AN EPIDEMIC OF KILLINGS
The coronavirus pandemic likely drove record homicide numbers in Milwaukee. But there’s no vaccine for violence.
After gassing up at a north side Milwaukee convenience store in July, Myles Laster got his mom on the phone after experiencing something distressing. ● He ran into an acquaintance who recently lost her boyfriend from a fatal drug overdose. Although Laster and the woman had not always gotten along, he asked how she was doing. She blew up at him, and he, in turn yelled back at her. ● After leaving the store, Laster told his mom, the woman intentionally rear-ended his vehicle and drove off. His mother, Paulette, told him to calm down and call police. He parked his car and placed the call. He called again 20 minutes later.
A few minutes later, according to a criminal complaint, two men who had just spoken to the woman circled the block. The woman had told the men she was so angry, “I could kill him.” The men assured her they would take care of the situation, telling her that if anybody asked, “We were at the beach all day,” according to the complaint.
Hardly 90 minutes had passed since the argument outside the convenience store when the men pulled alongside Laster’s car and he was shot in the left temple.
“My whole life changed that quick,” Paulette Laster said. “I’m thinking, ‘Myles is just waiting for the cops.’ When I called back, I didn’t get no answer.”
That kind of scenario — a minor argument escalating into deadly violence involving a gun — is happening far too often in Milwaukee. Half of the time, those involved know each other.
As of Dec. 29, Milwaukee had 189 people killed in homicides in 2020 — a rate so unprecedented there were still nearly two months left on the calendar when the city’s 1991 record of 165 homicides was broken.
It comes at a time when violence has climbed in cities across the U.S., but it also comes after four consecutive years of homicides declining in Milwaukee, which fell from 147 in 2015 to 97 in 2019.
“There are a variety of community actors whose efforts pay off in less violent crime and that just makes it all the more important to subdue the pandemic.”
Richard Rosenfeld, Professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis
Many have cited the cascading effects of the coronavirus pandemic as the driving factor behind such a harsh change of course. Workers are unemployed and stressed; youths have ample free time and less monitoring; police face illness in the ranks and heightened scrutiny on the job; outreach efforts from social services and violence prevention programs have faced added hurdles; normal forms of release — entertainment, shopping, athletics — have been curtailed.
That has many people hoping 2020 will amount to an aberration, that once a vaccine is widely available, life will return to normal. But experts warn there is no vaccine for violence, and it may take some time yet for crime trends to normalize.
“If we can bring to bear the same level of focus, investment and urgency that we brought to COVID to the issue of gun violence, I’m hopeful that we can have an impact,” said Reggie Moore, the director of Milwaukee’s Office of Violence Prevention.
That will take time, and Milwaukee didn’t make it through the first weekend of the new year without a pair of homicides.
On Saturday morning, just before 12:30 a.m. in the 3400 block of West Hampton Avenue, a 23-year-old man and a 22-year-old woman were shot multiple times while in a parked car. Both died at the scene.
Homicides and nonfatal shootings in Milwaukee most often involved young Black men, as they do every year. As of Dec. 10, victims in those incidents were 86% Black, 83% male and 46% between the ages of 18 and 29, according to the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission.
Laster fits into all three categories. Since he was 5, his mother was determined to prevent him and his siblings from becoming another victim.
With two young boys and a girl, Paulette Laster felt uneasy about raising them in the city and moved them to a quiet subdivision in Brown Deer. There, from a young age, Myles Laster became a voracious reader and writer who gravitated toward music production. By age 10 he was freestyle rapping on YouTube.
In his teens, he adopted the moniker Milo Throwed, built a studio in a closet in his parents’ house and started attracting thousands of listeners to his work online. His music videos sometimes displayed guns and what looked like drugs, but they were pre-empted with disclaimers making it clear they were props meant to entertain.
“We do not support drug abuse and/or violence,” the messages read.
Domestic violence, arguments drive homicides
In 2020, Milwaukee police sounded the alarm multiple times about what appeared to be an increase in fatal shootings that escalated from minor disputes.
In August, off-duty community service officer Naeem Sarosh was shot and killed after trying to talk to his neighbor about grass clippings spilling over the property line, police said. Less than a month later, 16-year-old Fabian Guzman was shot and killed in one of multiple fatal shootings associated with road rage this year.
An argument or fight is listed as the primary factor in 25% of Milwaukee homicides in 2020, according to the Homicide Review Commission. Police and community members have said there appear to be more guns on the street on this year, allowing for arguments to quickly escalate to deadly violence.
As of Dec. 20, Milwaukee police confiscated more than 3,000 guns in 2020, an 18% increase from the year before.
The violence in the first half of 2020 in Milwaukee was marked by an abnormal share of fatal domestic and intimate partner violence, along with a pair of tragic mass shootings.
Five people were shot and killed at the Molson Coors complex in February, and in April, a family of five was killed inside a home on Milwaukee’s north side. In late September, seven people were injured in a shooting at a north side funeral home.
At the same time, about a third of homicides were falling under domestic and intimate partner violence, during roughly the first half of the year, police said. It was a trend that continued into 2020 after developing the year before, when that type of violence accounted for 19% of homicides.
The beginning of the year was marked with the tragic death in February of 26year-old Amarah Banks and her two daughters, Zaniya R. Ivery, 5, and Camaria Banks, 4, who were strangled and had their bodies burned by a former partner of Amarah Banks, according to prosecutors.
But as 2020 wore on, fatal instances of domestic and intimate partner violence diminished and accounted for 14% of the year’s homicides as of early December, according to the Homicide Review Commission. But fatal shootings over arguments, drug-related incidents and retaliation continued at heightened levels.
It has not been easy for investigators to keep up. Milwaukee police had cleared 50% of its homicide cases as of Dec. 24, when in the past three years that number hovered between 75% and 78%.
A case is considered cleared when someone is arrested or when a suspect is identified but cannot be arrested. A criminal conviction is not necessary, and clearance rates include all homicide arrests in a given year, no matter when the crime occurred.
On top of that, investigators haven’t been able to determine the primary factor behind 32% of homicides in 2020, an increase from 26% in 2019.
Constance Kostelac, director of the Homicide Review Commission, said some of that is due to a lack of cooperation from those involved in the incidents. That could potentially be explained by a lack of trust in the criminal justice system or fear of retaliation from perpetrators, she said.
Solving homicides or shootings has been linked with people’s willingness to engage with the criminal justice system, and the adjustments that officials have had to make in the face of the pandemic have not made things easier for officers and prosecutors.
In October, Milwaukee police Capt. Thomas Casper, who leads the homicide division, said the department has struggled to keep up with the large caseload. The same month, his division dealt with a COVID outbreak that sidelined as many as 10 detectives.
In addition, the pandemic has slowed the court system, making it more difficult for investigators to keep witnesses or victims engaged with lengthy cases, while jails hold fewer people in an effort to minimize spread of the virus.
“It’s hard to know if it’s actually a trend or a blip along the way, but right now it does look like we have more (cases) where there’s not information being shared with law enforcement,” Kostelac said.
Police need to consider reform
Following a pattern seen in other American cities, Milwaukee continued to see heightened levels of violence through the fall in 2020, although the numbers were on a downward trend as summer transitioned to fall and winter.
Part of that may just be general seasonality — the phenomenon where various types of crime, including violent crime, are more common in warmer months.
And even though a vaccine brings added promise of controlling the pandemic, it’s difficult to know when crime rates could return to pre-COVID levels, according to Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who has studied crime trends during the pandemic.
Kostelac is hopeful that trends will start leveling off in the first half of 2021, but a lot will depend on not just the vaccine’s distribution but on how police, violence interrupters and community groups respond to it. For police, Rosenfeld identified two important steps.
They first must redouble efforts at patrols to areas with high concentrations of violence, he said. That may require an “all-hands-on-deck” approach, meaning officers typically behind a desk should be redeployed to the streets.
Second, police have to take seriously the reform protesters of police brutality have called for during mass demonstrations in 2020. That means redirecting some services to other agencies to free up officers to handle violent crime.
“One clear, I think, example is responding to drug overdoses,” he said. “Fire department personnel are better trained to handle those incidents.”
It’s difficult to predict just how Milwaukee police will respond in 2021 since its leadership has been rattled with instability since the summer.
For about a month now, the Fire and Police Commission has remained locked in a 3-3 tie in choosing between two finalists for its next police chief. In December, Jeffrey Norman became the department’s second acting chief since August.
And after controversially being demoted to captain over the summer and then retiring from the department, Alfonso Morales was reinstated as chief by a Milwaukee County judge in December. But he has not decided if he will return to work as chief.
Kostelac also stressed the need for police to continue prioritizing community relations, something that now-departed Acting Chief Michael Brunson engaged in during his five months leading the department. After being criticized for drifting from a community-oriented approach to policing under Morales, the Fire and Police Commission is expected to codify such a strategy into its standard operating procedures in 2021.
“It’s critically important the incoming police chief values and understands the importance of a comprehensive approach to public safety that has been called for by the community,” Moore said.
But it’s not just police who will have to respond in a big way once vaccines are more widely distributed. It will be imperative for community groups, social services,
youth employment and afterschool programs who have scaled back their activities during social distancing to ramp up their engagement once it is safe to do so.
Moore said his office plans to roll out several initiatives next year, such as public awareness campaigns around gun violence and finding help for mental health issues. It will focus more on engaging perpetrators of domestic violence. And its team of violence interrupters, called 414Life, will expand its presence from Milwaukee’s north side into the south side.
“There are a variety of community actors whose efforts pay off in less violent crime and that just makes it all the more important to subdue the pandemic,” Rosenfeld said.
‘The glue that held them together’
Nearly six months after Laster’s death, his loved ones are still learning to cope with his absence.
His mother, Paulette, describes the family as being left “empty.” His friends stop by her house in Brown Deer at least once a week “to feel his vibe.”
From a young age, Myles Laster was a natural at making people feel welcome. When his mother hosted his future stepfather for dinner dates, he acted as a server. When his family hosted parties, he took photos of attendees at the door and supplied them with printouts. He encouraged his friends to explore rapping and music production along with him.
“They lost the glue that held them together,” she said. “We have so much crime that’s going on in these streets in Milwaukee, people should be outraged.”
It has been difficult for his mother to watch the prosecution unfold. The two men accused of shooting her son — Darius C. Anderson, 21, of Brown Deer and Eric J. A. Gibson, 21, of Milwaukee — have been charged with first-degree reckless homicide, party to a crime.
But both are free as they await trial after posting a combined total of more than $100,000 in cash bail. And the woman who had words with her son before the shooting has not been charged.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Kent Lovern declined to comment on that decision, citing an open case. But he said sometimes, depending on available evidence, particularly in homicide cases, prosecutors have to focus on those most responsible.
Paulette Laster said she does not expect the prosecution to bring her the closure she needs.
Three weeks before he died, Myles Laster started a T-shirt line called Throwed Aesthetics. His mother has since trademarked the brand and will continue selling the merchandise to raise funds for a Milo Throwed scholarship fund for students interested in music and engineering.
“His spirit is still here,” she said.