Milwaukee keeps trying this anti-crime strategy. Why?

Milwaukee has started many anticrime programs, only to abandon them.

Ask why and you’ll get many answers: Funding ran out, priorities changed or collaboration fell apart.

Sometimes, the city returns to the same strategies over and over again with varying degrees of success.

A high-profile example is focused deterrence — a strategy to identify the people causing a specific crime problem and offer them services such as job training and mental health treatment to help them change their ways.

If they keep breaking the law, they’re slapped with long prison terms designed to discourage others from making similar choices.

Milwaukee officials have tried to implement it at least three times since 2000. Every time, the efforts stalled.

The most celebrated success of focused deterrence came in Boston, where homicides plunged from 152 to 31 over a decade in the 1990s.

There and in several other cities, the numbers have fluctuated from year to year. But those places didn’t shelve the model, recognizing the dividends it has paid in community trust.

In 2006 Milwaukee leaders tried to replicate a model used in High Point, N.C. Violent crime decreased about 10% in the target area here, much lower than the 35% seen over several years in the North Carolina city, police officials said then.

For several months in 2010 and 2011, Milwaukee police and prosecutors hosted meetings with people responsible for much of the crime on the city’s north side. Again, there was some improvement, police said, but nothing approaching levels seen in other cities.

Both of those attempts were abandoned because the results weren’t dramatic enough, police said at the time.

In 2013, Milwaukee police worked with experts at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice to identify a “top tier” group of 400 people whom officers believed were driving the city’s violence.

The result was the same: A modest drop in crime that didn’t last.

The lack of federal prosecution was the key missing element in that last attempt at focused deterrence, according to then-Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn.

Michael Scott, director of the New York-based Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, still believes focused deterrence could help solve Milwaukee’s crime problem, but it will take more time than people here have devoted to past efforts.

Some other cities have spent as long as a year on preliminary phases such as selecting the group of offenders and building relationships with the people closest to them, he said.

For the strategy to work, those people — including family members, friends, or even fellow gang members — need to send the message that the criminal behavior is harmful and needs to stop.

“In order to get the family members of offenders to say that in a convincing way, they themselves have to trust the criminal justice system,” Scott said.

When Scott traveled to Milwaukee to talk about the approach last summer, the lack of trust was abundantly clear, he said.

“In some cities, maybe Milwaukee included, it has been perceived that police are there to keep minority groups under control, keep them suppressed from political power, suppressed from bothering anybody else,” he said.

“Police have to have a broader mission than reinforcing the social and class divisions in society.”