The Milwaukee Police Department's troubled Crime Data System was a victim of lack of management, project oversight and lousy training, according to an audit by the city comptroller's office. That's a familiar finding from that office when it comes to police projects.

The Data System earned infamous status when the public became increasingly aware that the MPD could not produce crime statistics for nearly a year. Ald. Michael Murphy finally asked for an audit of the $7.3 million system. MPD has withheld some $1.1 million to the system's contractor, Tiburon, because of "incomplete performance," notes the audit.

The system was supposed to be part of a $39.7 million computer upgrade in the department's new Third District station, a project itself that came in almost $30 million over budget.

The audit also discovers that five years after the system installation was started "important system functions sought and software purchased by MPD are still note operational or are currently underutilized."

MPD would not give a timeline for the project's completion and the comptroller's office declined to speculate on how long time and cost overruns will continue.

The audit also notes that the system's rising cost was not adequately disclosed to aldermen in the budget process, a practice which has been exposed lately at City Hall in projects such as the Canal Street expansion and the Third District Police Station itself.

Column Accused of Character Assassination: State Rep. Don Pridemore (R-Hartford) has taken such exception to my characterization that his views on racial disparity in incarceration rates is myopic, he took the time on the taxpayers' dime to send out a press release over the state political wires attacking OnMilwaukee.com and calling this column "slanderous." Pridemore is obviously not a lawyer.

The representative asserts that the key to stopping the racial gap in incarceration rates is due to the number of single-parent families among the African-American community in Milwaukee. This column wrote that looking at that factor as a major issue is simplistic. Besides "slanderous" he called our assessment "shameful."

"If I am wrong, show me data! If you disagree with the facts I have stated, then refute me -- but refute me with facts, not rhetoric!" he writes.

The cycle of poverty which leads young men into the penal system can't be simply solved by having two parents. After all, it is a fact that 50 percent of all marriages -- white and black -- end in divorce. We could cite facts related to segregation, lack of public funding for schools, blocked access to health care, lack of driver's licenses and a transit service that prevents low income people from getting to jobs as other parts of the problem, but there isn't enough bandwidth to do so.

River Development Resurrected: On Feb. 11 a group seeking to build a complex that caters to mentally ill along the Kinnickinnic River was told by the City Plan Commission that it should look for more suitable sites for the project, after environmentalists raised questions as to whether such a building would be the best use along the already highly-developed river.

Three days later the group asked the Commission to put their project on the agenda for the March 3 meeting.

Developer Cardinal Capital wants the city to approve a change in zoning on a two-acre parcel along the river near 6th Street and Rosedale so it could build housing and offices for the Our Space Foundation and the American Red Cross. Cardinal Capital builds affordable housing, taking advantage of tax credits offered by the state to do so.

Armed with a much slicker Power Point presentation and a speech by company president Erich Schwenker, the commission was told that the company had done its due diligence for two years in looking for suitable -- and for it, profitable -- properties for the complex known as Empowerment Village.

Schwenker said the opposition of Empowerment Village was akin to NIMBYism and that the same mindset would argue that the art museum shouldn't have been built because it blocked the view of the lake.

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