Crime in Madison.... (Fitchburg, Verona, Brooklyn: homes, neighborhoods, high school)

[Frau Kartoffelkopf]

You make a good point, but the reason people are living in those neighborhoods is probably because they can't afford to live in better neighborhoods. So where are they going to go?

[Milwaukee City]

I have been paying attention to crime in Madison and it seems like it's on the rise latley within the last two years. Are these just growing pains, as the city gets larger you should expect more problems or just a few bad apple's

This just doesn't sound like Madison: Man suffers critical head injury, two others stabbed during large fight in Madison - JSOnline

[Frau Kartoffelkopf]

Touche

[Chelito23]

I also see the Madison plan of tearing down troubled buildings as flawed. It just makes the delinquents relocate to other neighborhoods. As soon as Broadway Simpson was "revitalized", Allied became the hot spot. Now that they cracked downt o some extent there, they trouble broke up and now the SW side has seen an increase in crime. I think that better policing is the answer. After all, if the people who are trouble makers are arrested and sent to jail, or whoever starts up with shananigans, crime would go down. Oh well, that is my perspective. Afterall, the city can't realistically rear down EVERY building or apartment that attracts crime, because it will always resurface elsewhere in the city.

[Drover]

Originally Posted by Frau Kartoffelkopf

You make a good point, but the reason people are living in those neighborhoods is probably because they can't afford to live in better neighborhoods. So where are they going to go?

I dunno, how about Superior? Or one of the HFH units coming online? At any rate, apartment complexes are not there for the convenience of its tenants. They are there at the pleasure of their owners, who are in the best place to determine their disposition.

Originally Posted by Milwaukee City

This just doesn't sound like Madison: Man suffers critical head injury, two others stabbed during large fight in Madison - JSOnline

And this happened in the "trouble spot" area that people have been talking about in this thread.

Originally Posted by Chelito23

I also see the Madison plan of tearing down troubled buildings as flawed. It just makes the delinquents relocate to other neighborhoods. As soon as Broadway Simpson was "revitalized", Allied became the hot spot. Now that they cracked downt o some extent there, they trouble broke up and now the SW side has seen an increase in crime. I think that better policing is the answer. After all, if the people who are trouble makers are arrested and sent to jail, or whoever starts up with shananigans, crime would go down. Oh well, that is my perspective. Afterall, the city can't realistically rear down EVERY building or apartment that attracts crime, because it will always resurface elsewhere in the city.

What "plan" are you talking about? Did Madison do this, or did the people who owned the property do it?

Madison's crime rate is virtually non-existent for an urban center, so how much better policing do you want? What specifically do you want them to do that they haven't already done? The problem with leaving it in the hands of the police is that policing is basically a reactive solution -- the police can't really do anything until after something has happened. About the only proactive tools law enforcement have are sting operations or to simply increase their presence somewhere -- but as to the latter, they can't be everywhere all the time (and I doubt we'd want to live in a society where they are), and significantly increasing the police presence in one troubled area often leads to exactly the thing you're troubled about -- the riff-raff simply move somewhere else. Since law enforcement is largely a reactive force by nature, it is up to citizens and community to be the ones taking proactive measures. If that means tearing down problem buildings and starting over as part of a broader effort, so be it.

Until society perfects itself and stops raising kids who turn into riff-raff, we have to find ways of dealing with the riff-raff. While you don't like the idea of simply shuffling them from neighborhood to neighborhood, this has so far proven to be a more effective overall approach than allowing one area to become a permanent crime zone and infecting the areas around it like a cancer.

[SD83]

Hi friends. I've been looking into moving to the Madison area for years now. I was once laughed off of this forum for asking about the crime situation. It is unsettling to read of this development, to say the least.

Comparison isn't fair to the cities involved, but I still must ask. As one person commented earlier, one bullet is too many. But, when I check Madison's crime rates (by total crimes, and by ratio), they appear to be far less than any other city I've looked at. Milwaukee has three times the ratio, and Des Moines has twice the ratio.

I'm from Des Moines, and I certainly don't consider it a crime-heavy town, but those are the numbers. It certainly does have its undesirable locations, but they can be avoided.

So, in regards to Madison, is this a troubling growing trend? Or, just a ripple in the pond? I trust your folks' intuition than I do the numbers I read. Is it still possible to consider Madison a viable destination, or is it a case of "get out while the gettin' is good"?

[Drover]

Right now it's a ripple in the pond. I think the crime issue gets more traction in Madison because, as others have noted upthread, the "problem" areas seem to move around from neighborhood to neighborhood. You'll hear more about it when people who haven't really experienced it before start having it happen in their neighborhood, versus when it happens some place where it's not unexpected or unusual. And the problem areas always seem to crop up on the outskirts of town. The closer you are to campus or downtown, the less likely you are to end up in a problem neighborhood.

[ryanj0]

Originally Posted by SD83

Hi friends. I've been looking into moving to the Madison area for years now. I was once laughed off of this forum for asking about the crime situation. It is unsettling to read of this development, to say the least.

Comparison isn't fair to the cities involved, but I still must ask. As one person commented earlier, one bullet is too many. But, when I check Madison's crime rates (by total crimes, and by ratio), they appear to be far less than any other city I've looked at. Milwaukee has three times the ratio, and Des Moines has twice the ratio.

I'm from Des Moines, and I certainly don't consider it a crime-heavy town, but those are the numbers. It certainly does have its undesirable locations, but they can be avoided.

So, in regards to Madison, is this a troubling growing trend? Or, just a ripple in the pond? I trust your folks' intuition than I do the numbers I read. Is it still possible to consider Madison a viable destination, or is it a case of "get out while the gettin' is good"?

It is very hard to say. Madison crime seems to go in streaks... These streaks usually occur during the summer, I would guess it is just a ripple in the pond. Practically every year, usually around the start of summer, something will happen that will be "outside of Madison crime standards" and everyone goes crazy. I'm not saying this is right or wrong, just people do. And every year, the situation gets better. However, that does not mean it will always be this way, so it could be the start of a growing trend perhaps. But I doubt it.

This year it didn't happen in the "trouble area" (well some of it did), yet in the area right by the "trouble area". So the people who were used to things happening, in some cases, right across the street, had it happen in their backyard instead. I remember some five or six or something like that years back there was an influx in shootings in the Park St./Taft St. area. People in that area just went crazy. Shootings are uncommon in any area in Madison, but there was property crime and drug trafficking and such in these areas for years before the shootings.. Same with Hammersly. Anything between McKenna and Whitney has, for quite some time, been a trouble area for more minor crimes, but when there's a shooting, it's suddenly "a quiet neighborhood plagued". I assume it's just a ripple in the pond..

[Chelito23]

Madison doesn't have a "plan" in the real meaning of the word to tear down troubled apartments, I just was referring to the knee jerk reaction to crime, if the city sees a problem building or complex their soultions historically have been to tear it down or take it over. It is of course reactive, expensive and unrealistic because you can't tear down every building that becomes a hot spot, it will be an expensive, endless cycle.

I think improved policing in the hot spots does help, working with neighbors from affected areas, non-uniformed cops strolling (not patrolling)the area and sub stations are all things that would help and are more sustainable as the city grows.

Just forcing people to move is not a solution, it moves the problems elsewhere and then it is like a cancer that has roots and tentacles everywhere. I much prefer there to be a bad area as opposed to several bar areas. Why not work on the bad area and arrest the trouble makers and SAVE it??

Of course the real solution is for people to become accountable for themselves and their children but since we know that isn't going to happen anytime soon, that is why we need some new approaches to police work in Madison.

I think the crime does spike up and down but where doesn't it? It is like this everywhere, I remember taking criminology courses in the univserity and they said that crime goes up with the full moon, of course, people can be out in the dark and see better then. And of course crime spikes in Madison in the summer, there is no snow to leave foot tracks in and it isn't freezing cold either.

I have noticed a trend over the last couple of years in Madison of overall increased crime and the severity in the individual cases. I know just by saying that people will attack the comment and say how low the crime is compared to X and Y and Z and that comment is old news. We know Madison isn't Detroit, but it certainly isn't the Madison it was even 10 years ago.

[Frau Kartoffelkopf]

Actually, when I saw that crime went up in summer the first thing I thought was teenagers. In the little town near where I live we have a lot of petty crime in the summer because school isn't there to keep the more "rambunctious" teenagers busy and they end up graffiti-ing a store wall, breaking into an old house, or shoplifting.
I assume that in a larger city with more things available, bored teenagers would have more things to get into trouble with.

On a side note, I was told to avoid apartments along the Verona/ highway 151. Are there specific areas along the highway, or just the entire highway?