Marquette Warrior: Two More Robberies at Marquette

Saturday, April 05, 2008

Two More Robberies at Marquette

Actually, one robbery and one attempted robbery.

From an e-mail send to the entire Marquette community:
Marquette University Public Safety Alert

April 5, 2008

Two separate robberies were reported to the Department of Public Safety around 2:40 a.m. on Saturday, April 5. The first robbery occurred within the 700 block of North 18th Street at approximately 2:29 a.m. on Saturday, April 5. The second robbery occurred within the 1700 block of West Kilbourn Avenue at approximately 2:35 a.m. on Saturday, April 5. In both incidents, which are believed to be related, one male suspect approached the victims, including two Marquette students and one person not affiliated with Marquette, and demanded personal property. No weapon was displayed. During the first incident, the suspect implied he had a weapon by placing his hand in his pocket and demanded personal property. The victims refused to hand over their property and the suspect fled the area. During the second incident, the suspect grabbed the victim’s shoulder demanding personal property, the victim threw the property and the suspect fled the area with it. None of the victims was physically injured. The Department of Public Safety and the Milwaukee Police Department immediately responded to both incidents. Victim services have been offered to those involved.

The suspect in both incidents is described as follows:

Black male, 5’8” to 5’10” tall, mid twenties, dark complexion, small build, clean shaven wearing a dark colored sweatshirt.

Anyone having information about these incidents is encouraged to contact the Milwaukee Police Department at 414-935-7360 or Marquette Department of Public Safety at 414-288-6800.
As we have observed, these incidents show the inherent problems of being located in the central city of a large metropolitan area.

They also show that Marquette has a very strong interest in reducing crime in the city of Milwaukee.

Unfortunately, the approaches that are likely to do that (increased incarceration, aggressive policing) are politically incorrect. Thus Marquette will continue to be at best irrelevant, and at worst part of the problem.

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5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Dr. McAdams-

What are your thoughts on making DPS a commissioned police force? It seems to make sense to me as they would spend less time having to wait for MPD and more time being able to handle situations on their own.

I know they are already a well trained department. It may take some up-training and money for logistics, but that shouldn't be a deciding factor. Obviously there is the challenge of getting legislative support to change the law to allow a private school to have a police force, but I'm curious to see your thoughts and the thoughts of others on this board.

8:14 AM  
Blogger John McAdams said...

What are your thoughts on making DPS a commissioned police force?

I don't have a strong opinion on this one way or the other (surprise!), but the more things like this that happen, the more I would tend to favor it.

11:08 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Not so sure I would favor this.

One of the "off the record" reasons I've heard that DPS isn't in favor of this is that they don't want to become the "beer police," i.e. having to make their top duties patrolling underage parties, which is mostly left to MPD.

If the Milwaukee Police Department actually spent some time doing real police work on campus once in a while - actual foot patrols, talking to students, interrogating obvious non-students - MU wouldn't get the rep as an easy place for robbery.

1:09 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Brian-

I'm not sure where you are getting your information from. I think DPS is concerned about not being the beer police now. How would that change if they became commissioned? They would still have the discretion to only take enforcement action when they saw fit. Their duties toward the MU students would primarily go unchanged. The benefit would be that DPS would have some actual authority over the "non-students" that you address in your posting.

As for MPD, let's face it, they can't dedicate their whole district to the MU area. The realities of policing would dictate that the majority of their officers would be in the problem areas. I know you'll say that MU is becoming a problem area, however, I would encourage you to look at how many armed-robberies happen throughout district 3 as opposed to the MU area. You will see that MU is actually a very safe neigborhood in comparison.

My original thought was, wouldn't it be nice for DPS to be able to handle some of the "quality of life" problems they have (trespassing, loitering, pan handling, etc) without having to call MPD? They could clean up the area more effectively than MPD if they had the authority to do so!



Regarding MPD

1:24 PM  
Blogger Daniel said...

what's your thought about Top 10 Robberies

5:30 AM  

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