Racial Tension Exploded in Milwaukee This Weekend

Around 3:30 PM on Saturday, police officers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, pulled over Sylville K. Smith when they deemed his car suspicious. Smith and a friend got out and ran, and cops gave chase. Smith, a 23-year-old black man, was carrying a stolen handgun loaded with 23 rounds, and a black officer fatally shot him after he didn't drop the weapon, police say. His friend was arrested, and the entire incident went down in less than a minute.

By Saturday evening, angry protestors were squaring off with the local police force, throwing rocks and bricks at cops and their vehicles. Two stores and a bank branch were set ablaze as a gas station fire burned unabated, and two more storefronts were on fire by 2 AM, as the Washington Post reported. The sporadic gunfire made it too dangerous for firefighters to do their jobs amid one of the most intense scenes of rioting over police violence since 25-year-old Freddie Gray died at the hands of Baltimore cops in April 2015.

At first glance, the details of Smith's killing don't quite square with the tales of unarmed black men being targeted by white cops that have been the building blocks of the Black Lives Matter movement. But Milwaukee has a unique history of segregation and police brutality––one that residents describe as setting the stage for rioting and violence. As they put it, so deep and unchecked were the city's inequities that the slightest provocation was sufficient to send disgruntled residents over the edge.

"It's a series of things that has happened over a period of time," 39-year-old Sharlen Moore, who lives in the Sherman Park neighborhood where the violence took place, told the New York Times. "And right now you shake a soda bottle and you open the top and it explodes, and this is what it is."

As in many other American cities, tension between the local black and white communities came to a head in the 1960s. When the city council failed (again) to pass a fair housing law in 1967, riots broke out, and at least three people were killed, 100 injured, and 1,740 arrested, according to the Milwaukee County Historical Society, as reported by the Times.

Other factors in current tension surely include the high African American unemployment rate (20 percent in Milwaukee County) and renewed segregation, with local schools just as racially divided as they were in the mid 60s. And despite comprising 16 percent of the city's population in 2014, a report released just last month by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition black communities suggests African Americans received just 4 percent of home loans there.

As Black Lives Matter was gaining traction in 2014, protests erupted in the city when 31-year-old Dontre Hamilton, who was homeless and mentally ill, was killed by a cop in a public park. The cop who shot him claimed Hamilton, a black man, grabbed at his baton; witnesses dispute who struck the first blow. Officer Christopher Manney was eventually fired, but the police chief, Edward Flynn, did not publicly condemn the shooting as inappropriate. Instead, he worked with the Department of Justice to conduct a review of his own force after federal prosecutors declined to charge Manney.

That clearly wasn't good enough.

Sunday and early Monday saw more chaos, with one officer hospitalized after his squad car was pelted with a rock. The city was declared to be in a state of emergency, and Governor Scott Walker activated the national guard (officials have yet to actually deploy them). So far, several police officers have been hurt, a teenage girl was struck with a bullet, and 17 people have been arrested. The weekend was also marked by apparently unrelated local gun violence—between Friday and Saturday, five people died in separate shootings.

Some residents say that if this kind of violent uproar is to be avoided in the future, the city will need to pay serious attention to entrenched problems and policies that festered for decades.

"This entire community has sat back and witnessed how Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has become the worst place to live for African Americans in the entire country," City Alderman Khalif Rainey told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "Now this is a warning cry. Where do we go from here? Where do we go as a community from here?"

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