VIDEO: Milwaukee Chief Slammed by Council for Telling People How Not to Get Shot
Faced with growing complaints about his department's handling of a spike in carjackings and his own comments about how to avoid getting shot, Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn defended himself at a contentious Common Council committee meeting Monday.
"I tried to convey facts in a less dry way to a group of people who should not be afraid of their public spaces," Flynn said about the "four simple rules for not getting shot in Milwaukee" that he laid out at the annual Ceasefire Sabbath breakfast in mid-May.
The "four simple rules" — don't deal drugs, don't be part of a gang, don't illegally carry a gun, and don't get into a fight with someone who has more arrests than you — were delivered, flippantly in the view of some council members, in the midst of a rise in carjackings in Milwaukee, an issue that the Public Safety Committee addressed at Monday's meeting, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.
Since the first five months of 2014, when there were a total of 90 carjackings in the city, the number has increased 120% to 198 carjackings in the first five months of 2016. A large percentage of those carjackings have been committed by juveniles, Flynn said, adding that the first five months of 2016 have seen a 767% increase in juvenile arrests for carjacking compared with 2014.
