Young, Gifted and Black speaking out on policing issues in Madison

As Madisonians grapple with the shooting death of Tony Robinson and its place in the nationwide discussion about policing, the Young, Gifted and Black Coalition (YGB) has been speaking out against what the group says are pervasive racial disparities in Madison.

While the issue of police brutality is now in the headlines, YGB leaders say disparities in policing are outgrowths of other significant issues, including gaps in education, employment, poverty and incarceration rates.

“It is very apparent that Madison has a racial disparity problem – I would label it a crisis,” said Brandi Grayson, who is a co-organizer of YGB.  She spoke at a community discussion at First Unitarian Society in February.

African American adults are eight times more likely to be arrested in Dane County than white adults, Grayson said, citing statistics from the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families’ “Race to Equity Report.”  This disparity is double the arrest rates throughout the rest of Wisconsin and more than triple the national average. 

The report points out that 54 percent of African Americans in Dane County live below the federal poverty level (compared to 8.7 percent of whites).  The figure is even higher for youth.  Further 74 percent of African American youth live in poverty (compared to 5.5 percent of white youth), according to the report.

Madison police have disputed the statistics in the report. 

Matthew Braunginn, a co-organizer with YGB, said Madison is not the progressive city it claims to be. 

“We are only benefiting the majority, the well-off, with limited access to those that are marginalized,” Braunginn said. 

The problem manifests in seemingly simple problems, like bus route access in communities of color, to more complex problems, like levels of poverty that make committing crimes seem like the only option in some situations, he said.

“As a city and a society, we force people to make this choice between letting them or the kids go hungry or taking the risk to be able to feed them,” Braunginn said. “Sometimes it might just be better for society to let that person go that committed a crime, especially if it’s something as simple as theft or drug dealing … Those are more symptoms of ills in society than it is ills of that individual.”

Grayson pointed out the 45 percent of the people in jail because of what she calls “crimes of poverty.”  

“If they had an attorney, a job that was more than minimum wage, if they had assets and a daddy or mommy to call, they would not be in jail,” Grayson said. “Our jail should not operate as a poor house.”

YGB leads educational sessions with community members to bring attention to systematic racism in Madison and Dane County and its connection with mass incarceration.

They argue that the problems are rooted in a history of slavery and Jim Crow discrimination. 

“It’s just the same thing with different paint,” Braunginn said. 

In On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City UW-Madison sociology Alice Goffman traces the mass imprisonment of black men dates back to the War on Crime and the War on Drugs in the 1980s. Goffman argues that city policies focus law enforcement resources on minority communities. This leads to disparities in arrest rates, which become entrenched over time.

UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication Professor Douglas McLeod said mass incarceration and police violence are often oversimplified in the media.

McLeod pointed out that news coverage of protests against disparate policing in Ferguson focused on the appearance and behavior of protesters rather than issues like poverty and the increased presence of guns on a national scale. 

“When media go to cover protests, they tend to gravitate towards events,” McLeod said.  “You see a disproportionate amount of attention on factual details of the protest rather than underlying issues.” 

This makes it a challenge for groups seeking to push the discussion toward root causes.

YGB members are focused more on those underlying issues. It has received much attention for its work against an $8 million renovation of the Dane County jail and its demand that 350 black people be released from jail. That number, they say, would bring the Dane County jail population more in line with the county population – African Americans are 4.8 percent of county residents and 43 percent of its jail system.

YGB wants to see money that would be spent on the jail directed to community-led resources to de-incarcerate Madison and Dane County in two ways: making sure those who have been released from jail stay out, and decriminalizing poverty.

“We know incarceration doesn’t work – it’s punitive,” Braunginn said.  “People that are institutionalized continue to stay institutionalized.  We lose money, and if we invest in people and communities, we actually get a return on our investment back.”

YGB also seeks to prevent the Madison Police Department from over-policing black communities. 

“Police are very proactive in our neighborhoods meaning they are profiling people, harassing people and running plates,” Grayson said.  “In our white counterpart neighborhoods, we don’t have that sort of police presence.  They are more reactive, meaning when you need them, you call them, and we would like that same police motto.”

Braunginn pointed out that Chief Mike Koval and Mayor Paul Soglin have both stated that the majority of arrests happen at physical locations like Walmart and the mall, not in neighborhoods. 

“Yet they continue to defend the over-policing of black neighborhoods when the majority of arrests don’t happen there,” Braunginn said.

The issue of racial disparities in Madison and Dane County is widespread and deeply rooted within society.  Braunginn, however, thinks that Madison has the ability to set an example for the nation.

“Madison and Wisconsin have been built upon progressive and radical ideas, so this is right inside what we claim to be about,” Braunginn said.  “We’re leading the way in racial disparities, so why can’t we, as a city, uphold to our progressive ideals and lead the way in addressing its racial disparities?”

McLeod, who has been researching media coverage of social protests for more than 15 years, said it was too soon to comment on YGB’s political impact in Madison, but he sees a high potential for raising awareness and bringing issues of poverty to the forefront of the public agenda. 

“Crime and poverty are linked, especially in communities [like Madison] where there is a polarization of incomes,” McLeod said.  “The problem is that we have a cycle of poverty that disproportionately has affected one race over the other, so that conflates income and race.”