An Interview with Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes: A Perspective on Madison Crime (Part 1 of 2)
Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes leads the police force in an environment of changing societal values, politics and metropolitan growth.
by Jonathan Gramling
When Chief Shon Barnes became Madison Police Chief in 2021, Madison was still in the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic. As people were confined, for the most part, in their homes, they became more acutely aware of, it seemed, every crime committed within and outside of Madison’s city limits. It can also be attributed, according to Barnes, to the department’s transparency and openness when investigations are happening. It is also due to a complexity of incidents — some dangerous and some maybe not — that get lumped together in a category and in the fear of the public consciousness. Take shots fired, for example, which immediately conjures up people shooting guns at each other.
“The truth is our incident of shots fired is down 17 percent year-to-date,” Barnes said. “What that means is that there are less incidents where people are actually firing their weapons. That is really a tribute to the community, number one, and the police being where they need to be and attention to specific hot spots. Some of the incidents that we have seen have been in open fields where there is no one who could be an intended target. That certainly counts. And we are trying to figure out if that is someone test firing or is that a place where people go to have fun. We’ve seen instances of exchange of gunfire and we are trying to get more information on what we call small group violence. We are certainly looking at that. But the number of incidents of shots fired is down 17 percent.”
In a city whose annual homicides hover in the single digit category, every homicide generates a lot of attention so that they become “celebrated” events, in Barnes words. But the circumstances surrounding homicides are complex too.
“Not all of our homicides were gun related,” Barnes said. “But the majority of them were. One of the major categories was domestic. About 40 percent of our homicides we’ve had this year — we’ve had 10 — were domestic related. It’s very difficult to sometimes intercede with that. That’s why we always encourage people to report domestic violence at any level.”
Another category of celebrated cases is when people shoot at each other.
“What people normally look at are people who are struck by gunfire because to me that is obviously an attempted homicide,” Barnes said. “Those numbers of people who are struck by gunfire are down 40 percent year-to-date here in Madison from last year. So what that really suggests is we have seen some cases where gunfire was increased meaning the number of shots fired were increased. We’ve seen incidents where we have over 40 shell casings on one incident. That obviously was on a homicide. With at least two of them, we know we had over 30 shell casings. So that is extremely concerning to me. But that doesn’t mean that we are not moving in a direction where we are seeing reductions. That is one metric and I would assume that it is for me to be one of the most important metrics because you cannot replace someone’s life or if someone is hurt or maimed that certainly affects them and their families. But I would suggest that when it comes to crime, we look at a variety of crimes that we think affect the overall fear of safety and the overall perception of safety here in Madison.”
And in Barnes’ view, it is the celebrated cases that impact people’s overall assessment of crime and they impact people long after the actual case has come and gone.
“I’ve worked in a city where prior to me getting there, there was a young girl who was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting,” Barnes recalled. “Her grandmother was injured as well. And it was 2-3 years prior to me getting there. And the community still wasn’t healed. Sometimes when you have those important celebrated cases like that, it takes people a while longer to see that crime is a myriad of things.”
But while the community’s perception of crime may be shaped by the celebrated cases, Barnes has to be concerned with violations of all of the statutes in Madison’s ordinances.
“I have to be focused on stolen cars, which are down 22 precent year-to-date and down based on our four-year average,” Barnes said. “I have to look at theft from auto, which is also down year-to-date. I have to look at residential and commercial burglaries. We’re showing reductions in every category with the exception of homicide and aggravated assault. The definition of aggravated assault is kind of varied. That could be a bar fight where someone picks up a bottle or a bar fight where someone pushes you down and you fall and hit your head and have to be hospitalized. So I broke down the aggravated assault to see what is related to gunfire and those are down 40 some percent. Aggravated assault numbers are your angry people in angry places. And so those are sometimes difficult to predict. But we do our best.”
Next issue: Vehicular and other violations