Alderman Bauman brings Water St. Businesses’ Pleas to City
The “Entertainment District” around Water Street in Milwaukee has a higher incidence of reported crime. This is a problem for the businesses which comprise the district: If potential customers are afraid of being victimized in the area of these businesses, they will not come and spend money, and the businesses will have to turn to some other model for making their living, like selling drugs.
They sell drugs now, of course. The “Entertainment District” is a bunch of bars, which serve alcohol at several hundred per cent markups as the price of admission into a social space. Alcohol, famously, reduces our impulse control at the same time as it increases our aggression. A whole block of bars provides the additional environmental trigger for violence. “Alcohol is the basic ingredient of acts of violence”, says a 2021 study from Frontiers in Psychology.
The other key ingredient for violent crime is youth. Researchers have identified what they call the “age-crime curve”, which shows that violent crime peaks in late adolescence before tapering off into mature adulthood. The “Entertainment District” has, as its business model, attracting young people to come consume as much alcohol as they can afford.
Drug Dealers Ask for Police Protection
Alderman Robert Bauman, in whose District the businesses are located, represents them to the Common Council. He’s tried everything to solve this crime problem, he says: He’s tried restricting food trucks from the area; he’s… and he’s all out of ideas. The only thing for it, he now claims, is an increased police presence around these bars. He’s not alone in this proposal: Kendall Bruening, a real estate developer, proposes to donate a building he owns to the Milwaukee Police Department so that they can patrol the area.
If you look at Bauman’s Campaign Finance Report, the most common occupation listed for donors is “business owner”, followed by “retired”, “attorney”, and a tie between “business executive” and “real estate”. There are no other listed occupations among his donors from the last available report. Well, you get what you pay for, as the maxim goes, and business owners, lawyers, and developers have paid for top-notch representation in Milwaukee’s Aldermanic District 4.
And one can see why. The latest Census Bureau survey on service industry revenue shows just $6 trillion in revenue from the 2nd quarter of this year, an infinitesimal 3% growth from the previous quarter. Entrepreneurs, for all they give us, are starving to death; it is only just that they seek friends in government. Perhaps the business owners on Water Street can work to develop a commercial for Alderman Bauman in the style of ASPCA ads featuring the plaintive tones of Sarah Mclachlan.
Who can aid in this crisis of profitability? The police! Imagine our Jetson’s-like future: We can shuffle from bar to bar, our hands in the air and our heads down, between lines of policemen, with the sniper’s red light buzzing about our heads like a particularly malicious bee. The bartender will scan our cellphones, extracting a certain percentage of our annual income, and, because our hands will still be upheld, use a water gun to squirt liquor into our mouths. Alternately, businesses might save money by removing seating and replacing the barstools with a trough to fill with bottom shelf rotgut whiskey.
There are other interests in the neighborhood in which these businesses are located, namely those who live and work there, but they don’t have an Alderman, as they haven’t purchased one. They also don’t get to decide what goes in the buildings in their neighborhood; that’s a matter between developers, banks, and Bauman. Presumably, some in the neighborhood might want a watering hole or two in which to raise a glass in praise of famous men and dance. But it isn’t as if a survey was taken; those efforts are reserved for more important matters, like service industry revenue.
In all likelihood, some residents might like fewer bars, because the businesses are what sociologists would call criminogenic, i.e. they produce crime.
Crime, generally, is way down. In Milwaukee, homicides are down 30% from the previous year, as of July. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have a problem with crime: Wage theft is rampant, landlords regularly victimize tenants, and the drug economy, unable to rely on police, enforces its own laws with violence.
Perhaps there’s a comparison to be made there: In the illegal economy, those entrepreneurs who make their livings by addiction and irresponsibility, those protests against the future, have to put more guns on the street if their business is suffering from the neighborhood conditions they help create. This is how we should understand the calls for greater armed presence in the “Entertainment District” by Alderman Bauman and the drug dealers for whom he works. At least the illegal drug dealers pay for protection themselves.
