MadCrime101

Former Madison mayor Paul Soglin is probably the leading local bloggers tracking Madison crime. You can read all of his posts dedicated to the topic by clicking here.

Soglin doesn’t limit himself to Madison and the peripheral.He doesn’t just focus on Madison, his entries will also take us to Milwaukee and occasionally nationally. Monitoring our larger sister city to the East is important because as we grow we will continue to deal with issues that they are already tackling - or not tackling.

Soglin has spent a great deal of time of late responding to a series of posts by Milwaukee’s Rick Esenberg. Soglin comes from a progressive perspective and Esenberg from a conservative perspective so the dialogue has been very interesting to read. Back on May 24 Soglin made an excellent point concerning the poverty and crime connection - a point we should be mindful of us we proceed with this dialogue. Poverty does not always equal crime. I’ll let Soglin elaborate.

Historically, poor communities, while less safe than wealthy communities, have not always been violent. Similarly, there are many once wealthy, or at least middle class neighborhoods, that fell to the onslaught of both violence and poverty. The very neighborhoods in Milwaukee with the highest violence are examples of the latter.

Many fine neighborhoods with a culture that respected and valued work, community, family, education, and in some instances faith, fell under the pressure of poverty and crime. Good people lived there.  They had the culture and the values.

What they did not have was the will. They lacked the will to fight as their community was challenged.  Some gave up and fled sooner than others. 

We call it middle class flight.  It is not white flight; it is not black flight. Anyone with the resources and the means left.  And with it, went many of the moral standard bearers. A vacuum was created and a culture of violence filled it.

As the middle class blacks left for the same reason as their white counterparts, they took with them the leadership that is needed in the public schools, the playgrounds and the workplace.

An argument was made to me a few years ago about the successes in education and employment of low income black families that moved into relatively quite and affluent suburbs: their success is attributed to reconnecting with the black middle class. A new standard was set.

No, economics are not the only solution; economics alone does not guarantee a safe community, but it sure plays a hell of a role in providing one.

Families with economic success, families with a step up the economic ladder are stakeholders. They have an interest in exerting their will to set the moral standards and enforce them. But it can be a very lonely battle if one feels isolated, has children who may succumb to drugs and violence, and there is no help from the outside.

Here at MadCrime101 we hope to keep this in mind as we look at all crime that takes place in the greater Madison area. While a great deal of crime occurs because of individuals hitting rock bottom and finding themselves with nothing to lose, Madison also has to cope with “crimes of privilege.” A “crime of privilege” usually deals with white collar crime - business folk swindling the system, but in this case I use it to loosely cover college students or suburban youth who resort to criminal activities out of boredom.