Samuel McClain beating

I have a proposition for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's editorial board members. Go live for a month in the neighborhood where Samuel McClain was beaten by a "Lord of the Flies" youth mob for honking his horn at them, and see how long it takes you to want to carry a concealed weapon. It's so easy for you to oppose ccw when you get to go home at night to a neighborhood where violent crime is rare.

I covered crime in Milwaukee County for the Journal Sentinel for about five years. It wasn't long before even I started becoming familiar with family names. I'd interview someone connected to a crime and it would turn out that they were related to another homicide I wrote about three years before. Or, I'd see a name on a criminal complaint and recognize it as the family member of a murder suspect. In addition, horrific crimes have a way of happening again... and again. And often the same people are involved or I'd end up in exactly the same neighborhood. And so it was that I recognized the names of two McClain beating suspects as the relatives of one of the scariest accused killers I ever interviewed.

It's about time that we start talking about the realities of homicide (although McClain thankfully wasn't one) and violent crime in Milwaukee. Violent crime is concentrated in a small geographic area and it involves a core group of young men who make up the urban underclass in our community. Young African-American males are disproportionately victims and suspects. But too often we write and talk about the homicide problem through racially and gender neutral terms. In order to find solutions, we need to truly understand what's going on and we can't do that if we are too politically correct to look at the facts. We are losing a generation of young black males in Milwaukee (in 2002, for example, the homicide rate for black males was 40 times that for white males and the homicide rate for black males was off the charts compared to any other group). People are afraid to focus on this because they don't want to be called racist. I don't think it's racist to try to get a handle on the issue so we can try to find solutions. And I don't mean throwing more governmental social programs at the problem.

I was not particularly surprised to read in the paper about the horrific beating of McClain and the fact that two of the suspects are the brothers of Laron Ball, who was shot and killed in a courthouse shooting melee a couple years ago.

I interviewed Laron Ball in the jail several months before his death. I was doing a story on gangs and a homicide detective told me to talk to Ball. I'd realized that a lot of the murders that we covered in the paper as disconnected (such as a spate of murders in Metcalfe Park) were in fact retaliatory feuds between makeshift neighborhood gangs that adopted colorful names - Murda Mobb, Ghetto Boys, 3-6 Mob (Ball's gang and the gang supposedly involved in the McClain beating.) These neighborhood drug crews make a living selling drugs but also robbing other drug dealers and gang members, and Ball admitted as much. Robbing other drug dealers is the perfect crime because the victim is highly unlikely to call the police. It's also an exceptionally dangerous enterprise. These groups are made up of young African-American men without educations and with long criminal records who are unemployable and have no moral bearings.

In the interview for a story about life in gangs, Ball told me he'd been shot at least once, and had seen a friend die. Of the 20 or so 3-6 M.O.B. gangsters, he estimated, "Three are dead and seven are in jail." Ball openly acknowledged the 3-6 M.O.B. "robbed people to steal their drugs." The gang certainly was doing its share all on its own to contribute to the violent crime problem.

The chilling thing about Ball, and what I will never forget, was how young he looked and how normal. The banality of evil. He looked like a high schooler, but he had a frightening retaliatory mindset, and the longest record I'd ever seen in someone so young. In truth, he was one of the scariest people I'd ever interviewed for these reasons. In fact, I later opposed another reporter's suggestion that the paper run vignettes on each homicide victim. I was worried they'd simply end up glorifying the Balls of the world; I learned fast on the police beat that the homicide victim everyone else was memorializing as "just turning his life around" might very well have died with a gun at his side and a gang tattoo on his back. In truth, the Samuel McClain type victims get the media coverage but are not the norm. It's the Balls of the world who often end up on the street dead.

What's going on in Milwaukee? Let's look at Ball's life as an example from a Journal Sentinel story I once co-authored:

• Age 20 - six children by three different women (all under age 3) and a seventh on the way when he was killed. (What's the future for them?)
• The son of a mother who was convicted of running a drug house and child neglect when he was 15, records show.
• Since 1998, Ball had been charged 12 times with felonies, and seven misdemeanors. But the only cases that stuck were two misdemeanors.
• Two other times in about as many years, he had been questioned as a suspect in murder investigations.
• His brother and cousin (I don't believe these are the same family members involved in the McClain beating): One was a four-time felon. The other was recently released from jail after a cocaine conviction imposed by Judge Jacqueline Schellinger, the same judge presiding over Ball's case (when the shooting occurred). Both family members admitted affiliation with the 3-6 M.O.B., and said the acronym M.O.B. stood for "Money Over Bitches."

Well, here we are several years later and the 3-6 M.O.B. apparently still thrives and more Ball family members are allegedly caught up in a horrendous crime. I wonder if the liberals will argue that we shouldn't try to crack down on the 3-6 M.O.B. because we will just breed more urban terrorists and make them hate us more. I wonder if they think we should immediately withdraw our forces from this urban war. But I digress.

I saw a movie the other day on HBO, an older movie, that I thought captured what I'd seen on the police beat: Menace II Society. If you want to understand homicide or violent crime in Milwaukee, rent this movie. Homicide often revolves around the Balls of the world killing other Balls of the world. The problems are so very deep. Whenever I hear people babbling on about "lack of accountability from the parents" I think about how little they know about how truly deep the problems are. Such comments imply the parents are inside watching TV while their kids are running loose on the streets. If only they had a stronger curfew... it's not even in the same framework as reality.

We're talking about the complete disintegration of the family structure. Don't assume these kids even have parents around. It's common knowledge that many are fatherless. But we've got a generation growing up without mothers too, the orphans or near orphans of the crack epidemic of the late 1980s. Some are virtually homeless. Many are being raised by grandmothers. Is this true of everyone in the inner city? Of course not. Most people in the inner city are good people not involved in crime. Rather, they are preyed upon.

But these are the patterns I observed over and over again when I dug into the lives of murder victims and suspects in Milwaukee. I mentored an African American youth from Milwaukee for more than four years. Father, a drug dealer in Chicago who never knew him. Mother, murdered by her boyfriend. Being raised by his grandmother. Witnessed a murder getting off the bus. Had several friends who were murdered. Only one of his friends was being raised by his father - and only one was being raised by his mother. One mother was off doing drugs. Another had died of AIDS. And so on. The kid I mentored was the son of a teenage mother who was the child of a teenage mother who was the child of a teenage mother...

But I am the child of a teenage mother. I was raised in virtual poverty by a single mother who earned $10,000 a year teaching school. So these are not excuses. People are not preordained by environment to commit crime. They do have free will.

But these things are contributing factors. And many of these patterns of social disintegration existed in the South. Read this book if you want to learn more about that.

I am not a person who thinks systemic issues and historical problems don't play a role in crime. Of course they do. I believe the southern sharecropping culture mirrored social patterns that exist today in the modern ghetto. I believe the decline of the manufacturing base in Milwaukee played a role. I believe the crack epidemic did as well.

I also believe that, although we can, and should, try to identify the reasons that can lead to a criminal environment (and identify how some segments of society lost the rigid rules needed for order on Golding's island), we can not excuse the individual from the choices they've made. Let me be very clear about that. There comes a point where incarceration is the only option. You can't rehabiliate a Laron Ball. It's too late.