well one of the things we recognize we have to deal with here in Milwaukee is not just the actual amount of crime or the amount of disorder is can be documented in statistics but fear of crime because fear of crime is what motivates public Behavior it's fear of crime that causes people to abandon their public spaces and when you abandon your public spaces they end up being occupied by people who want to use them unlawfully and so a big piece of our outdoor roll call effort is to reassure neighborhoods that we are there you know it's one thing to see us drive by or walk by one or two at a time but when you realize that in the vicinity of your neighborhood there are 30 or 40 or 50 officers working that night um it should give you some comfort it should make you feel comfortable using your front stoop instead of your backyard it should make you feel comfortable being in your front yard instead of you know behind locked doors it should make you comfortable being on your sidewalk with your kids that's the goal we recognize that fear is always going to lag behind the statistical measures of crime and so we think it's important particularly in neighborhoods that are most Afflicted to be highly visible and one way to do that is to do the occasional outdoor roll call for the purposes of reassurance I think the most important thing about the numbers we've released today is the cumulative totals you know we're looking at nine quarters now of improvement and I think that's something the community needs to take comfort from you know the men and women of this Police Department have worked extraordinarily hard to achieve not just one-time successes or two time successes but sustained success and that work I think is uh paying real dividends for the self-confidence of neighborhoods I mean we recognize that in any given day a specific neighborhood is going to have issues or concerns that we need to be responsive to but I think if we look at the trend lines that quarter after quarter after quarter and year after year we're continuing to see improvements that's good for the morale of neighborhoods it's good for the morale of the city to see that its investment is paying off and it's good for the morale of our officers who know that their work is resulting in real improvements in the lives of their neighbors we're very sensitive about the fact that those neighborhoods most afflicted by serious crime that are most um desirous of enhanced police presence can if we're not careful be alienated when we come on strong to try to deter criminal behavior and we've really worked hard to on the one hand make sure that our cops are on the dots as we say as you look at our density map there the the the the dark darker areas that are represented by more crime you know more more impacted crime precisely the places we put more officers and we want them to get busy we want them to use lawful traffic enforcement as a way to conduct traffic stops we want them to stop and question people at night find out who they are and what they're going and what's new the challenge is to do that in a way in which the community in which that's occurring remains support supportive so far at least according to the data we're not seeing an increase in our uh citizen complaints we have quadrupled the number of car and pedestrian stops we make in the last three years quadrupled and our citizen complaints have remained level with 2007 numbers which to me indicates that people are accepting of what we're doing because our officers are behaving with courtesy professionalism and respect but we have to keep our antenna out because we recognize that how our Authority is used is as important as its results we're putting more officers on the streets than we ever have before you know we have really dramatically cut overtime because we have reformed business practices that were ineffective and inefficient and expensive you know I mean it's been a while since everybody did the annual who made all the money overtime story okay and that's because we weren't managing our overtime I mean my ambition year after year is to spend every Buck I can on Police Operations I'll throw money at a special security initiative I'll throw money at an anti-me plan we throw money at our deployments in the summertime believe me I'll spend the dough but I don't want to spend the dough on guys hanging around waiting to use a computer to make a report out people are going to get sent home people are going to get sent home when their shift is over and they're done and they can do it at the beginning of their next shift you know we're examining Court overtime processes and business practices that were inefficient but if you look at the number of cars we put out the number of foot patrols we put out we're putting out as much or many as we ever have well I mean you're going to get anecdotal information from a variety of sources both good and bad you know in my experience not a lot of people call their Alderman up to say hey things are great people call up Alderman to raise a stink to get additional resources in their neighborhood whether it needs it or not you know we have to go by the data and it's important for us that the data get collected and that we collect it accurately so we can have an impact on it but I don't have any doubt that from time to time this neighborhood or that neighborhood is somewhat dissatisfied with the quality of our response that's why we're never done I think citizen confidence has a lot to do with their willingness to cooperate with the police people that feel that they are isolated and abandoned in their house and surrounded by neighbors they don't know who intimidate them is going to deter them from cooperating with us if people feel like somebody's looking after them if they feel like the police are a stable presence if they even recognize their beat officer they're going to feel more confident that working with us to make their neighborhood safer is a good idea um the first quarter of this year we saw 100% clearance rate in the homicide rate now that indicates to me that people are working with us to uh to solve homicides you know we're going to have segments of the population you know the the tough guy segment of the population and somebody comes into the hospital shot in the rear end and he's going to be a tough guy and not cooperate with us we do continue to have some problems with that but when it comes to dealing with the stranger crimes we're getting a real lot of cooperation and that's a tribute to the Prof professionalism of our detectives who know how to talk to people you know the Old Dirty Harry stuff doesn't work in real life people don't talk to you because you try to scare them to death they talk to them because you gain their confidence and we got detectives that are really good at that really know how to PE you talk to people well you know the first quarter of this year we made a heck of a lot of burglary arrests and we did increase our clearance rate for burglaries which was also significant but we also have to uh recognize that this has been a persistent problem for about the last year and change um we have we're continuing to focus our resources where burglaries are most likely to occur we've also undertaken a new initiative with district attorney Chisum where he is devoting prosecutors to uh prosecute residential burglaries as seriously as violent crimes I mean we're recognizing that in many neighborhoods a burglary is in fact far more serious than a shooting and the community gets that a lot of our shootings are Knuckleheads shooting Knuckleheads in the rear end but a house gets broken into in a stable neighborhood and people start thinking do I want to live here so we know we need get a handle on that and so we're devoting significant resources and you know I'm I'm I'm heartened by the fact that arrest and clearances are up but it's been frustrating that that has not been matched in a in a similar crime decrease as the other crime decreases well you you don't ever decide you've won all right I mean you don't give up when you have a spike and you don't decide you know the game is over because we're making some serious improvements uh there's a lot of crime in in Milwaukee so there's plenty for us to do and uh I'm convinced that as we continue to get better and better at um developing good accurate and timely crime information as we get better at putting that information in the hands of our detectives and police officers as we get better and more refined at our deployments and as Citizens gain confidence in the police department and are willing to organize themselves that's a key part of this I think we can continue to see some significant decreases so you know there are challenges out there for us you know the economy is you not improving as rapidly as people would hope returning prisoners are coming back to a community in which there's a dir of job opportunities you know everybody in city government is having some level of attrition but I'm convinced that our strategies combined with the work ethic of our people are going to keep paying dividends