Here & Now

Milwaukee Mayoral Candidates Talk Crime, Schools and Jobs

Frederica Freyberg:

For the first time in nearly 20 years Wisconsin’s largest city will vote for a new mayor. With just four days before the special election in Milwaukee, candidates Cavalier Johnson, the current acting mayor and former city council president and Robert Donovan, former city council alderman, sat down for a conversation with our partners at Milwaukee PBS.

Maayan Silver:

How much of the uptick in violence has been impacted by the pandemic and voters want specifics as to your plans for the city to minimize all of this crime and violence. Candidate Donovan.

Robert Donovan:

I will say this. I think perhaps some of it is due to COVID or this whole period of the last two years we have seen chaos reign in Milwaukee and I simply do not believe that there is any hope of restoring order and stability to our streets and neighborhoods without providing the Milwaukee Police Department with the appropriate level of manpower. In addition, we need to ensure that our district attorneys and our judges are holding our criminals accountable for their crimes. It seems to me every time we hear of some horrendous crime being committed, it’s perpetrated by an individual, a record a mile long, should not have even been out on the street in the first place. So those are critical components to begin the process of restoring order to our community.

Maayan Silver:

Candidate Johnson?

Cavalier Johnson:

Yeah, you are absolutely correct and COVID certainly has played a role in the uptick in crime and violence we have seen in large cities across the country. Milwaukee is no exception. And we need to have holistic public safety in order to address the problems we have on the streets of Milwaukee. So holistic public safety means having the adequate number of police officers, something that I want to see and something that I’ve been fighting for. It also means working to have mental health services that are available to folks in our community. It also makes — it also looks to make sure we have earlier interventions in the lives of young people, and we have had conversations with the district attorney, with the chief judge for Milwaukee County. That has had the state come in to make an investment, tens of millions of dollars in our public safety apparatus here in Milwaukee.

Mike Strehlow:

Should officers be returned to the schools?

Cavalier Johnson:

I don’t believe that police necessarily need to be inside the classroom. I’ve not called for that. What I would like to see, though, is that police are able to be on hand, at schools, especially after school when things are more likely to happen, more likely to pop up.

Robert Donovan:

We just can’t have our police coming after the fact. We need officers, the appropriate officers in our schools connecting with students, creating those relationships that are so critical so that they can prevent crime or prevent the fight or the disturbance from occurring.

Everett Marshburn:

Last year the Office of Equity and Inclusion found the pandemic had immense and widespread impacts on the Milwaukee workers. Low wage workers were hit particularly hard. Workers living in Black neighborhoods experienced disproportionate unemployment impacts. What specific steps will you take to bring jobs to challenged neighborhoods and ensure they pay a living wage?

Cavalier Johnson:

Right now downtown there is a sky rise coming out of the ground, The Couture. It’ll be the tallest residential tower in Wisconsin, and that’s skyline defining and great for the city. It’s great for downtown. The thing that’s most exciting to me about The Couture though is the fact it’s going to take a million construction hours and 40% of those hours, 400,000 will go to people who live in the most depressed neighborhoods in Milwaukee. The neighborhoods I grew up in because of the city’s Residence Preference Program. So that will create an opportunity for those folks who live in disadvantaged, challenged neighborhoods to have an access point into a 21st Century economy job in the trades. We need to find new ways for folks to have these access points.

Everett Marshburn:

Candidate Donovan?

Robert Donovan:

I would want as mayor a Department of City Development that is far more aggressive in reaching outside our region to attract businesses to come to Milwaukee and I would urge that department and insist that that department work with many of our executives currently here in Milwaukee. Milwaukee is home to some of the best Fortune 500 companies in the country. We need to tap into the connections that those CEOs have with other CEOs around the country and bring some of their vendors and some of their companies that they are connected with right here in Milwaukee. But in addition, as I have said previously, we need to take programs that work in other communities and implement them here in Milwaukee. One of the things that I would insist on moving forward with as mayor is the Cleveland co-op model that has been very successful in Cleveland in taking individuals who have chronically unemployed or low skilled, training them, getting them into jobs and those individuals then become owners, co-owners of the company they are working with.

Everett Marshburn:

Both of you have been fairly critical of our former mayor about his seeming lack of work in the neighborhoods. Candidate Johnson, you said in a recent debate, the 20 years under Tom Barrett, the depressed neighborhood you grew up in, where windows are busted out, doors boarded up, have not seen improvement. You said we have got to lift those neighborhoods and create stability. What concrete steps would each of you take to do that to improve underserved communities.

Cavalier Johnson:

What I want to see is us to get back to a point in this community where we are providing family-supporting job opportunities for the people who live here. Working with entrepreneurs to make sure they have opportunity to have access to the resources to start new jobs, working with our Department of City Development, working with M7 to attract new businesses to Milwaukee. Using the tools that we have to lure companies here and build out opportunities like Milwaukee Tool that’s happening downtown with up to 2,000 family-supporting jobs in our city.

Robert Donovan:

I again, emphasize restoring safety to our neighborhoods and then begin the process, once that’s accomplished of businesses will want to come into neighborhoods. We also desperately need to ensure that these houses that are burnt up, fire damage or boarded up, we either tear them down or restore them, one or the other. We need the resources to get that done. But we begin the process one at a time of taking our neighborhoods and revitalizing them.