However, it's become clear that Clarke is suffering from the same kind of delusional power that infects other elected Republicans here in the state and nationally:
First, we have no word on any other reassignments of anyone to any neighborhoods to put themselves "in harm's way." Just Schuh. That is so Karl Rove.A deputy who last week blasted Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. in a union newsletter was reassigned Monday to a one-man foot patrol, with no squad car, in the north side area of Milwaukee where a spate of murders has garnered community attention.
Deputy Michael Schuh, a 55-year-old bailiff, was told to take a county bus to and from the neighborhood, contact every home and business, encourage cooperation with police and distribute a Sheriff's Department business card to those he contacts.
"Convince them that we're the good guys/we're on their side and can't succeed without their participation," Schuh was informed in a memo dated Monday from Sheriff's Capt. Eileen T. Richards.
Schuh's newsletter musings questioned Clarke's courage and use of deputies to escort him [apparently in response to something deputies believe Clarke himself wrote!]. [. . .]
In a written statement released Monday night, Clarke wrote that he would assign resources in high-crime areas where they are needed.
"We have to put ourselves in harm's way so that the law abiding people we serve won't have to," Clarke wrote. He said he did not want to waste his time responding to "any baseless insinuation made about what we're doing."
Second, who the hell really thinks sending an old, balding white guy into a neighborhood with high rates of black-on-black murders is going to solve the problem? Jim Stingl's Sunday column covered this year's increased murder rate, and I don't see anything in there that makes me think a Sheriff's deputy handing out business cards is going to do a thing. As I noted last night in a post about schooling, the whole community needs a serious reinvestment, rethinking, revitalization; as Milwaukee County ADA Mark Williams said (paraphrased) to Stingl, the murders are happening because of "widespread poverty, kids having kids and raising them in a moral vacuum, and easy availability of guns." One business card isn't going to cure that.
So, to sum up: Sheriff Clarke gets to punish a deputy critical of him, and put on a show for the media of "doing something" about the problem of homicide in Milwaukee. In the mean time, we have a serious cultural problem, as evidenced by the young man Stingl quotes at the end of his column:
Incarceration isn't always a deterrent. A young man charged with killing his girlfriend's unborn child by beating the woman wasn't terribly concerned when the woman's sister threatened to call police.[Update: Bill Christopherson's take on the Xoff Files.]
"I don't care," he said. "I got to go to jail one day."
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