Police-Racial Issue Arises in Wake of Mass Murders : Crime: Milwaukee activists are concerned over high proportion of black victims. Some criticize officers’ response.

The city’s grief over a grisly murder spree was compounded Sunday by questions of whether authorities could have stopped the killer sooner and concerns that race played a part in the lack of responsiveness.

“What do you do when the people that are supposed to be protecting us are now letting us die?” demanded the Rev. LeHavre Buck, a black community activist and pastor of the Church and Kingdom of God in Christ.

“It hurts you to your soul that this tragedy has come into our community,” he said Sunday. “You want to cry. You want to holler. You want to blame somebody for this pain. We didn’t need death. We’ve got enough of that already.”

Blacks are dissatisfied by reassurances of Mayor John Norquist and Police Chief Philip Arreola that they are sensitive to the needs of all residents following revelations in the Jeffrey L. Dahmer mutilation murders.

Dahmer, 31, has admitted killing and butchering 11 males in his apartment. Nine of the victims were black and one was a 14-year-old Laotian boy, who was seen naked and bleeding on May 27 outside Dahmer’s apartment.

Neighbors called police, but the boy was allowed to go with Dahmer after Dahmer convinced them his companion was an adult homosexual partner involved in a domestic spat after he had too much to drink.

Neighbors and community leaders said police did not heed their complaints because they are black.

Meanwhile, authorities in Ohio said Sunday that Dahmer told detectives his first victim was an Ohio hitchhiker he brought to his parents’ house and killed with a barbell 13 years ago.

Dahmer told authorities he murdered Steven Mark Hicks, dismembered his body and buried it, Summit County Sheriff David Troutman said at a news conference.

“We feel at this time it may have been his first,” Troutman said.

In a three-hour interview with Ohio authorities Saturday, Dahmer identified a photo of Hicks and drew a map of his parents’ former home and grounds pinpointing where the remains were buried, Troutman said.

Authorities planned to dig Tuesday on the wooded, two-acre property in nearby Bath Township, Troutman said.

Ohio authorities questioned Dahmer after the house’s current owner learned about the Milwaukee slayings and gave police a human bone he had found while doing landscaping work a year earlier, said Bath Township Police Chief Bill Gravis.