‘Reach out. Let us support you.’
Community members call for peace after fatal shooting
Two days after a 17-year-old was shot and killed on New Year’s Day in Milwaukee, around 40 community members and violence prevention workers assembled for a call for peace Tuesday.
Standing in a parking lot on the 3200 block of West Villard Avenue where the shooting occurred, speakers pleaded with the public to intervene when they see problematic behavior from their own family members, neighbors and other loved ones.
That means talking to them and holding them accountable for creating “the havoc and chaos in our neighborhoods,” they said. It means identifying domestic violence situations and connecting those involved with resources. It means forgetting about any stigma associated with asking for help.
“If anyone is listening, we’re asking you to join these efforts and part of these efforts,” said DeShawn Ewing of the city’s Office of Violence Prevention. “I know ya’ll don’t want your baby boy, your grandson, granddaughter locked up. But let’s give them the support they need so they can be ones who help make this change in our community as well.
“I’ll speak out for the Black community: we have to stop shunning individuals from getting that mental health support they need. We need to push it, we need to encourage it.”
Milwaukee just finished its third consecutive year of unprecedented levels of homicides and gun violence, breaking its homicide record again with a preliminary total of 215 lives lost, according to the Milwaukee Police Department and Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office.
The call for peace came less than 48 hours after the first reported homicide of 2023. The victim was identified Tuesday as 17-year-old Steven L. Perkins by the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office. Police said two other males – ages 16 and 22 – also suffered gunshot wounds and were later arrested.
Vaun Mayes, a community activist, said Perkins had been active in some of the community events Mayes organized when Perkins was younger.
“We need consistency in what we’re doing,” he said. “When this pandemic started, we lost access to a lot of those young people that we were consistent with. That’s unacceptable.”
Reggie Moore, the director of violence prevention policy at the Medical College of Wisconsin, said the hard work of a range of organizations and residents had already had an impact on the Old North Milwaukee neighborhood, where Tuesday’s call for peace and Sunday’s fatal shooting occurred.
He said the area, which has long struggled with gun violence, saw a 36% decrease in homicides and a 20% decrease in nonfatal shootings from 2021 to 2022. Since 2020, homicides decreased 25%.
“Most of the gun violence that happens in this neighborhood are not a result of the residents in this neighborhood and no neighborhood in this city should be plagued by gun violence,” he said.
From 2016 to 2019, homicides in Milwaukee dropped 30% and were well below the previous record of 165, set in 1991 as a crack epidemic engulfed cities across the country.
Since 2020, Milwaukee and the rest of the nation has dealt with elevated, if not historic levels of gun violence. Criminologists and public health officials locally and nationally attributed it to a combination of the effects of the pandemic, damaged police-community relations from the murder of George Floyd and increased gun carrying.
The primary factor behind roughly a third of all homicides every year are unknown, according to the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission, but the most commonly identified factor is arguments, accounting for roughly another third of all homicides annually.
Officials have said poor conflict resolution skills mixed with increased gun carrying have driven much of the city’s historic gun violence.
Meanwhile, about 16% of homicides were related to domestic or intimate partner violence last year, according to police data. Earlier in 2022, officials said too many victims appeared to have been isolated from outreach efforts.
It’s those trends that have pushed public safety officials to continually stress the need for residents to act on the problematic behavior they witness, by either mediating disputes peacefully on the spot or asking for help.
Lynn Lewis, the program director for Milwaukee’s team of violence interrupters, called 414Life, implored residents to reach out for support.
“Milwaukee, this cannot and should not be the norm,” Lewis said. “Gun violence is not our story. There are a plethora of resources here. Reach out. Let us support you. Let us engage with you. Let us show up on your porch. Let us show up to your child’s school. Let us help you mediate.”