Donchathink?
Half of felony gun possession crimes in Milwaukee Never Charged
Over the past two years, Milwaukee leaders have been making demands of state leaders to help them solve the city’s crime problem. One demand being made by Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn is for a state law change requiring a 3-year mandatory sentence for illegally possessing a firearm. But while Barrett and Flynn continue to push for the mandatory minimum, a Media Trackers investigation shows that the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office may make their case for mandatory minimums a moot point.
In an open records request to the Milwaukee Police Department, Media Trackers requested information on all MPD police reports forwarded to the DA’s office with the recommended charge of “Possession of a Firearm by a Felon†– a felony under current law — during June, July and August of 2013. What Media Trackers found was that nearly half of those cases referred to the DA’s office by the MPD were never charged.
Of the 142 cases recommended for charges by the MPD between June and August of last summer, a year later Media Trackers was unable to locate any charge related to illegally possessing a firearm in 68 of those cases – a stunning 47.8% of the time – using WCCA.
In at least one case, Milwaukee DA John Chisholm’s office refused to charge a suspect with possession of a firearm as a felon in 2013 only to have the man charged with first degree intentional homicide a year later.
Well I’ll be darned!
Instead of dropping serious gun crimes and locking violent felons up, dropping serious charges to get a higher conviction/plea rate might be a bad idea.
I could have told them that and I didn’t have to even go to law school!
But if you keep up the bad ideas, then you get to campaign on future “tough-on-crime-ness” or something every go around.
Chisholm is too busy doing politically motivated political persecution of Scott Walker and Wisconsin conservatives to be bothered going after real criminals.