Invest in people, not punishment

As we enter the sixth week of protests against racism and police violence in Milwaukee, our city is grappling with measures to increase police accountability and promote a new vision for what public safety looks like in schools and neighborhoods. Thankfully we don't have to look far. Organizers across the country have spent years figuring out what this kind of transformation could look like.

In 2017 I had the honor of facilitating the development of Milwaukee's first comprehensive violence prevention plan known as the Blueprint for Peace. It is often referred to as "the people's plan" for preventing violence because it was created with leadership from thousands of community members whose lives are most directly impacted by violence. These individuals poured their pain, ideas, and imagination into the content of this plan.

Youth activists and mothers who'd lost children to gun violence contributed as experts alongside the mayor, county executive, business leaders, philanthropy, and the superintendent of schools.

In 2015, we saw a significant spike in non-fatal shootings and homicides. Wisconsin had the second-highest Black homicide victimization rate in the country in 2016.

The launch of the Blueprint in 2017 coincided with a subsequent three-year decline in homicides and non-fatal shootings. Although 2020 is off to a tragic start - the COVID-19 pandemic has hit our Black and Latino communities hard, and we have endured two mass shootings and an increase in domestic violence - we are committed to continuing to do everything possible to slow the pace of gun violence in our city.

As youth, families, elected officials, and activists work to build a world where public safety is produced by access to resources, services, and opportunity, the Blueprint for Peace contains specific strategies that embody this vision. But coming up with resources for preventing violence has never been easy.

The vast majority of funding for community safety has always gone toward studying or reacting to the problem instead of preventing it. It is impossible to put a price tag on prevention, but it's clear that what has been allocated at the federal, state, and local level is not enough.

If we can invest in stopping a young person from being unintentionally shot or a mother from being unnecessarily killed, or any other form of violence that harms an individual, a neighborhood, a school, a community, I can't put a price tag on that. It is clear that our country has not equitably and fairly invested in prevention to the extent that we've invested in cops, cages, and coffins. What I want to see is a country that's committed to preventing pain and loss, instead of managing it.

We know what it takes to prevent violence. It takes quality housing, after school programs, and access to quality health care. It takes putting outreach workers who "interrupt violence" before it happens on the street.

It takes applying restrictive use of force policies in policing. It takes putting community members in the lead when it comes to developing and implementing solutions that work. It also takes investments in the kinds of things that give people real opportunities, like better schools and living wage jobs. It shouldn't take a pandemic to stop people from being evicted from their homes (temporarily) and from having their water and gas turned off.

At all levels of government, the response to the coronavirus showed our country can make policy at breakneck speed and come up with the funding for it. What's stopped us from creating community safety hasn't been a lack of plans or a lack of ideas or a lack of research. It's been a lack of will.

The world that we're born into doesn't have to be the world we die in. We can actually shape it. We can influence it. We can change the conditions that undermine what a healthy community should look like.

I've seen families who've experienced the greatest pain imaginable - the loss of a child to community violence - heal themselves and their neighborhoods by channeling their pain into activism for change. As I watch the protests in Milwaukee and around the country, I know this is the dawn of a new day. A dream whose time has come. A demand that won't be denied.