As officials meet to discuss violence, shootout takes place outside
Pastor prays for action, not just conferences
On Monday morning, a standingroom crowd of social workers, therapists, clinics, university researchers and criminal justice officials crammed into the basement of a church on Milwaukee’s west side.
They were holding a regular brainstorming session on strategies to treat the epidemic of psychological trauma that overwhelms social agencies across Milwaukee and disables much of its workforce — a toxic side-effect in a city with near-daily exposure to
violence, abuse, abandonment and drugs.
As if to drive home the point in a way that no one could miss, a volley of gunfire rang out in the street outside Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, even as the meeting was in progress.
In his vestibule upstairs, Pastor Patrick Keen heard the shootout between a gunman and a team of federal agents. Police quickly sealed off the street with yellow “DO NOT CROSS” police tape. TV crews arrived.
Monday’s nonfatal shooting underscored how traumatic violence occurs with numbing frequency in Milwaukee, almost like background noise.
Keen, who had opened Monday’s meeting with a prayer, came back downstairs, asked for the microphone and led a second prayer.
Heads bowed. In a city caught in a downward spiral of poverty and dysfunction, Keen prayed for guidance to find ways to act and to heal — and not just hold endless conferences.
“We have to stop talking about it,” Keen prayed. “Working hands are holier than praying lips.”
The shooting also added to the urgency of the work of the coalition, which calls itself SWIM — Scaling Wellness In Milwaukee. SWIM has been meeting since January.
SWIM belongs to a new school of public health researchers, who argue that distressed communities cannot tackle the generational cycle of abuse, dropouts, unemployment, suicide, violence and addiction unless it can find a way to treat the invisible scars of neurological trauma, one individual at a time.
Whether in a foreign war zone or at home in the United States, trauma researchers argue, the sight of a bleeding bullet wound can inflict post-traumatic stress disorders that are equally debilitating — aggression, depression, anxiety, addiction, worse.
That’s why conventional efforts, like make-work jobs, often won’t break the city’s cycle because those interventions don’t treat the root neurological causes, they argue.
The circumstances of Monday’s shooting remain under investigation. As of Thursday, details remained sketchy. What is known is that agents for the U.S. Marshals task force coincidentally were in the neighborhood conducting surveillance involving an unrelated fugitive when a gunman opened fire.
St. Joe’s offers an invitation
Shortly before the gunfire, SWIM’s newest members had introduced themselves to the overflow crowd. To the surprise of many, they represented Ascension SE Wisconsin Hospital’s St. Joseph’s campus in the Sherman Park neighborhood.
Fresh in everyone’s memory was an announcement in April from the money-losing medical complex that sent ripples of panic across the city. St. Joseph’s sprawling campus, already onethird vacant, said it was prepared for another round of cuts in its medical services.
Speculation immediately ensued that Ascension Health, the St. Louisbased chain that owns and operates St. Joseph’s, is in the process of a slow-motion shutdown of the entire 1.1million-square-foot facility. Its absence would leave yet another a crater-sized vacuum of basic health and human services in the heart of one of the nation’s most impoverished big cities.
A tidal wave of civic backlash ensued, led by Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Ascension backtracked, saying it had put its planned cuts on hold.
Refuting the rumors of a shutdown, St. Joseph’s officials now suggest that St. Joe’s has potential to play a new and radically different role in the high-trauma city.
On Monday, St. Joseph’s invited members of the SWIM coalition into talks to see if they can fill unused space on campus with trauma-responsive practitioners, services and agencies. The St. Joseph’s “vision” is to re-purpose the unused space in order to create a “wellness village” that could include services for mental and behavioral health as well as addiction, said Reggie
Newson, vice president of government affairs and chief lobbyist for Ascension Wisconsin, which operates 23 hospitals in the state.
“We’ll meet with anyone, anytime, anyplace,” Newson said. Working with a national consulting firm, St. Joseph’s wants to draft a blueprint “to treat a person’s total health.”
St. Joseph’s plans remain vague. More community listening sessions are planned, Newson said. But there is no ambiguity about the anchor role St. Joseph’s plays in the city’s urban center and the economic condition of the community surrounding the Catholic medical facility.
No hospital delivered as many babies
Built in 1928 and expanded repeatedly since, the hospital rode the crest of the city’s prosperity to its peak 50 years ago. These days, the hospital abuts one the most economically ravaged enclaves within the city. It’s a mile from the once-industrial 30th Street corridor, a north-south succession of shuttered factories that in places looks like a canyon of industrial graveyards and barbed wire.
In the last century, no other hospital delivered as many babies as “St. Joe’s,” which to this day is called “the baby hospital,” a resource for the area’s uninsured and poor mothers. St. Joseph’s also has the busiest emergency department in the state, according to its own staff.
The hospital, which primarily serves patients covered by Medicaid and Medicare, lost a total of $81.9 million in the 2012 through 2016 fiscal years, based on the most recent data from the Wisconsin Hospital Association.
“I want to emphasize — St. Joseph’s campus is not closing,” said Newson, who ran the state Department of Workforce Development for Gov. Scott Walker before he joined Ascension.
“We are looking at public and private partners,” Nichole Gladney, director of community services at Ascension Wisconsin, told SWIM. “We are the safety net hospital.”
Getting to ‘that broken child’
“A Time to Heal,” a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel series published last year, explored entire neighborhoods within Milwaukee where exposure to traumatic experiences is an everyday fact of urban life.
The Journal Sentinel series showed that trauma and economic decline are interrelated and self-reinforcing, creating populations that are so traumatized that the local workforce is incapacitated.
Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, near West Wisconsin Avenue and North 30th Street, occupies one of Milwaukee’s high-distress districts. It serves as hub for Central City Churches Inc., an ecumenical organization of eight congregations.
The circumstances of Monday’s shooting remain under investigation. As of Thursday, details remained sketchy.
What is known is that agents for the U.S. Marshals task force coincidentally were in the neighborhood conducting surveillance involving an unrelated fugitive when a gunman opened fire.
“In response to a threat posed by the suspected shooter, members of the task force fired their weapons, striking the suspect. The suspect received medical care at the scene until he was transported to a local area hospital.”
Both Milwaukee police and the U.S. Marshals Service are conducting investigations, both agencies said without adding details.
After the SWIM meeting, Annemarie Scobey-Polacheck, director of corporate philanthropy at Johnson Controls Inc. who is active in SWIM, found herself waiting in the church basement until police allowed her to drive out of the parking lot.
This is why we’re meeting, she mused. Often when it comes to a gunman, Scobey-Polacheck said, “somewhere inside that person is a broken child. The idea is to get to that broken child before they have a gun.”
SWIM was launched in January by the president of Marquette University, Mike Lovell, whose campus is only a few blocks from Our Savior’s Lutheran Church. Commenting on the St. Joseph’s proposal, Lovell said:
“We really feel like this is an opportunity.”