying to locate the second girl (activists say both were found.) Morales said police didn’t get the cooperation they needed from family. “This whole chain of events could have been avoided,” Morales said. [Heavy]

Back in 2015, Professor David Kennedy of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice argued that black communities are underpoliced when it comes to major crimes, and overpoliced when it comes to petty crimes. He cited the book Ghettoside, by Jill Leovy.

Leovy says high-crime black communities are underpoliced. Isn’t the problem in fact that they’re overpoliced? The community is up in arms over mass incarceration, zero tolerance, stop and frisk, and all the rest. How can it be sensible for anybody to ask for more of the same?

In fact, I believe that she’s exactly right – something that’s very easy to understand if you live in or are otherwise close to these communities.

…

Imagine, if you can, what you’d do if that big kid on the next block and his friends gang-raped your sister. And showed the cellphone videos to everybody at school. And when you tried to face him down, they put you in the hospital and did a drive-by on your house. While the cops just watched. Imagine what you’d do when your older brother got your dad’s deer rifle and said to you and your friends, we have to go take care of this. They killed our mom and they have to pay.

Imagine how the violence would spiral; there’d be bodies in the streets in no time. And then, if you can, imagine how you’d feel listening to the folks in the next town over watch the carnage and talk about how it’s all because you have a terrible family and weren’t raised right, and there’s dope so you’re all drug dealers and we all know drug dealers have to shoot each other, and shooting each other is just cultural for people like you, and you and all your friends are vicious, evil super-predators with no regard for human life.

And then imagine how you’d feel as the cops looked at you, and your family, and your friends, and your whole town, and said, we knew you were scum.

You’d be experiencing what families in stressed black neighborhoods have experienced forever – very high rates of arrest for minor offenses white folks routinely get away with, and shockingly low arrest rates for serious violent crime. The cause of the latter is not as simple as deliberate police withdrawal – it’s a toxic mix of a terrible history of exactly that, and a nearly as toxic present of mistrust, broken relationships and bad behavior on both sides – but the result is the same. Being overpoliced for the small stuff, and underpoliced for the important stuff, alienates the community, undercuts cooperation and fuels private violence: which itself often then drives even more intrusive policing, more alienation, lower clearance rates, and still more violence. The cops write off the community even more; the community writes off the cops even more. [Los Angeles Times]

Unfortunately, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You can’t argue for proactive policing in black communities, and then complain when the police crack down on low-level crimes that have a detrimental impact on a standard of living and lead to greater occurrences of violence. In 2015, City Journal argued that dangerous communities need so-called “broken windows” policing because it works. “Broken windows policing” refers to maintaining order in public spaces. City Journal has more:

This practice, widely referred to as Broken Windows or quality-of-life or order-maintenance policing, asserts that, in communities contending with high levels of disruption, maintaining order not only improves the quality of life for residents; it also reduces opportunities for more serious crime.

…

Ample evidence makes clear that Broken Windows policing leads to less crime. The academics who attribute crime drops to economic or demographic factors often work with macro data sets and draw unsubstantiated, far-fetched conclusions about street-level police work, which most have scarcely witnessed. These ivory-tower studies, frequently treated with reverence by the media, don’t prove what they purport to prove, and they fail to grasp how crime is managed in dense, urban settings.

New York City’s experience has suggestively demonstrated the success of Broken Windows over the last 20 years. In 1993, the city’s murder rate was 26.5 per 100,000 people. Starting in 1994, with the election of Rudy Giuliani as mayor and the appointment of Bratton as police commissioner, Broken Windows policing was put into practice citywide (it had been implemented in the subway in 1990)—and crime fell further, faster, and for longer than anywhere else in the country. Today, by far the largest and densest city in the United States has a lower murder rate, at four per 100,000, than the nation as a whole, at 4.5 per 100,000. In 1993, New York accounted for about 7.9 percent of the nation’s homicides; last year, the city’s share was just 2.4 percent. While the national murder rate per 100,000 people has been cut in half since 1994, the rate in New York has declined by more than six times. And those striking figures are emblematic of a broader accomplishment in a city that has seen huge, historic declines in every one of the seven major crime categories.

Broken Windows–style policing was pivotal in achieving these results. Left unchecked, street corners can degenerate into criminogenic environments. The bullies take over. They drink alcohol and take drugs openly, make excessive noise, intimidate and shake down honest citizens, engage in scams and criminal enterprises—and, worst of all, fight with one another, often with firearms. Conditions like these drove up shootings in New York City to 5,269 per year in 1993. To counter the violence, the NYPD undertook a concerted effort, beginning in 1994, to regain control of street corners and commercial strips, using quality-of-life policing as an essential tool. By cracking down on low-level offenders, the police not only made neighborhoods more orderly; they discovered that many misdemeanor offenders were also wanted for serious crimes, from illegal gun possession to murder. In the next four years, annual shootings fell by nearly 3,300 incidents—or about two fewer shootings per day. This helped reduce the numbers of murders, too, with New York experiencing the four largest drops in homicide in the city’s history, including spectacular declines of 369 incidents in 1994 and 401 incidents in 1995, cutting murders by more than one a day in each of those years. [City Journal]

In order to make American cities safe and livable again, we need to have an honest, data-driven (politically incorrect) conversation about effective policing in America’s black communities.