Wauwatosa Crime Report for April

A short one today. There will also only be a single newsletter next week, as I will be traveling.

In case you didn’t know, the Wauwatosa Police Department releases a crime report each month. You can find them here. A report for the month of May hasn’t been released yet, but April’s is available.

Some highlights:

→ The Wauwatosa Police Department is currently undermanned. They have 93 of 105 officers. The wording in the report is somewhat ambiguous, but I think they have an additional 6 officers completing Academy and Field Training as well as 4 others on some type of medical, miltary, or administrative leave. Presumably, once the new officers complete their training, they’ll be almost fully staffed.

→ There were no murders, shootings, or arsons in Wauwatosa during the month of April. But there were 3 overdose deaths—two from opiates and one, possibly, from cocaine—as well as 6 burglaries, 1 robbery, and 113 thefts¹. I liked this one:

At approx. 19:42 on 4/20/22, One was arrested for burglary after breaking the front window of Best Buy with a brick. This subject was previously arrested […] for retail theft at Best Buy that same day.

I guess he didn’t get everything he needed the first time.

→ There were 10 reported vehicle thefts. Seven of those vehicles have been recovered. Year-to-date (YTD), there have been 56 stolen vehicles, 49 of which have been recovered. The report also said this is about a 25% decrease from the same time frame last year, although I’m not sure if “same time frame” is referring to the year-to-date figure or the month of April.

→ Relatedly, a screenshot of their crime tracking software show a 25% decrease in thefts YTD compared to the same period last year.

Calls for service (it’s not clear if this is just calls for police or whether it also includes calls for the fire department and emergency services as well) are also down 18% compared to last year.

→ School calls for service. I actually found this to be the most interesting thing:

A lot of the public’s comments during the last several school board meetings involve parents’ concerns over violence, fights, and other related disruptions at schools. The sense I get from listening to them is that the problem is much worse than it has been in the past.

When you look at the middle and high-schools above, there does indeed seem to be a large jump in calls to the police department from 2021 to 2022, especially at Whitman Middle School and Tosa West High School. However, when you look at the same period of time (January 1 through April 30) from 5 and 10 years ago, those figures don’t seem so egregious. There were actually fewer calls at Tosa West in 2017 and 2012 than there have been in 2022. Numbers for Whitman are more ambiguous—they’re much higher in 2022 than they were in 2017 and 2021 but roughly the same as 2012.

So why do parents think school quality is declining if the frequency of school incidents egregious enough to summon the police are similar to rates seen 5 and 10 years ago? I can quickly think of two explanations for this, but there are probably more:

1. A school may have many reasons to call the police but parents may only be concerned about a subset of them. Suppose that schools get the police involved for two things—drugs and violence. If most calls to the police in 2012 were for things like drug possession, and most parents are less concerned about some kid with marijuana is his bookbag than chairs getting thrown in classrooms or fights breaking out in the courtyard, then it makes sense that parents would be more concerned than they were previously. Violence is still increasing, but the increased incidence of violence at schools is being masked by decreases in other types of police-callable offenses such that the aggregate numbers look roughly constant over a 10-year period.

2. Maybe the threshold for problems that trigger police involvement has changed. If teachers and administrators at schools are less likely to involve the police for things they might have been involved with in 2012, the statistics might look similar but the actual reality could be much worse. The school’s standards have changed but the parents’ standards have not.

3. I thought of a third as I was writing the other two down. Maybe parents were as upset and concerned in 2012 as they are in 2022 but the parents are different. Parents today think the schools have become more violent because they weren’t aware of the problems that existed ten years ago. Their kids weren’t in middle or high school and the parents who did have middle and high-school-aged children in 2012 no longer go to school board meetings because their kids have graduated.

4. Sorry, I keep thinking of more. 2012 might be an outlier with an unusually high number of calls to the police surrounded by years before and after with much lower levels. I understand why the crime report presented it the way they did—you want to make sure you’re comparing equivalent durations of time, but it would be more useful I think if they told you the average number of calls to the police from January through April over the last 3-, 5-, and 10-year periods. This would give you a less noisy baseline for comparison while also not averaging out recent changes in trend.

5. Last one, I promise. Maybe the violence in schools is more salient because of particularly high-profile incidents. For example, this was listed under “Weapons Related Calls” in the April report:

   • At approx. 13:52, a juvenile (2005) was arrested during the school day for possession of a stolen firearm at Wauwatosa West High School. The firearm was reported stolen from Milwaukee.

   This probably only counts as a single “call for service” but is realistically much more of a concern than a dozen fist fights.

I’m not sure which of these is correct. (1) seems unlikely, (3) seems a little more plausible but still unlikely. Some combination of (2), (4), and (5) seem possible. You could actually figure out (2) by talking to teachers and administrators, and there have been some comments by the Superintendent to suggest this might have occurred. The Police Department could clear up (4) pretty easily by presenting the data differently, while (5) is kind of subjective and you’d have to comb through all the individual reports to figure out if it was true. Of course, maybe the real explanation is (6), the thing I haven’t thought of yet.

That’s all I’ve got. Have a good weekend.

1. I realized that I didn’t know what the differences were between robbery, burglary, and theft. NOLO.com provides this helpful definition: “Burglary involves a person illegally entering a building in order to commit a crime while inside; robbery is generally when someone takes something of value directly from another person by the use of force or fear. So, to answer the question, the family home has been burglarized.” And I suppose a theft is where the person doesn’t enter a building illegally.