Arrest Trends in Milwaukee, 1980-2011 — Part Two
In the first post in this series, I compared black and white arrest rates in Milwaukee over time. In this post, I present arrest data by offense type.
In 2011, the seven leading arrest offenses were disorderly conduct, “other assault” (i.e., not aggravated assault), drug possession, theft, vagrancy, vandalism, and weapons possession. Together, these seven offenses accounted for more than 53 percent of all Milwaukee Police Department arrests. This amounts to almost exactly ten times the number of arrests for the violent “index crimes” — the most serious violent offenses that dominate media coverage of the criminal justice system (homicide, robbery, forcible rape, and aggravated assault). To get a more realistic sense of the day-in-day-out work of the system, it may be helpful to appreciate that for every homicide arrest you see in the news, there are 123 arrests for disorderly conduct and 47 arrests for simple drug possession — nearly all of which fly well below the media radar screen. It is an interesting question to what extent these lower-level arrests contribute to public safety.
These offense distributions do not differ much by race. The first pie chart below indicates the distribution of the Big Seven arrest offenses among blacks; the second provides the distribution among whites.