City looks to expand program

Ceasefire could grow to second neighborhood

Milwaukee officials brought their pitch for funding Ceasefire, a violence interruption program, to business and nonprofit leaders in the Greater Milwaukee Committee during a discussion of the city’s overarching violence prevention plan.

Ceasefire is based on the Cure Violence model, which involves training and paying trusted insiders of a community to anticipate where violence will occur and intervene before it erupts. Those interrupters typically work in an eight-to-10 block “hot spot” zone in neighborhoods.

Milwaukee will launch Ceasefire this year in the Old North Milwaukee neighborhood with $280,000 in city funding and $100,000 from Bader Philanthropies.

Reggie Moore, director of the city’s Office of Violence Prevention, said the city would need another $280,000 to bring Ceasefire to a second neighborhood this year.

“Our goal is to ensure that the community has the resources, and when I say community not just the folks outside this room, but all of us are involved in this issue,” Moore told the Greater Milwaukee Committee Monday.

Ceasefire supports the first goal of the recently-released Blueprint for Peace: “Stop the shooting. Stop the violence.” The plan takes a public-health approach and focuses on 10 priority neighborhoods identified by high rates of homicides, nonfatal shootings and assaults. The Office of Violence Prevention is housed within the city’s Health Department.

David Muhammad, the office’s program manager, cited academic studies showing drops in homicides and nonfatal shootings in other cities that have used the same strategy.

“Among community residents, though it is not a law enforcement strategy, it actually increases the confidence of residents in law enforcement,” Muhammad said, citing that research.

Ceasefire is similar to another grassroots effort in Milwaukee called Safe Zones, which began in 2015.

Safe Zones “didn’t have the support that was necessary and didn’t necessarily make the institutional changes,” said Common Council President Ashanti Hamilton.

“That’s why it was necessary to begin almost anew, fresh,” Hamilton said.

But the Safe Zone effort did appear to have an effect. The Garden Homes neighborhood was “consistently in the top five neighborhoods for violence” but no longer is, Hamilton said.

The decline in crime came as Safe Zones and other strategies took hold in that same neighborhood around the same time, he said.