Election fraud is exceptionally rare: Over the past decade in Wisconsin, it has been prosecuted fewer than 200 times, or about once for every 163,000 ballots cast.

And within that tiny universe, the most common reason for criminal charges is not double voting or voter impersonation, it’s a voter’s probation status, a Wisconsin Watch analysis of every Wisconsin election fraud case since 2012 found.

The analysis, with data compiled by Court Data Technologies, also found Black Wisconsinites, most of them from Milwaukee County, are even more overrepresented in election fraud prosecutions than they are in the court system overall.

The Wisconsin Watch analysis is the most comprehensive accounting of Wisconsin election fraud cases to date. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, includes in an online election fraud database only 35 cases since 2012.

“The allegations are out of scale with the rate at which there are actual crimes committed by voters,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Barry Burden, who runs the Elections Research Center. “It’s not that there are no crimes committed by voters …but they’re just minuscule compared to the number of allegations.”

The specter of even a scant amount of election fraud has been used to justify the state’s voter ID law, Republican efforts to restrict voting options during the pandemic, and former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election results.

Yet none of the dozens of GOP “election integrity” proposals would help prevent or detect the most common voting infraction: people who, knowingly or not, vote while still under Department of Corrections control.

The overheated rhetoric over fraud — and the threat that any voting mistake could lead to jail or probation — can be enough to dissuade a person from voting, said Christopher Uggen, a University of Minnesota sociology professor who co-authored a book about felony disenfranchisement.

“And that’s not to say necessarily that anybody who raises the issue of voter fraud is engaging in these efforts,” he said. “But I do think there is an element, at least, who is more cynically and actively trying to suppress the vote and may raise doubts in people’s minds about the negative consequences of them going out and voting.”

More evidence that fraud is rare

Between Jan. 1, 2012, and spring 2022, Wisconsinites cast more than 31 million ballots in 48 elections, but only 192 prosecutions for election fraud.

Of those, there were 40 cases that involved the kind of fraudulent voting of the type banned everywhere, such as voter impersonation.

In 20 cases, election workers, volunteers or candidates were charged. The most recent and high-profile example is a now-former Milwaukee clerk who requested military absentee ballots be sent to a lawmaker under fake names just before November’s election.

In seven cases, voters used improper addresses to register; three cases involved noncitizens voting; and two involved disorderly conduct at a polling place.

More than half of the cases — 109 — involved people voting or registering to vote before their probation ended. And 39 of those came from Milwaukee County.

“There is not a significant number of fraudulent votes being cast,” said Matthew Westphal, the Milwaukee County assistant prosecutor who handles election crimes. “The fact that we get referrals for illegal voters or fraudulent voters is indicative of the fact that the system is working, because it is catching those people who are voting fraudulently.”

The Wisconsin Elections Commission does an audit after each election to see if anyone ineligible due to their probation status voted. Cases are referred to local prosecutors, and additional investigation is likely needed.

Court data show at least 52 people received sentences that went beyond fines and fees; only six were ordered to serve more than a month in jail.

Few cases of double voting, voter impersonation

Voter fraud cases in Wisconsin include a Fort Atkinson man who voted twice in the 2012 gubernatorial recall election against then-Gov. Scott Walker — once in his voting district in Fort Atkinson and once in the nearby town of Koshkonong, where he used to live. Wisconsin Watch is not naming him and another defendant because both told authorities they didn’t know they were violating the law.

He is one of just 21 people charged with voting more than once in an election in the previous 10 years.

Another anti-fraud measure enacted in Wisconsin requires voters to present a photo ID to vote. It was signed in 2011, but legal challenges delayed implementation until 2016.

Burden said the state’s voter ID law was “probably the most significant effort to try to combat either perceptions of vote fraud happening or actual crimes.” However, the only crime it is designed to prevent is voter impersonation.

Of the 192 election fraud prosecutions from 2012 through spring 2022, only five dealt with voter impersonation — with just one of those coming prior to the ID law taking effect, according to the Wisconsin Watch analysis. Those five include the case of Harry Wait, a Racine County political activist who turned himself in to authorities in 2022 after requesting absentee ballots for elected officials to show such fraud was possible.

Critics of Wisconsin’s voter ID law and other restrictions or hurdles to voting have said such measures are not preventing much fraud — but they are keeping many people from voting.

“Voter suppression has been applied differentially throughout the nation’s history,” Uggen said. “And a threat of cracking down on illegal voting can have that same chilling effect.”

Probation the most common case

Two-and-a-half months after his release from prison, a Milwaukee man went to a polling place in November 2018 with his mother.

He didn’t go along planning to vote, according to court records, but once at the polls, his mother told him he was eligible. He recalled hearing about the government overturning the rule banning people with felony convictions from voting, so he registered that day and cast a ballot.

Two-and-a-half years later, he was charged with a felony for providing false information to an election official. The case was straightforward because he had checked a box declaring he wasn’t on probation.

Six months later, he pleaded guilty, and a judge ordered him to pay court fines and fees.

That's what the typical election fraud prosecution in Wisconsin has looked like over the past decade, Wisconsin Watch found.

State law bans anyone convicted of a felony from registering or voting until they’re “off paper,” meaning they’ve completed probation, extended supervision or parole.

Bill would ban voting until fines paid

A bill introduced in February by state Sen. Duey Stroebel, R-Saukville; Rep. Shae Sortwell, R-Two Rivers, and 13 other GOP lawmakers would bar voting until potential voters have paid “all fines, costs, fees, surcharges, and restitution, and have completed any court-ordered community service.” A similar law passed by Florida’s GOP-run Legislature in 2019 keeps hundreds of thousands of felons — who regained voting rights in a 2018 statewide referendum — from voting.

In a statement to Wisconsin Watch, Stroebel said probation and restitution are as much a part of someone’s sentence as incarceration.

“Fundamental fairness demands such debts to society be paid if that person is to be treated the same as the vast majority of Wisconsinites who didn’t commit a felony,” he said.

However, the bill doesn’t include additional safeguards to prevent someone with a felony conviction from casting a ballot, such as improving the system poll workers have to check before such a person registers and votes. Sortwell’s office said the Wisconsin Elections Commission should issue rules to clarify election documents and inform local clerks to reflect the changes in voting eligibility.

Uggen said many states are moving to ease voting restrictions on people with felony convictions. Confusion about eligibility is common among formerly incarcerated people, even probation officers or election workers, according to court records and interviews.

One way to reduce confusion would be to establish a clearer line for eligibility, such as allowing people to vote after incarceration ends, which happens in Illinois, Indiana and 20 other states.

“It's increasingly hard to justify disenfranchising those who are fit to be in the community in every other way,” Uggen said.

Racial disparity in the cases

Black Wisconsinites make up just 6.8% of the state’s population, but 25% of defendants in election fraud prosecutions, the Wisconsin Watch analysis found. Westphal said he doesn’t review demographic information when deciding whether to charge someone, but acknowledged his office is aware of disparities in whom it charges.

Keisha Robinson, deputy director of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities Milwaukee, said Wisconsin Watch’s findings don’t surprise her. Felony disenfranchisement cases, she said, have ripple effects for years.

She recounted the story of a woman who got nine months in jail in 2007 after voting while still on probation, which she didn’t know was a crime.

“When people heard about her being charged and having to do jail time, there were lots of (people saying) ‘That’s why I don’t vote,’” she said.Reporting for this story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. The nonprofit Wisconsin Watch (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with WPR, PBS Wisconsin, other news media and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by Wisconsin Watch do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.

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SPECIAL REPORT: Extreme heat puts city in double jeopardy

August 27, 2020 by Bridget Fogarty

Diane Green, a 54-year-old resident of Milwaukee’s Northwest Side, stands outside the MacCanon Brown Homeless Sanctuary, 2461 W. Center St., as she waits for a fan. The agency distributed hundreds of fans to residents in the 53206 ZIP code this summer.

Twenty-five summers after a deadly heat wave hit Milwaukee, the city stands at the intersection of two public health crises: COVID-19 and climate change. Is Milwaukee ready for future extreme heat?

Diane Green is resourceful in the summer. She has to be.

On most hot days, the 54-year-old resident of Milwaukee’s Northwest Side wakes up before sunrise, turns on her oven and cooks a day’s worth of breakfast, lunch and dinner for herself, her 28-year-old daughter and her two grandchildren.

“I try to get all the oven stuff out of the way” before the heat hits, she said. Even with four plug-in fans whirring around her house, cooking in the daylight would make an already hot summer day unbearable.

Once the sun is shining, she keeps the lights off and her fans on. She might find a shady spot to sit outside, but that is rare. It’s cooler for her to stay inside all day if she can.

Summer heat feels different depending on where you live in the city, and Green resides in one of Milwaukee’s most vulnerable locations during excessive heat.

The concrete infrastructure on the city’s North and South sides traps heat and re-emits it more than natural landscapes. These pockets of heat, better known as urban heat islands, produce a climate of their own on hot days and can make it nearly impossible for residents without quality air conditioning to cool off.

“The heat makes me tired,” Green said.  And it makes other people she knows agitated or angry.

Especially this summer.

The Milwaukee County heat vulnerability index map. Click map for full view with explanation.

Many of the neighborhoods that are vulnerable to excessive heat are home to African American and Latinx Milwaukeeans who have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus. Fallout from the pandemic has left some residents unemployed and worrying about utility cutoffs or evictions – not to mention wondering when they will get a federal stimulus check.

In any other year, Green would cool off in the air-conditioned Milwaukee Public Library’s Center Street branch at 2727 W. Fond du Lac Ave. But libraries — like most other cooling centers in the city — closed indoor operations in March when the coronavirus began to spread in Milwaukee.

And finding a place to stay cool in daytime heat is only half the battle.

“The heat at night is terrible,” Green said.

On hot nights, she sets her fan in the window and tries to ignore the mosquitoes that come in and bite her as she falls asleep. “I’ll wake up and be sweating — like someone poured water on me.”

By and large, the coronavirus has made it even harder for more vulnerable residents to stay cool this summer.

The 1995 heat wave

Though dealing with a pandemic during a hot summer has been new territory for the city, extreme heat is not a new issue for Milwaukee.

Jeffrey Jentzen still remembers standing in his office in July 1995 as an overwhelming number of bodies were brought in. As the medical examiner for Milwaukee County, even he wasn’t prepared for the four days that would become one of the deadliest events in Milwaukee’s history.

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 Images from a televised report released in 1995 by TMJ4. News (Photo provided by TMJ4 News)

“The heat was so subtle, you didn’t see it coming,” said Jentzen, who conducted the investigation of at least 91 deaths caused by the heat wave. Research shows many of the deaths could have been prevented.

As daytime temperatures climbed to 103 degrees, and high humidity persisted, it never cooled down at night.

Despite timely warnings by the National Weather Service and local news, officials left residents with little to no information on how or where to cool off.

Now, extreme heat is considered a health emergency — it’s the No. 1 weather-related killer in Wisconsin. When the National Weather Service sends out a heat advisory, the Milwaukee Heat Task Force acts on its Excessive Heat Event Coordination Plan.

Made up of almost 40 government agencies and community organizations, the group provides a community-based, coordinated response to alert residents of oncoming heat and to increase access to cooling centers.

But the coronavirus poked holes in the city’s preparedness for this year’s heat, leaving lower-income residents to make do with severely limited options for cooling off.

COVID-19 and climate change

Then there’s the issue of climate change.

Studies show global warming is accelerating the frequency and severity of heat waves — like the one Milwaukee saw in 1995 — worldwide.

And summers in Milwaukee are only getting hotter. 

By 2050, it is likely the number of extremely hot days experienced in Wisconsin will quadruple, said Daniel Vimont, a UW-Madison professor and scientist at the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts. His group engages citizens, decision-makers and scientists around the state to foster solutions to climate change.

“Hot nights, warm days and increased humidity all work together to produce dangerous situations for our health,” he said.

Dr. Caitlin Rublee, an emergency medicine physician at Froedert Hospital and public health physician at the Medical College of Wisconsin, has seen the health consequences when patients don’t have access to quality cooling in their homes.

In the past month, she’s cared for critically ill patients experiencing both COVID-19 and extreme heat, using many of the same hospital resources to treat the two.

“We are at the intersection of two public health crises: COVID-19 and climate change,” Rublee said.

As future summers will bring an increase in heat waves, she said, any evictions and utility cut-offs will put residents at even greater risk of life-threatening heat related illnesses.

Wisconsin’s policies on utility and eviction moratoriums don’t protect the health of residents in a changing climate, she wrote in the Wisconsin State Journal.

“But we can create ones that do,” she wrote. “Now is the time to create policies that protect people and build resilience against the health threats of climate change.”

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After spending time in Minneapolis watching protests unfold after the death of George Floyd, Annia Leonard returned to Milwaukee prepared to join similar marches in the city.

But the activist said she was met with resistance.

“Minneapolis was like a war zone,” she said. “Being there made me want to be louder about this issue, but when I attended protests in Milwaukee, there wasn’t space for me.”

Over the past few months, Black women in Milwaukee have participated in protests – organizing, educating and advocating for change. Yet some told NNS they feel invisible in the movement.

Many said they feel left out of decision-making processes, leadership positions and the overall narrative of the importance of Black lives.

Leonard, for example, is a youth organizer with Uplifting Black Liberation and Community Vision, or UBLAC. UBLAC is a coalition led by Black women, trans people and queer people with the goal of Black liberation.

Despite her experience in activism and organizing, Leonard said, she still finds herself being ignored and pushed aside.

But this hasn’t stopped Leonard from attending as many protests as she can. She even helped plan the Black Women’s Emancipation March in June.

The case for inclusion

“When you start a movement about the importance of Black people and you don’t highlight all Black people, you limit how far that movement can go,” said Monique Liston, the chief strategist at Ubuntu Research and Evaluation, a Black women-led consulting firm for education, policy and advocacy.

Liston said she has experienced firsthand what it feels like to be invisible erased from a space.

“As an organizer, I’ve walked into spaces with all the necessary information and tools needed to proceed and have had to wait for my male counterparts to arrive to even be noticed,” she said.

The costs of invisibility

Those interviewed stressed that the impact of such incidents takes a toll.

“When Black women are not acknowledged in their work or lived experiences, or even in their death, it makes them seem easily disposable,” said Shavonda Sisson, the creator of the Love on Black Women Fund, a people-driven fund that supports Black women in need.

“It makes it easier for us to be victimized. It makes it easier to ignore our physical and mental health needs,” she said. “It even validates why we aren’t paid properly for services.”

Sisson used the death of Breonna Taylor as an example. Taylor, a 26-year-old African American emergency room technician, was killed by police in Louisville, Kentucky, in March.

“When Black men are murdered by police, there is immediate action, but that doesn’t happen for Black women,” Sisson said. “Breonna Taylor was brought into the conversation only after we rallied for George Floyd.”

Elle Halo, another activist, added: “When we start excluding groups, we miss imperative topics that need to be addressed.”

“We forget to address things like how HIV . . . domestic violence or incarceration are plaguing our communities.”

She said she sometimes fights to be included in male-dominated spaces.

“Me being able to wiggle my way into a space isn’t the same as having my voice heard or my opinion respected in that space,” she said.

“Black women and femmes are nurturers and caretakers,” Halo said, adding these attributes are “vital to any space that they are in.”

‘The power of Black women’

Ajamou Butler, the founder of Heal the Hood Milwaukee, an organization committed to healing communities through words and actions, said men have to do better.

“I understand the power of Black women because I literally wouldn’t exist without one,” he said.

Having Black women in leadership is a must, he said.

“I work with many young girls who have experienced trauma,” he said. “While I am qualified to deal with that, I have witnessed Black women do it better.”

Butler said men must do a better job in helping to ensure the voices of women are heard.

“We have to pay attention to when we are in rooms and there are no women there,” he said.

‘The movement belongs to no one’

Organizers all agree that for any movement to be successful, woman must be present—and appreciated.

Camille Mays, a local activist and mediator, said she’s experienced being undermined in her role as an organizer.

“I had a male organizer tell me that the activist of the year award I won was a pity award,” she said. “I work every day doing this work, and my male counterparts don’t even see me.”

Mays said change can’t happen without all voices being heard.

“Until we can sit down and collaborate with one another, we will not see the change we are hoping to create,” she said. “We have to bridge the divided, put our egos to the side and work together.

“The movement belongs to no one,” she said. “We are all in this together.”

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LGBTQ+ voices from within the Black Lives Matter movement

Through marches, murals and speeches, LGBTQ+ members of the Black Lives Matter movement are leading crucial conversations in the community.

July 9, 2020 by Matt Martinez 

The LGBTQ+ community is more than an ally to the Black Lives Matter movement.

In fact, two of the movement’s founders identify as queer. 

LGBTQ+ activists across the nation have been painting murals, organizing marches and speaking at rallies. Their message? Issues addressed by BLM affect the LGBTQ+ community, too. 

We spoke to some of the activists in Milwaukee’s LGBTQ+ community who are leading the charge.

The people in this story are referred to by their personal gender pronouns. To find out more about personal gender pronouns and their relation to gender identity, visit the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s LGBTQ+ Resource Center page.

‘We’ve got to realize that homophobia is a part of white supremacy’

Solana Patterson-Ramos

Solana Patterson-Ramos is a community organizer and political campaign coordinator. 

Patterson-Ramos worked on the Lena Taylor for Mayor campaign and is involved in the Democratic party in Milwaukee. They are gender queer and pansexual.

Patterson-Ramos said people from all walks of life and every part of the country need to be involved in BLM.

“There needs to be someone yelling ‘black lives matter’ to let people know that it’s a real issue,” Patterson-Ramos said. “You might not know that’s in your town, you might not know it’s in your community or in your relationships with people around you.” 

Patterson-Ramos said there are different levels of comfort with inclusivity within the movement. Not everyone has the same level of understanding of queer issues, but there is always room for education.

“There’s no one set of leaders,” Patterson-Ramos said. “The movement is not a system like the police departments are. They’re not a system where everybody’s in communication and everybody has the same training and everybody’s going under the same leadership.”

Patterson-Ramos said claims that the movement was not inclusive came from “the opposition” to try and divide. They said its unhelpful to view the LGBTQ+ community as separate from BLM; all Black people share the struggle.   

“It’s about Black lives,” Patterson-Ramos said. “You’re Black, it’s about you.”  

Patterson-Ramos said if you’re not also fighting for LGBT Black lives, you’re not fully in the movement.

“We’ve got to realize that homophobia is a part of white supremacy and that hate against someone that’s different from you is part of white supremacy,” Patterson-Ramos said. 

‘We need to empower cis and trans Black women to do healing justice work’

Elle Halo

Black trans activist Elle Halo wears many hats. She’s a writer, community organizer and advocate. She primarily works on AIDS prevention and awareness as well as organizing youth LGBTQ+ groups.

Halo has spoken at, hosted and otherwise been involved in several BLM events, including the Black Women’s Emancipation March last month. 

“We need to empower cis and trans Black women to do healing justice work and we need to pay them equally to do it,” Halo said.

For Halo, “healing justice work” means “uplifting communities and addressing social justice issues in any way that intersects with public work.”

“I think being a teacher is healing justice work,” Halo said. “I think being a doctor is healing justice work. I think being an activist or an organizer is healing justice work. But I also think motherhood is healing justice work.”

Halo said she favors abolishing the police and prisons. She questioned how the police could be “protecting” citizens when “there’s absolutely no proactive work being done.”

“They’re only responding in a militarized way to the things that have already happened in our community and the lives that are already gone,” Halo said. “You can’t go shooting up places because people have been shot.” 

Halo also questioned how effectively the police use taxpayer money. 

Halo said healing justice workers have the tools to help people re-entering society from prison and could pick up the slack for police departments. 

“I really believe that Black women effectively act as an individual whole state-of-the-art prison re-entry system and facility every time a Black man gets out of jail anyway,” Halo said.

Halo said she has been using her platform to try to uplift those voices as well as providing support for other trans women through the group Sisters Helping Each other Battle Adversity, or SHEBA. She said it’s a common feeling among trans women that they have to “sell their bodies” and “sell themselves into the system” in order to gain attention for their issues. 

“Something I see in my international trans community is people just having to go to such extremes for survival when we’re more than adequate by ourselves,” Halo said. “We don’t all have to start organizations. We can build and change the makeup … of the people and the staff and the boards of organizations that are already servicing our communities.”

‘Now we’re asking for systematic change’

Broderick “Montell Ross” Pearson

Broderick Pearson was the lead organizer of last month’s March With Pride for Black Lives Matter protest. Pearson said he felt that because of shared discrimination, the LGBTQ+ community “should be one of the first groups standing in support and solidarity for Black Lives Matter.”

Pearson performs masculine drag as Montell Ross and is well known in the drag community.

March With Pride began with a Facebook post and quickly snowballed into a 2,500-person march. Along with other allies in the LGBTQ+ community, leaders were able to get the word out and organize the full protest in just a few days. 

Pearson said internalized oppression can be damaging to the movement.

“It’s very hard,” Pearson said, “for some Black gay people to stand behind the Black Lives Matter movement when you walk outside your home and you’re being called a lot of derogatory names and harassed and possibly even putting yourself in danger of violence from your own people.”

Pearson was involved in a virtual town hall to have a conversation with community leaders about inclusion and acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community. 

“When something happens in our community,” Pearson said, “whether you are trans, gay, bi, bisexual, non-identifying, gender non-conforming: if we notice injustice happening against us, we … need to understand the support that is needed as a community of Black individuals, not just the gay community.” 

Pearson referred to the recent killing of a trans man, Tony McDade, by police in Tallahassee. A 2014 National Coalition for Anti-Violence Programs study found that transgender people are seven times more likely to experience physical violence in encounters with the police.

“There has been no media attention for his situation and there has been no movement because of his situation,” Pearson said. “So for me, for the Black gay community, for the LGBT community, we want situations like that to have just as much noise made … as we’re making for George Floyd.” 

Pearson said BLM has been brought “an entire different level to the nation” as compared to the past. 

“Now we’re asking for systematic change,” Pearson said. “Now we understand what systematic racism is. Now we understand what defunding the police and putting that money into a marginalized community, specifically communities of color, will do for us.”

‘There hasn’t been enough attention for the queer and trans community’

Angel Vega

Angel Vega was a co-organizer of the March With Pride for Black Lives Matter protest. Vega has experience organizing parades and helped to gather people for the march.

Similarly, Vega is involved with Pueblo MKE, a coalition of “Brown People for Black Lives Matter” made up of Latinx allies to the movement. He is also a teacher.

“There hasn’t been enough attention for the queer and trans community,” Vega said. “Because again, they’re also impacted by this, sometimes even more so than a straight or cis man or woman.”

Vega said he’s often hidden his identity as a gay man, but that he’s put aside those feelings to embrace his whole identity for the movement. He said that he wants to respect his allyship as a Mexican American by remembering his place in the movement and leaving plenty of room for others. 

Vega said he views BLM events as an important opportunity to educate the community on anti-blackness. He said having conversations about colorism and other issues is important and everyone needs to combat anti-Black biases.

Vega said he wants an end to institutionalized racism and oppression, which he says are “symptoms of a decaying system, which is capitalism.” 

“To me, it’s like being in a society where we’re working for each other,” Vega said. “We’re not working for the cis white man … the capitalistic one percent. For me, it’s about disbanding the police, disbanding ICE, doing restorative practices for people who are incarcerated, for teachers to practice restorative practices.”

‘So many things that we need to address”

Annia Leonard

Annia Leonard is a youth organizer with Uplifting Black Liberation and Community Vision, or UBLAC. UBLAC is a coalition led by Black women, trans people and queer people with the goal of Black liberation.

Leonard said she has been actively showing support and solidarity with BLM. She said that she wants the LGBTQ+ community to be vocal about their unity with BLM and that she has challenged people to participate

Leonard said part of the work she does involves examining different aspects of Black lives and identity. She is planning to host workshops and initiatives on “collective understanding and collective unity” about what it is to be Black in America.

Leonard expressed the importance of protesters taking care of themselves, and that she has been contemplating “more calculated and strategic ways of showing up” to avoid burnout. She mentioned the importance of having a home space where people feel loved and comforted. 

“It’s really about having a place outside of everything happening out on the streets,” Leonard said. 

Leonard also said the work needs to continue on long-term, systemic issues. She’s working to address “systemic oppression tied to capitalism” as well as local concerns.

“There’s still so many things that we need to address that we can’t put all our energy into reacting to one life or two lives.” Leonard said. 

‘The fight isn’t over’

Jaqueline Tavares

Jaqueline Tavares is an artist and photographer. She is a Mexican American ally to the movement, and she wants to respect the boundaries of allyship.

“I don’t want to overstep …” Tavares said. “I say this a lot, but I think it’s important that people know that I’m here to amplify other people’s voices in the movement.”

Tavares especially wants to elevate the voices of Black women, trans women and LGBTQ+ women through her art. As a bisexual herself, she wants to stop them from being “erased or overlooked.”

Tavares helped put up murals around the city. She said in terms of promoting the movement, art can be an easier avenue to learning more than reading and research.

“It’s something that people can see,” Tavares said. “It’s right in their faces and it’s like ‘Oh, hey this is going on. These people are getting murdered’ or ‘These are the people that have been fighting for others’ rights.’ That’s one way art can be helpful.”

The most recent mural was put up on Locust and Holton. The mural featured black female and LGBTQ+ activists, such as Marsha P. Johnson, a Black trans woman who started the Stonewall Riots.

Tavares said members of the LGBTQ+ community reached out to voice concern about march leader Frank Sensabaugh, who goes by Frank Nitty, being on the mural after it was found he used anti-LGBTQ+ language in the past. Nitty has since apologized for the comments. 

Tavares said that while progress has been made, there’s still a long way to go for herself and for the movement.

“The fight isn’t over,” Tavares said. “There are still trans people getting killed. There’re still people in the LGBTQ+ community getting killed. There’re still Black women and Black people in the community getting killed. This isn’t the end of it. We have to keep pushing forward.”

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Last of three parts

Editor’s note: Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service has changed the names of youths in New York’s justice system upon request to ensure their safety and privacy. 

NEW YORK—Although they already face obstacles, the real challenge for young people in New York’s youth justice system comes when they return home, those who work with them say.

“When kids are in placement, they get all these tools, but when they leave, there’s not always people there saying, ‘Hey, stop, think about that,’” said Rohee Ramnath, a mentor for the nonprofit Rising Ground. “But now you leave placement, and you come here.” 

“Here” is an “aftercare” mentorship group for youths after they finish their time in a Close to Home facility at a community school in the Bronx. Ramnath is formerly incarcerated himself and is now dedicated to helping youths in his neighborhood turn their lives around. 

The Close to Home initiative moved all of the state’s young people from state-run youth prison facilities upstate into community-based programs, and, in some situations, into small residential care homes with limited security measures, in the city.

The organizations that run the Close to Home facilities are all required as part of their contracts through New York City to provide some kind of aftercare for youths. Some homes have mentorship groups. Others have family therapy or other programs.  

“For anybody who’s looking to do this work, that’s the key,” said Lisa Crook, vice president of justice for youth and families programs at Rising Ground. “Start with aftercare.” 

Initiatives such as Close to Home have gained the attention of leaders in Milwaukee County in the year and a half since the state legislature passed a bill to close Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake youth prisons and replace them with smaller regional facilities, and they will come into question as a state committee allocates funds to replacement plans across Wisconsin in the coming weeks.

In Milwaukee, youths leaving Lincoln Hills or Copper Lake—or even those transitioning home from the Vel R. Phillips Youth Detention Center or a residential care center—have needs when they get home, said Sharlen Moore, the co-founder of Youth Justice Milwaukee, which pushes for alternatives to locking up young people.

Moore has worked with youths, families and community members for more than two years to press for community-based alternatives to incarceration. Her organization is getting ready to launch Youth Justice Wisconsin to push for these kinds of changes at a state level.

“A lot of the young people’s needs aren’t being met once they’re out,” she said. “Young people need mentors, stable housing, jobs and access to transportation to rebuild their lives.” She said these kinds of things should be part of the conversation about how to best replace Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake.  

The ‘game-changer’

Meanwhile, in New York, Crook said having the kind of consistent support aftercare provides—and making sure that youths have a supportive adult relationship once they transition back into the community—has been a “game-changer.” 

“They really need that person they know they can trust,” Crook said. “They need to know that we’re there for them and that the people they were connected with can answer their phone when they call.” 

The Rising Ground aftercare program is modeled after a broader mentoring initiative in New York City called Arches. The initiative is a partnership between the Department of Probation and different nonprofit organizations.

While Ramnath runs his group for youths after they’ve spent time in a facility, Arches is essentially a prevention effort to connect youths and young adults with a supportive community to keep them from getting further into the system. A young person’s probation officer can refer them to an Arches mentorship group, and their time on supervision could be shortened, or their records could be sealed upon successful completion on a case-by-case basis. 

Arches and programs like it are run by people considered “credible messengers”—people like Ramnath who have had direct experience in the system themselves and can reflect on and talk about the way they transformed their lives.

“We’re past just relating to the kids,” Ramnath said. “They don’t just need someone who can relate to what they went through and what they’re experiencing now even. We’re past that. They need compassion, understanding. They need to know somebody’s on their team. They need to know how to love.” 

According to a 2018 study by the Urban Institute, Arches participants were significantly less likely to be reconvicted of a crime than youths on probation who did not participate in the mentorship program. 

Such mentorship programs are an example of a community-based alternative considered to be a part of a “continuum of care” for youths in the justice system that Milwaukee leaders often mention when they talk about potential reforms. 

‘They actually want to help us’

Darnell Davis, who participated in an Arches group in the Bronx, now helps lead one.

“I realized, wow, these people actually want to see us do right,” he said of his surprise when he first started attending the group. “They don’t want to see us in jail cells or unemployed. They actually want to help us. When I found that, I knew I needed to keep coming.” 

“These are relationships I’ve never had,” Davis said. 

Kevin Quiroz is the Credible Messenger Justice Center liaison at Community Connections for Youth, a nonprofit in the Bronx. He trains other organizations and mentors to run successful mentorship groups.

Quiroz said the key to success is strong collaboration between the city-run system and grassroots organizations based in the neighborhoods where the young people come from.  

“It’s taking money that was once used to incarcerate individuals and is now used to invest in these community programs, these transformative mentoring programs,” he said. 

Back in Milwaukee 

In Milwaukee County, leaders in the Department of Health and Human Services are working to move kids home from Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake to community-based programs in Milwaukee.  

By working through the courts to find alternatives, the county has reduced the number of Milwaukee kids in the youth prisons from 56 youths in May 2019, to 33 youths in August 2019—a 41% reduction.  

Mary Jo Meyers, director of the Milwaukee County Department of Health and Human Services, said they began this process of moving kids back to the city because they didn’t want the county’s reforms to wait on the state to close Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake.  

“We wanted to start using what we know works right now,” she said. “What does Milwaukee County need to do to reduce the footprint of incarceration for young people, especially young people of color?” 

Mark Mertens, administrator for the Milwaukee County Division of Youth and Family Services, said they brought the numbers down by looking at each individual situation to determine what worked best.

Youths have transitioned home or into other local programs. Some have been moved to the Vel R. Phillips Youth Detention Center in Wauwatosa to participate in the Milwaukee County Accountability Program—a partnership between the county and nonprofit Running Rebels. Others were referred to social services through the county program Wraparound. And others were referred directly to Running Rebels’ mentorship and supervision programming. 

As it continues to implement reforms, Mertens said Milwaukee County will continue to utilize Bakari Center as a residential option for youth in the justice system.  

The center—which opened earlier this year— is a therapeutic residential treatment center for boys. It uses individual and group therapy to teach young people how to regulate their emotions and make thoughtful decisions.

Milwaukee County leaders have said alternative programs and models like Close to Home are some of the inspiration behind their recently submitted $24.9 million proposal to the state for the local piece of the plans to replace Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake. 

“We’re asking what can we learn from what we’re doing now and from the places that we visited like New York and Washington, D.C.?” Myers said. 

Last week, Milwaukee County updated its plan to reduce the number of beds it plans to have for youths from 54 to 40. It also reduced the proposed costs of renovations for facilities from $41.8 million to $24.9 million.

The county’s new proposal doesn’t include building any new facilities but rather suggests renovations and new programs. It seeks to renovate the Vel R. Phillips Youth Detention Center to feel more homelike, with added green space and accessibility for families, and suggests the county will collaborate with, lease and renovate existing residential facilities in the county through partnerships with “community partners” that haven’t been identified yet. 

The rest of the requested funding—in addition to separate county funding—would be dedicated to investing in personnel and staff training as well as creating more programs to serve as alternatives to incarceration, including mentoring programs. 

Other counties in Wisconsin have also proposed plans for local youth justice programs—including building new facilities and expanding detention centers. A state grant committee will determine who will receive funding in October. 

Meanwhile, as part of the law that will close Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections plans to build a youth prison in Milwaukee on Teutonia Avenue and one in Hortonia, Wisconsin—separately and independently of the county’s plan.

The two prisons would be for young people who commit more serious offenses and are deemed “Serious Juvenile Offenders.” Additionally, the state plans to significantly expand Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center, which is a secure correctional facility in Madison, increasing the number of beds across the state for youths in the justice system. 

Moore and other stress that now is the time for Milwaukee to explore other alternatives to incarceration.

“We’re hoping that we start doing some things differently,” said Moore of Youth Justice Milwaukee. “Not locking young people up just because it’s the easy thing to do, but that we literally start practicing best practices and stop locking up young people.” 

How we reported this story: Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service reporter Allison Dikanovic received a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network to travel to New York City earlier this summer to report this story. She visited two Close to Home youth justice facilities, two mentoring groups and met with various stakeholders in the system, including youths, parents, nonprofit organizations, advocates, researchers and city officials to learn about changes that New York made to its system.

Check out the entire series

Read part one of series. Read part two of series.

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Second of three parts

Editor’s note: Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service has changed the names of youths in New York’s justice system upon request to ensure their safety and privacy.

NEW YORK — Four teenage young men stand in a circle around a long wooden dining room table. Staff members, some of whom wear polo shirts and on-trend khaki pants with elastic around the ankles—matching the kids’ attire—stand in the circle as well. Colorful tissue paper decorations hang from the ceiling, and taco toppings are spread out on the table ready for lunch.  

After waiting for their court date in a more traditional detention center, the young men around the table were placed in this Close to Home facility in Brooklyn operated by the nonprofit Rising Ground. It is one of the small facilities for six to 12 kids that replaced the state’s youth prisons, and it’s meant to resemble a homelike environment. The idea is a shift from the traditional idea of “corrections” to make the space and program less punitive and more constructive, said Lisa Crook, vice president of justice for youth and families programs at Rising Ground.

Initiatives such as Close to Home have gained the attention of leaders in Milwaukee County in the year and a half since the state legislature passed a bill to close Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake youth prisons and replace them with smaller regional facilities, and they will come into question as a state committee allocates funds to replacement plans across Wisconsin in the coming weeks.

Before sitting down for lunch, each person completes the sentence out loud, one after the other, “I’m checking in and I’m feeling … ”

“Blessed.” 

“Relaxed.” 

“Focused.” 

“Shy.” 

“Sad.” 

Someone intercedes, “Do you want to talk about it?” 

“No.” 

The circle continues. 

“I’m checking in, and I’m feeling optimistic.” 

No one skips a beat, a sign the youths obviously are familiar with the practice.

This type of check-in and open discussion about feelings is an integral piece of the model of care this home embraces, Crook said. They follow what’s called the Missouri Model. The model focuses on building trust and accountability between youths and staff and relies heavily on group therapy. Anyone, staff or youths, can call for a “circle” at any point throughout the day if they want to talk a situation through or check in as a group.

In order to get a contract from the city’s Administration for Children’s Services to run a Close to Home facility, provider organizations such as Rising Ground are required to have a specific, evidence-based model of care that guides their work. The providers say this has contributed to their homes’ success, but leaders from some grassroots organizations counter that these types of stipulations have become a barrier to smaller, locally trusted organizations that seek Close to Home contracts. 

Felipe Franco, the deputy commissioner of New York’s Administration for Children’s Services, said the point of this requirement is to have a unifying philosophy so all staff and youths work within the same structure.

‘We work on being nonjudgmental’ 

After their circle, the young people took their seats and goofed around at lunch, laughing with staff. 

Earlier this year, Nathan, 13, spent about seven months at a different Rising Ground Close to Home facility in the Bronx that operates similarly to this one in Brooklyn. 

He said his relationships with staff made all the difference for him while in Close to Home.  Nathan was placed there after multiple incidents of robbery.

“I mean nobody wants to be locked up, but staff made days better and stuff,” he said. “Staff made it feel like home sometimes, even though I still knew that it was not the crib.” 

Crook said a quality staff that youths can genuinely relate to is essential to the success of the Close to Home model. 

“The kids will be the first to tell you if a staff member is just in it for a paycheck,” she said. “The kids can read through your BS in like five seconds.” 

Crook said many staff members come from the neighborhoods where the homes are located and where the youths are from. Many have had experiences in the system themselves or have faced similar circumstances like the young people they supervise. Staff members know the major events and the always- changing nuances of the neighborhoods—including gang dynamics.

“The kids know our staff are coming from a lot of the same places and have experienced a lot of the same things, and they can see, ‘Oh, there’s a different path. I don’t have to hang out on the streets,’ Crook said. “That’s huge, and kids weren’t getting that when they were in Buffalo or Syracuse or wherever they were before.” 

Edwidge Michel, a group leader for a Close to Home facility in Queens, which is run by a different provider, said the role of staff in these programs is “not correctional.”

“It’s not being a security guard,” Michel said. “You’re actually constantly being therapeutic with a young person and trying to have a breakthrough or even plant seeds of hope so they can move on and be successful.” 

Crook and Michel said both homes focus heavily on training staff on how to best speak to youths and how to manage their own emotions while on the job.

“We are respectful of what the young people have to say and understand that emotions are not wrong or right,”  Michel said. “We work on being nonjudgmental.” 

This perspective is necessary for building positive relationships, but also for maintaining a safe community within the home, Crook explained.  

It’s a concept Franco described as “safety by relationships.” 

Sometimes subtle things can be perceived as a threat and could make a young person feel unsafe, on guard or combative, Crook said, but knowledgeable staff pick up on those things.

“If a young person doesn’t feel safe, they’re either going to fight or flight,” Michel said. “We want them to think, ‘I don’t have to worry about safety, so I can now focus on treatment.’” 

Nathan agreed.

In limited-secure homes such as this one, school is provided in-house, but in most of the Close to Home facilities, which are “non-secure,” the youths attend a special school offsite. In both cases, the New York City Department of Education runs the schools, so all of the young people’s credits transfer to whichever school they attend when they return to the community. Most youths stay in a Close to Home facility for just under a year, followed by court-ordered aftercare programming.

“I didn’t have to be ‘on’ when I got here,” Nathan said. “It takes me a long time to trust people, but I didn’t have to come in with my guard up.” 

Building a community

Each night, the youths meet in a room lined with black leather bean bag chairs and inspirational quotes affixed to the turquoise walls for “group.”

This regular therapy meeting is the heart of the model of care, where the young people process their emotions and decision-making through daily reflections, discussions and activities in community with each other. 

“The positives I got from placement were learning how to control my frustrations and becoming more patient,” Nathan said. “I was not a patient kid. I wanted things when I wanted them. That slowed me down, being in there. Maybe not slowed, but it calmed me down.” 

Bryson, 15, and Antoine, 14, were staying in the Close to Home facility in Queens run by Michel, and they said that group provides an opportunity for them to learn from each other.

“It’s a good environment, an open space. We can talk about anything, different topics,” Bryson said. “Like if anything is a concern, we can speak about it and know how to fix it and put it into play a different way. The most important thing is that everybody respects each other and respects the feelings.” 

After group, the youths can make phone calls home or to loved ones. The length and frequency of the calls is a privilege that’s incentivised in the program. Youths can earn more or longer calls with excellent behavior. 

Nathan said this helped him stay motivated.

“You earn stuff, so then I had something to lose,” he said. “When you’re locked in, you don’t have anything to lose. If they’re not talking about sending you home, if they just set your court dates back and stuff, you’re just going to give up. You’re not going to care.” 

“That’s why I kept getting locked up, because I didn’t care,” Nathan revealed. 

The same approach applies to home visits. 

As youths progress through the program, they can earn time away from the facility and with their families, ranging from a few hours to a whole weekend. 

“I was seeing my family more often,” Nathan said. “That’s what I’m saying. I had something to lose.” 

Youths just starting the program and youths in the “limited-secure” homes don’t get to leave the facilities, but their families can visit them at least once a week. 

Most of the homes are easily accessible by public transit, but if a family has transportation troubles, the provider organizations will pick bring them there.

The Close to Home facilities also hold regular family events and celebrations, such as a dinner party where the youths cook for their families or an art gallery night where they display their work.

Crook said the goal is for youths to feel they are still an important part of their family and community, even if they’re not living at home at the moment.

In the evenings and on the weekends, different homes have activities that are built into their programming, ranging from book clubs, yoga, cooking classes, basketball and movie nights to hatching chickens, hydroponic growing, music lessons at Carnegie Hall, kickboxing or indoor skydiving. 

‘You’re still addicted to locking up kids’ 

Though advocates say Close to Home programs create positive experiences for young people, some are wary that they are still too similar to past models of youth incarceration.

Ruben Austria started an organization called Community Connections for Youth right around the same time that the Close to Home initiative was beginning. He was an advocate who pushed at a statewide level to close New York’s youth prisons and to ensure resources were invested in community programs in areas like the South Bronx.

Austria said he often thinks that New York could do more to invest in the neighborhoods, families, programs and communities that surround the kids who end up in the system. 

“We’re not doing the most punitive and harsh thing, but we’re also not really investing in communities except in the way of brief treatment and temporary supervision,” he said. 

Austria said Close to Home “was both an excellent development and also a huge missed opportunity in certain ways because of the absence of a community capacity-building strategy.”

He warned places like Milwaukee not to miss the opportunity.

“People get too caught up on ‘Well, where are we going to put the kids?’ and end up creating just a kinder, gentler reincarnation of youths incarceration,” he said.

Austria said investing in a young person’s neighborhood, family and community will produce the most positive outcomes.

“You might spend millions of dollars on architects and designing the new facilities, but how much are you spending designing and developing the alternatives? You’re still addicted to locking up kids,” Austria said. “It’s just a question of priorities.” 

How we reported this story: Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service reporter Allison Dikanovic received a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network to travel to New York City earlier this summer to report this story. She visited two Close to Home youth justice facilities, two mentoring groups and met with various stakeholders in the system, including youths, parents, nonprofit organizations, advocates, researchers and city officials to learn about changes that New York made to its system.

Friday:  A look at alternatives to traditional incarceration for youths.

Read the first part of series.

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First of three parts

Editor’s note: Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service has changed the names of youths in New York’s justice system upon request to ensure their safety and privacy.

NEW YORK — The walk from a subway station in Brooklyn, New York, to a secure facility for kids in the criminal justice system takes all of five minutes. The route passes by a laundromat, a Chinese takeout restaurant, a bodega with fresh flowers on the sidewalk and a college preparatory high school.

It’s a little different than the three-and-a-half-hour drive from Milwaukee through fields and farms to Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake youth prisons in the unincorporated town of Irma, Wisconsin.

In Brooklyn, the gray stone apartment building is indistinguishable from other homes on the block. A hip-level black gate with decorative trim opens up to a concrete courtyard with a space for recycling bins. Blue stairs lead to a glass-paned locked door. Once opened, another locked door is just inside, an additional yet subtle security measure.

The windows have bars on them that match the aesthetic of the gate. No razor barbed wire is in sight.

Young people whom family courts deem to be the highest risk to the community are placed in this limited-secure facility, right in the middle of a residential neighborhood, across the street from a school.

The front room has two couches by the window and a box of board games for when families come to visit the kids, usually at least once a week.

In the winter, the youths help shovel neighbors’ sidewalks, and in the summer, they help garden, said Lisa Crook, vice president of justice for youth and families programs at Rising Ground, one of the nonprofits that operates these homes.

“There’s this mindset, like ‘oh, you need to be punished for your crime,’ but what I’ve often said is just because we have a homelike setting, and we have therapeutic intervention, does not mean that the kids are not acutely aware of the accountability and what led them to be placed with us in the first place,” Crook said.

“If you have a program that looks institutional and treats a kid institutionally, you teach someone how to be institutionalized,” she added.

In the year and a half since the Wisconsin legislature passed a bill to close Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake and replace the state’s youth prisons with smaller regional facilities, local and state leaders have proposed various replacement plans. Leaders from Milwaukee County—including County Executive Chris Abele—have looked to best practices in places across the country to use as inspiration for changes locally. They have continually referenced New York’s Close to Home reform initiative as a model to learn from.

New York’s approach

Felipe Franco, deputy commissioner for New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, said: “We believe that kids should be served in their homes or close to their homes, and we value that these communities and these families are actually part of the solution.”

This wasn’t always the mindset in New York.

In 2012, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed legislation called Close to Home, which restructured the way New York’s youth justice system worked as a whole. The initiative moved all of the state’s young people from state-run youth prison facilities upstate into community-based programs, and, in some situations, into small residential care homes with limited security measures, in the city.

More robust alternative-to-incarceration programs were put in place to give judges sentencing options that wouldn’t remove youths from their homes. The criteria for who was considered “high risk” and in need of residential placement were changed, with the goal to keep more kids at home and limit the number of youths who are placed in the Close to Home facilities.

For those who the courts decide do need to be placed, these 29 home-like facilities—which can house up to 12 youths but these days usually have fewer than five—adhere to a therapeutic model of care that focuses on shifting the way young people make decisions. 

The emphasis is on family engagement and involvement in the broader community to prepare the youths for returning home. Girls are housed separately from boys. Nonprofits receive contracts from the city to operate the homes, so as the needs change and as the number of youths being placed declines, the city can easily close homes or change their purpose.

The sweeping reforms came in the wake of a declining youth crime rate, a significantly increasing cost of housing a young person in one of the upstate prisons and mounting pressure from advocates as investigations and reports of abuse surfaced from the state facilities. Leaders have acknowledged that the youth prison model they were using was no longer effective for New York’s young people.

Wisconsin’s approach

Just one year before New York passed Close to Home, in 2011, Wisconsin took a drastically different approach to shifting how it handled youths in the justice system.

Rather than shuttering large prison-like institutions and moving Milwaukee youths back to the city, the state closed its correctional facility in Southeastern Wisconsin, Ethan Allen in Delafield, Wisconsin, and transferred all of the youths to Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake.

Since then, in line with national trends, New York and Wisconsin have both continued to experience a decline in youth arrests and residential placement in correctional facilities. They both also arrest and lock up black and brown youths at much higher rates than their white counterparts.

However, other than that, the states’ two approaches have yielded vastly different outcomes.

In Wisconsin, Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake fell into a state of well-documented disarray that has cost taxpayers more than $25 million in legal fees to date. Criminal investigations have opened and closed. Youths have sued for allegations of abuse, injury, sexual assault and neglect at the institution. The facilities experienced severe understaffing and inadequate training. 

Expenses have soared. It now costs more than $144,000 a year to incarcerate each young person at Lincoln Hills or Copper Lake and is expected to surpass $200,000 in the next year. The most recent recidivism rate for youths at Lincoln Hills within the three- year period from 2014 to 2017 was 58.8%, according to the Wisconsin Department of Corrections.

Meanwhile in New York, from 2014 to 2016, only 7.6% of youths violated their probation and 14% were readmitted to a Close to Home facility. From 2013 to 2018, the number of youths placed in residential facilities in New York dropped by 71%, in effect shrinking the whole system. In the 2018 fiscal year, only 154 youths in all of New York City were placed in Close to Home facilities, according to New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services.

But possibly more revealing than just recidivism or a decline in placements, the Close to Home reforms in New York seem to be creating additional positive outcomes for youths, according to a report from the Columbia Justice Lab, a research organization at Columbia University studying justice system reform. In the 2016-’17 school year, 91% of youths in the facilities passed their academic classes. In 2016, 91% of youths enrolled in a community-based program after being released from a facility and 67% successfully completed their aftercare program.

“I think the Close to Home programs they have now are reasonable,” said Nathan, a 13-year-old who completed a placement in a Close to Home facility. “If you’re going to commit a crime, it’s not like you’re just going to get a walk in the park. I’m not saying that it’s lit, but it’s actually reasonable. It’s not like you’re in jail.”

“I really matured when I was in there,” he said. “They taught me how to look at things differently, and it helped me mature.”

Lessons for Wisconsin?

The changes that Wisconsin and Milwaukee make in the wake of Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake closing have the potential to affect the future of some of the state’s most vulnerable youths.

In its most recent application to the state juvenile justice grant committee, Milwaukee County submitted a proposal that in some ways resembles the Close to Home model.

The county’s latest plan includes renovations to existing residential facilities, including the Vel R. Phillips Youth Detention Center, and possibly leasing other spaces in partnership with existing service providers to create 32 total beds for Milwaukee youths placed in residential correctional settings. The plan would also build out more local, community‐based programs to accommodate youths in the system instead of sending them upstate or placing them in correctional settings.

However, the state grant committee has yet to determine which counties will receive funding for their replacement plans.

Other counties across Wisconsin have also applied, and their proposals include building new secure correctional facilities and renovating detention centers.

Additionally, the state Department of Corrections has released renderings of a youth prison with 35 beds that it seeks to build in Milwaukee County for youths deemed “serious juvenile offenders.” The state also plans to build a youth prison in Hortonia and to significantly expand Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center, which is a secure correctional facility in Madison, increasing the number of beds across the state for youth in the justice system.

In New York, Crook stressed the importance of making sure kids are connected to supports in their communities.

“We have to be real,” Crook said. “The kids are going back to the same places they’re coming from, and so they have to learn how to make better decisions in the same communities where they’re at.”

How we reported this story: Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service reporter Allison Dikanovic received a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network to travel to New York City earlier this summer to report this story. She visited two Close to Home youth justice facilities, two mentoring groups and met with various stakeholders in the system, including youths, parents, nonprofit organizations, advocates, researchers and city officials to learn about changes that New York made to its system.

Wednesday: A day in the life of a Close to Home facility.

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Three years ago, unrest in Sherman Park put the neighborhood-and our city-in the national spotlight. But what’s happened to the community since then? That’s the question we seek to answer with a special focus for the remainder 2019. You’ll find all of our coverage here milwaukeenns.org/tag/sherman-park-three-years-later.

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Three years ago this week, unrest in Sherman Park put the neighborhood-and our city-in the national spotlight. But what’s happened to the community since then? That’s the question we seek to answer this week – and our focus for the remainder of the year.

Milwaukee County Sheriff’s vehicles patrol Sherman Park as park-goers enjoy the early evening on Milwaukee’s northwest side. (File photo by Jabril Faraj)

June and July 2016: Tensions build in Sherman Park 

On the evening of June 29, 2016, several dozen youths threw rocks and bottles, damaging property near Sherman Park, including the window of a gas station, a county transit bus and a fence.  City and county leaders publicly disagreed about how to best maintain safety and order in county parks between the police and sheriff’s departments.

Neighbors and community leaders began monitoring Sherman Park independently of law enforcement, helping to break up fights and planning activities for the groups of kids hanging out in the park, such as kickball games and pizza parties.

On July 20, 2016, the operator of the vandalized gas station allegedly fired a gun into the air to scare off a group of youths that had entered and disrupted the store.

August 13, 2016: Day One of protests turn violent  

Protestors clashed with lines of officers in riot gear. Around 10:15 p.m., the BP gas station at North Sherman Boulevard and West Burleigh Street was set on fire and gunshots were fired.  

Fires were set at three other businesses throughout the night—the BMO Harris Bank branch, Jet Beauty and O’Reilly Auto Parts stores—near North 35th and West Burleigh streets. By 2:20 a.m., police announced that order was restored and began reducing the number of officers in the area. 

Brian Sylvas talks with a Milwaukee police officer shortly after a young man was taken into custody. (File photo by Jabril Faraj)

August 14, 2016: Day Two of protests

On Sunday morning, community members gathered near the park and the damaged businesses to clean up the area and distribute food and water. Faith leaders led prayers. Later in the evening, protests turned violent again. Three squad cars were damaged, windows were broken and a car and several Dumpsters were set on fire. Seven police officers and four sheriff’s deputies were injured, and an 18-year-old man was hit by random gunfire.

Response from elected leaders

Following the weekend’s unrest, Mayor Tom Barrett announced a citywide 10 p.m. curfew for youths under age 17. Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr., ordered Sherman Park be closed at night, and sheriff’s deputies raised an orange fence around the park’s perimeter. Clarke also requested a presence from the National Guard.

A teen sits at a picnic table as sheriff’s deputies block an entrance to Sherman Park. (File photo by Jabril Faraj)

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This is the second in a two-part series about Milwaukee Police Department response times. Read the first installment here.

South Side resident Dede Kupper and her husband Dan, a mechanic, woke up on a recent morning to find that their 2012 GMC Denali had been broken into and that thieves had stolen a bag containing $800 worth of tools.  Kupper called the police, and after an hour of waiting, she called again.

“He [the police officer] told me it didn’t sound like $2,500 worth of stuff was stolen, which makes it a felony, so they weren’t going to send a squad. I told them I wanted one sent anyway,” she said.

Three hours later, Kupper said, an officer showed up.

“I don’t think they [police] considered it an issue but to us it was a big deal. Just because your life is not in danger, does that make it not worthy of a police response?” Kupper asked.

Her story is common in Milwaukee, where residents who report nonviolent crimes including stolen vehicles (68 minutes), theft (58 minutes) or theft from vehicle (58 minutes) face a long wait for a police response, if they respond at all, according to Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) dispatch data analyzed by Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Margie Ramirez, who lives near West Greenfield Avenue, called 911 last summer after she heard a commotion in the street and looked out to see a woman ripping her clothes off, running in the street and throwing herself to the pavement.

“I thought she was going to get hit by a car,” Ramirez said. She waited an hour for police to arrive, and when they didn’t show up, called them back, she said.

“They said they had other calls to respond to and never came. I felt like they didn’t even care,” Ramirez said.

In general, police in Milwaukee were slow to respond to many violent and nonviolent crimes, according to an NNS analysis of more than 1 million MPD dispatch records that occurred during the five-year period between 2013 and 2017. The average response time by MPD for all types of calls was 33 minutes in 2017, down substantially from 65 minutes in 2015, but up slightly from 32 minutes in 2013. Calls for assistance from MPD are prioritized by the department to determine what calls get the quickest response, said Assistant Police Chief Ray Banks in an interview following a July meeting in the Amani neighborhood.

The priorities range from 1 to 6, with 1 being the highest priority.

The data shows average response times of more than 45 minutes for nonviolent crimes including property damage (47 minutes), reports of a wanted subject (61 minutes) and graffiti (62 minutes). These crimes might not be considered urgent, but nevertheless affect the quality of life of residents, according to Ald.  Bob Donovan. Donovan described response times in general in the city as “dismal” and criticized the lack of action to improve them.

“We’re heading in the wrong direction,” he said. “What steps have been taken to address these deficiencies? I would argue that very little has been done to address these quality of life issues,” he said. MPD declined to comment for this story. Among the questions was why response times spiked dramatically in 2015.

Ald. Jose Perez said that he and other aldermen have been working with Paulina De Haan, emergency communications and policy director for the city of Milwaukee, to streamline the dispatch process and improve communication between residents and 911 dispatchers.

“Those jobs are tough, and we want to make sure the dispatcher is someone who understands the community and can communicate what information is needed to get a quicker response,” said Perez, during a July interview with NNS.

When that quick response doesn’t occur, it damages trust people have that police are responsive to their concerns, said Sharlen Moore, executive director of Urban Underground, a local youth-led social justice organization.

Tammy Rivera, executive director of Southside Organizing Committee said she consistently hears from community members that police take too long to respond to calls.

“I don’t have a scientific gauge of what an expected response time is, but I do know that many times I hear from the community that it’s been deemed unacceptably long,” she said.

Rivera said that while she believes that people — especially those who are victims of violence — expect an immediate police response, she knows that might not be possible. She also understands why people get upset when police don’t respond or take a long time to do so, including in cases involving property damage.

“It may be because someone’s tire got damaged, but these things can really impact someone’s life and sense of safety. If police don’t show up, then crimes like that end up being underreported because people think it’s not worth calling anymore,” Rivera said. Response times for property damage calls in the 53215 ZIP code, where her organization is located, averaged 41 minutes in 2017, down from 45 minutes in 2016.

Tom Schneider, executive director of COA Goldin Center, a nonprofit in the Amani neighborhood, said while it’s important to note that calls to police necessitate different responses, it is important that the community, as well as the police, work to reduce response times. “People have to be willing to make a call, which sometimes has to do with whether or not they feel the police will respond.”

Response times in Milwaukee are high for several reasons, according to city leaders and law enforcement representatives. They include a shortage of resources for law enforcement, flawed policing strategies that originated under former MPD Chief Ed Flynn, and a high number of crimes and criminals on the streets.

“The number of officers we have currently working our streets in Milwaukee is inadequate,” stated Donovan in an interview with NNS earlier this summer. MPD officers have faced increased peril this year, with two losing their lives in the line of duty since June. Residents have also been shaken by violence in the city, including 19 murders in August, as of Aug. 27.

Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales addressed the violence during a recent news conference, where he outlined his ongoing plans to help stop the bloodshed and improve response times.

“I promised to send 100 officers back to the district by June 1 and accomplished that. This allows officers to be more proactive and respond more quickly,” Morales said. Morales also vowed to continue to hold community listening sessions and improve relations between residents and police, which he said was one of the keys to reducing violence in the city.

Mike Crivello, president of the Milwaukee Police Association, said he expected response times to drop under Morales due to his focus on improving relations with residents and the increase in neighborhood beat cops.

“When police have a smaller area to patrol they truly get to know those people, truly care and are able to respond better. They’re able to better crack down on these quality of life issues that impact residents,” Crivello said.

Still, he added, with limited manpower and high levels of crime, response times will suffer and residents such as Kupper will continue to be frustrated.

“If an action has been taken against me, be it a threat or vandalism, I deserve the attention of the police department as much as everyone else does,” Kupper said. “It’s not fair that … every little noise you hear makes you fearful because somebody might be stealing from you, and there is nothing that will be done about it if you don’t catch them yourself,” said Kupper, who added that she has a concealed carry permit.

Editor’s note: Sophie Bolich and Abby Ng contributed to this story. Matt Schumwinger, principal at Big Lake Data, provided data processing and geocoding. This story has been updated to include three more homicides that occurred since the article was first published.

The post Special report: Residents reporting nonviolent crimes face long waits for MPD response appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

This is the first in a two-part series about Milwaukee Police Department response times. Read the second installment here.

If you are the victim of an armed robbery in Milwaukee and call the police for help, you can expect to wait nearly half an hour for officers to arrive, according to Milwaukee Police Department dispatch data analyzed by Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

NNS analyzed more than 1 million MPD dispatch records that occurred during the five-year period between 2013 and 2017. The average response time for all types of calls to MPD was 33 minutes in 2017, down substantially from 65 minutes in 2015, but up slightly from 32 minutes in 2013.

“I don’t think that’s acceptable at all,” said Ald. Bob Donovan of the response times. Donovan, who represents the 8th District on the South Side, said he found it especially disturbing that the response time for a violent crime such as reckless use of a weapon averaged 74 minutes in 2017. The response to calls for domestic violence averaged 30 minutes, while it took police 29 minutes to respond to a battery.

Ald. Jose Perez, who represents the city’s 12th District,  said it’s not just residents who have to wait a long time for police to arrive.

“I call myself and I have to wait,” Perez said. “We want to get these times down.”

Police responded much more quickly to shootings (6 minutes), fights (12 minutes), and reports of subjects with a gun (13 minutes) in 2017.

The NNS analysis also found that response times vary by neighborhood. For example, someone reporting an armed robbery in 53204 on the South Side last year waited 21 minutes on average, while in 53205 on the North Side the average wait was 54 minutes. The average response time to all types of calls in 53204 last year was 31 minutes, while in 53205 it was 39 minutes.

Milwaukee Police Chief Alfonso Morales declined, through a spokesperson, to be interviewed for this story.

Milwaukee police officers have come under fire for their response times in several high profile incidents in recent years, including the stabbing death of Barbara Killebrew, who called 911 three times and waited 22 minutes for police to respond in late 2014. Six MPD officers were disciplined for their slow response in that case. MPD was also widely criticized for taking three hours to respond to the sexual assault of an elderly woman in 2015.

Assistant Police Chief Ray Banks said responses are dictated by a priority system, which classifies calls into categories from 1 to 6, with 1 being the highest priority.

“If there’s a shooting, that’s a Priority 1 call and will get the quickest response,” said Banks, after a recent meeting with residents in the Amani neighborhood.

According to the data analyzed by NNS, the response time for Priority 1 calls in 2015 (the last year for which priority-level data was available) averaged 21 minutes. Priority 5 calls took an average of 87 minutes in 2015.

Jennifer Morris, who lives on the South Side, said she called 911 last year for help while her ex-husband, who was under a restraining order not to go near her, was trying to kick in her door and threatening to kill her.

“They didn’t show up for well over an hour,” after he’d already left, said Morris. “They [the police] did nothing.”

Banks said residents need to continue calling police to report crimes or emergencies, and to be prepared to provide information that could help dispatchers classify the call’s priority status correctly.

“You might call and report a burglary, but if we know that someone is inside the home then that could push it from a lower priority call to a higher one,” Banks said.

Perez said that he and other aldermen have been working with Paulina De Haan, emergency communications and policy director for the city of Milwaukee, to improve the communication process between residents and 911 dispatchers.

“Those jobs are tough and we want to make sure the dispatcher is someone who understands the community and can communicate what information is needed to get a quicker response,” Perez said.

Lisa Schultz said she waited five hours for police to arrive at her North Side home after her son found the front door unlocked and called 911. Schultz, whose home was burglarized, said she didn’t find out right away about what happened, but police still weren’t there when she got home.

“I called 911 again and told them I didn’t know if someone was still in my house. Several hours after that they finally showed up,” Schultz said.

The average response time for an illegal entry was 57 minutes in 2016, when the burglary at Schultz’s home occurred. It was 33 minutes in 2017.

There are several reasons response times in Milwaukee are high, according to city leaders, law enforcement representatives and others. They include the high number of crimes and criminals on the streets, a shortage of resources for law enforcement and policing strategies that originated under MPD Chief Ed Flynn, who resigned in February after leading the department for 10 years.

Mike Crivello, president of the Milwaukee Police Association, said residents often think it takes officers much longer to respond than it really does, but he believes that response times ballooned while Flynn was at the helm.

“Flynn came out and said that if people are willing to wait hours for their cable man then they can wait for their police officer,” Crivello said. Flynn could not reached for comment.

Crivello said Flynn eliminated or scaled down several specialized units in the department, such as detectives, that acted as “force multipliers” because of their ability to free up beat cops to patrol neighborhoods and respond to certain types of calls. Other “force multipliers,” that were reduced under Flynn were motorcycle and bike cops, according to Crivello.

“Those guys could relieve officers regularly on car accidents because [they] were skilled at that,” added Crivello, who said he expects response times to improve under Morales.

Fred Royal, president of the Milwaukee NAACP, also cited the elimination of specialty units under Flynn as a reason response times increased.

“High-risk units that used to go out and serve search warrants for violent offenders were cut down. All of the drug units were dismantled. The specialty units allowed individuals to build rapport and get to know who the players were, which helped to cut down crime,” Royal said.

The shortage of police officers is another reason response times are slow, Crivello said, blaming Mayor Tom Barrett. Barrett declined to comment.

“No matter how hard you try to reduce response times, if you don’t have the manpower you can’t do it,” Crivello said.

“The number of officers we have currently working our streets in Milwaukee is inadequate for the levels of crime and disorder,” agreed Donovan. While police department budgets have ballooned, police staffing levels have decreased, which slowed response times, he contended.

According to the 2018 city budget, the MPD allocation is $293 million, down from $302 million in 2017 and much higher than the $166 million allocated in 2012.

According to Royal, who once waited more than an hour for police to arrive after a break-in at his home, the issue is less about a police shortage than about policing strategies. He said a high concentration of police officers in certain areas and “stop and frisk” policies, both common strategies under Flynn, contributed to high response times. The city settled a class-action lawsuit challenging the stop and frisk policy in July.

“Our city needs to be focused on better utilization of the police we have,” Royal said.

Still, he said, the only way to solve the problem is to attack it at the root, which would mean focusing on reducing poverty in the city.

“If you give somebody a job they won’t be stealing. If you reduce poverty, you reduce crime and subsequently response times,” Royal said.

Perez said there are jobs in the city for people who want to work.

“I never get phone calls in my office from people looking for work. I get phone calls from people looking for people who are looking for work,” he said.

While Perez agreed poverty is a major issue that must be addressed, another is the failure of the District Attorney’s office to keep repeat offenders off the streets.

“We’re always surprised and upset when there is someone who is a repeat offender and they commit another heinous crime,” Perez said in an interview a week before a repeat offender who was wanted by police shot and killed MPD Officer Michael J. Michalski.

Donovan blames repeat offenders for the increased crime and the resulting slow response times in Milwaukee.

“They [repeat offenders] need to be punished and taken from society for a period of time until they learn their lesson. Then our officers might not be spread as thin as they are,” Donovan said.

Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm said that while he understands the frustration of local aldermen, there is no data drawing a connection between habitual offenders and response times.

“It’s next to impossible to make a connection between inaction at the DA’s office and higher response times. There are so many factors that influence response times. The responsibility falls on all of us to make a community safer,” Chisholm said.

Residents also may have unrealistic expectations for prompt police response times, according to Ian Bautista, executive director of the Clarke Square Neighborhood Initiative.

“People are expecting them to materialize instantly and that’s just not the case when the force is busy trying to prioritize the most sensitive situations,” explained Bautista, who said he often fields calls from residents who complain about police response times.

The problem with slow response times is that when people lose confidence in police they are less likely to report a crime, according to Sharlen Moore, executive director of Urban Underground.

“It impacts the community greatly when residents have lost hope in law enforcement,” Moore said.

“They have been let down far too long,” she added. “Now is really the time for changes to start happening in order for trust to be rebuilt. I’m hopeful that it can be done.”

Editor’s note: Sophie Bolich and Abby Ng contributed to this story. Matt Schumwinger, principal at Big Lake Data, provided data processing and geocoding.

The post Special Report: MPD slow to respond to violent crime calls, police data shows appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Editor’s note: This is one of an occasional series of stories highlighting the health risk — particularly to children — of lead service lines, which deliver water from city water mains to about 70,000 homes in Milwaukee.

Sixteen months after funding was made available to replace lead water service lines at each licensed child care facility in Milwaukee — at no cost to the property owner  — 184 day care centers in the city are still operating with lead service lines.

“Despite all the shake-ups at the Health Department it still seems as if there isn’t a sense of urgency among some over there, sadly,” said Ald. Bob Donovan referring to the slow pace of the replacements.

“I’m sure it’s impacting our kids,” added Donovan, whose district has day care centers operating with lead water service lines.

In December 2016 the Common Council approved a budget that included funding to replace lead service lines at each licensed city child care facility. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is supplementing the funding. In June 2017, 385 child care centers were eligible for a full replacement at a cost of $13,100 each, though that number has now dropped to 347, according to Sandy Rusch Walton, communications manager for the Department of Public Works (DPW). The number fluctuates as day care centers open and close, she said. Of the 347, 184 were operating with lead water service lines as of April 6.

Forty-eight of the 184 have not responded to outreach from the Milwaukee Health Department (MHD) or Milwaukee Water Works (part of DPW) regarding the free replacements. The remaining 136 had either scheduled appointments with MWW or the replacement work had been bid out to contractors, according to Rusch Walton. Forty-six replacements are currently under contract, 40 have gone out to bid, and 50 day care centers have scheduled home visits with MWW, she added.

The city has faced challenges funding the private side of the replacements and lining up contractors to conduct them, said Ald. James Bohl, who has been pushing to reevaluate the strategy for dealing with lead service lines. According to Rusch Walton, the $7,100 cost of replacing the private portion of lead water service lines, which connect to one of the city’s main water supply pipes, is $1 million more than the funding provided to MWW from the DNR. However, a plan is in place to pay for the work with DNR funds and collection of outstanding debt, she said.

“The sooner we replace the (lead service) lines at day cares the better. The quicker that happens the quicker we remediate one area of concern,” said Bohl, who also remarked on the apparent lack of urgency to complete the replacements.

Day care centers are not required to replace their lead water service lines, according to Angela Hagy, director of disease control and environmental health at MHD.

Lead water pipes have been found to decay and cause lead contamination in tap water, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Lead exposure can cause behavior problems and learning disabilities in young children and also harm adults, states the CDC. Last year Mayor Tom Barrett urged Milwaukee residents living in a building constructed prior to 1951, which were typically constructed with lead water lines, to purchase a faucet filter. About 70,000 Milwaukee residents are served by lead laterals, according to DPW data.

The city sent a letter in June to property owners where day care centers are located informing them that it would pay to replace lead water service lines to reduce children’s exposure to lead.  The letter also stated that children under the age of 6 are most vulnerable to lead poisoning and that no amount of exposure to lead is safe. According to that letter, lead is not present in drinking water provided by MWW and it meets all federal guidelines for safety. However, when water stands in fixtures or pipes that contain lead, lead may dissolve into the water, it stated.

According to data provided by MWW, the majority of licensed child care centers operating with lead service lines are located on the North Side, including District 7, which has the most, and District 15, which has the second highest number.

“More needs to be done to protect our children,” said Ald. Russell W. Stamper II, who represents District 15. Eleven child care centers in his district have not responded to city outreach efforts and 24 have either gone to bid or have scheduled appointments with MWW. Nineteen lead service line replacements occurred at child care centers in Stamper’s district in 2017.

Conflicting messages

A Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service investigation found that disorganized outreach efforts and inefficient record keeping by MHD, MWW and the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families have hindered the replacements.

The health department manages outreach to child care facilities and is the initial point of contact, according to Rusch Walton. However, both MHD and MWW are coordinating the lead line removals. NNS found several instances in which day care operators said they never knew the property was eligible for a free replacement and only were informed of the opportunity to pick up free water filters provided by MHD. Several property owners also claimed they never were told that they were eligible to receive a full replacement of lead water service lines at no cost. Property owners must provide consent to conduct the lead service line replacement.

Krystal Rouse, owner of Christyle’s Little Learners, 2442 N. 54th St., said she was offered a water filter in late 2017 and nothing else. Jose M. Castro, who owns the property, said he’d never been contacted by anyone from MHD, but would be happy to have the work done.  Rouse said that her center serves 10 children.

“If they’re going to do something at no cost for the owner that’s fine for me. Maybe they sent (a letter) over to the (day care) and never sent it to me,” said Castro in Spanish. According to information included in an email sent to the aldermen by Jennifer Gonda, superintendent of Milwaukee Water Works, MHD was not able to coordinate a replacement at Little Learners because it had no contact information for Castro. NNS was able to quickly contact Castro after Rouse provided his phone number.

Tabitha Garner, owner of Touching Tender Hearts, 2523 N. 14th St., also said she was offered free water filters from MHD and picked them up in October. Garner, who doesn’t own the building but said she’s been running a child care center there for 25 years, said she was not told the property was eligible for a full replacement. MHD has since reached the owner of the property, Will Sherard, who stated that he wants something in writing confirming that the replacement is free before he agrees to the project, according to notes included with the data sent to council members.

“If we reach a child care facility owner we offer a filter … and ask for the contact information for the property owner to begin the process of getting the facility set up for replacement,” stated Jean Schultz, environmental and disease control specialist at MHD. “The issue has primarily been with facilities where the child care owner is responsive, but the property owner is not. We continue to reach out to these owners by whatever means we have.”

MHD does not track which day care operators have picked up free water filters or those who said they have their own filter, she added.

Stamper acknowledged the challenge of getting permission from property owners to conduct a replacement. He said he and Ald. Milele Coggs have requested that the city attorney look into mandating that owners of properties where day care centers are located have their lead laterals replaced.

Legislation mandating a replacement would not please Michele Quin Wright, owner of Mae Quin’s Family Learn Center, 3703 N. 24th Place. Wright said the day care center, which is run out of her home, serves between six and eight children a day. She acknowledged being contacted by MHD but said she didn’t want the free replacement.

“Once they start digging, all kind of mice are going to come into my house,” she said. I have cases of bottled water; we boil water or let the water run 15 minutes,” said Wright, adding that she also has a filter.

The initial outreach in 2017, consisting of phone calls to Wright and other child care operators, met with limited success, according to Rusch Walton. That effort was followed by sending a letter to property owners in June. Subsequent contacts included phone calls and a strongly worded letter that the department planned to send last month, she said.

Schultz said that property owners — not child care operators — are the first point of contact for MHD. In many cases, MHD was unable to contact either the day care owner or the property owner, as up-to-date contact information was missing from the records provided to MHD by the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families (DCF).

DCF, which licenses all child care facilities in the state, is in charge of collecting contact  information from applicants, according to Gina Paige, outreach specialist for DCF.  Once the facility is licensed, the owners are responsible for letting DCF know of any changes, she stated. Paige said that DCF performs annual inspections to assess compliance with requirements and determine whether information is current. However, it’s not clear when the last inspection of information provided by licensed child care centers in Milwaukee was conducted. Many of the day care centers NNS attempted to contact had phone numbers that were no longer in service.

Another major issue with MHD outreach efforts, according to Bohl, Stamper and Donovan, is that the department never conducted personal visits to any of the day care centers, including those that failed to respond to phone calls or letters and those whose contact information was not up to date.

“There’s been no management, poor management and disjointed efforts at the Health Department and we are now reaping what we sow,” Donovan said.

The data included in the email Gonda sent to Donovan and the other alderman in March contained a list of child care centers that had not responded to phone calls or letters, and invited assistance in reaching them. Donovan, who said he didn’t realized he’d been sent a list until informed of it by an NNS reporter, nevertheless said that the onus is on the Health Department to take the extra step.

“They (MHD) ought to be conducting personal visits to the day cares and visiting the homes of these property owners,” he added.

NNS visited six day care centers that had not responded to MHD or MWW. In each case, someone — including several day care operators who were also the property owners — answered the door. Asked why they hadn’t responded to outreach and whether they understood that the property was eligible for a free lead water service line replacement, most stated that they’d recently been contacted to begin the process of scheduling a replacement  — after NNS asked MHD about its outreach efforts to day care centers. Some stated that they had their own filters and others said they only used bottled water at the day care centers.

NNS also spoke with several day care owners who said they’d misplaced or failed to fully understand the communications by MHD and MWW. A women who identified herself as the owner of The Learning Factory Childcare LLC, 4235 W. Fond Du Lac Ave., which is on the list of day care centers that had not responded to MHD outreach, said her pipes were repaired and hung up. Some property owners claimed that they had given the okay for the replacement and were still waiting to be contacted by MHD. MHD spokesperson Janalle Goosby said she could not provide details regarding specific licensed child care facilities.

“The Milwaukee Health Department (MHD) is continuing to work with all licensed childcare facilities to make sure that ALL of them have their lead lines replaced,” said Goosby in an email.

According to Bohl, there is much room for improvement in coordinating the outreach to day care centers regarding lead water service lines. For example, the city should look into how many certified child care facilities have lead laterals. Certified facilities are different than licensed day care centers, and can only serve up to three children under age 7 who are unrelated to the provider.

Bohl said he worries that all the focus on lead water service lines could be distracting residents from even larger sources of lead in the community. For example, he stated that lead levels at MPS should be addressed, because of the plumbing at older schools.

“Some of those lead levels at MPS were dangerously high and the source in many cases wasn’t a lead service line,” Bohl said.

Earlier this week, Barrett said that paint is still the primary source of lead poisoning in Milwaukee children and implied that the emphasis on lead in the water is misplaced.

Despite differing viewpoints on where the city’s anti-lead efforts should be focused and the history of disarray within MHD, Donovan said the appointment of Patricia McManus as interim health commissioner in February should help address these issues.

“We’re hopeful that she can turn things around,” Donovan said.

Stamper said he is planning to introduce legislation that would engage community groups on the South Side and North Side to visit each each day care center as well as houses where children with elevated lead levels live to pass out free water filters and information on health services in the community.

“There are many issues we need to remediate regarding lead exposure in our city,” Stamper said. “It’s going to take a lot of work and coordination but there’s no question that more needs to be done.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated on April 22, 2018, to reflect new information that arrived while the article was in production. It also includes an updated graphic.

The post Special report: Disorganization hampers city effort to replace lead water service lines at child care centers appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Editor’s note: This is one of an occasional series of stories highlighting the health risk — particularly to children — of lead service lines, which deliver water from city water mains to about 70,000 homes in Milwaukee.

Amid revelations that deficiencies within the Milwaukee Health Department hindered the city’s response to the local lead poisoning crisis, community leaders, Health Department officials and aldermen are saying the city must be more aggressive and proactive to protect residents from lead poisoning.

Community groups, including the Freshwater for Life Action Coalition (FLAC), have advocated for more aggressive actions to address lead poisoning — particularly exposure through hazardous lead piping — since late 2015. In interviews with the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, representatives of FLAC, Milwaukee Water Commons, the Black Health Coalition of Wisconsin, Hunger Task Force and Sixteenth Street Community Health Centers expressed the need to create a straightforward, comprehensive plan to prevent lead exposure.

Black Health Coalition President Patricia McManus, who recently was appointed interim Health Commissioner in a 13-1 Common Council vote, said the process must be open and transparent, and that it should include a timeline and priorities for implementation.

“Lead is not normal,” said McManus. “That’s the message that needs to keep being said.”

McManus was a member of Milwaukee’s Water Quality Task Force, which released a report that lists 20 recommendations to make drinking water safer. The report says the city should “ensure vulnerable populations have access to lead-removing water filters” and “do all in its authority to accelerate the removal and/or rehabilitation of lead service lines.”

Milwaukee Health Department (MHD) Director of Disease Control and Environmental Health Angela Hagy wrote in an email that MHD supports a plan that focuses on educating people about the effects of lead exposure, abating sources of lead exposure and testing children for elevated levels.

The Health Department has been aware of the risks of lead exposure from paint since the early 1980s.

According to MHD, about 130,000 homes are at risk for lead paint hazards, less than 20,000 of which have been successfully remediated over the last 20 years. Since 2010, the Health Department’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program (CLPPP), has used more than $17.6 million in federal and city funds to replace 33,737 windows in 4,173 units.

The issue of lead in water was brought to the fore as a result of the 2014 crisis in Flint, Michigan, where residents were supplied toxic water for more than a year.

The City of Milwaukee’s problems with lead in the water first surfaced in 1991, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency created the Lead and Copper Rule, intended to limit the concentration of lead and copper in drinking water. The city failed three of its first four tests and was non-compliant most recently in 1997. Instead of addressing the lead pipe issue then, the city added a phosphoric acid-based compound to the water that coats the pipes to prevent lead from leaching into the water. In every test since, the city has been in compliance.

Though Milwaukee’s water is clean at the source, lead from service lines can dissolve or flake into the water, making it hazardous. More than 70,000 Milwaukee homes, primarily concentrated in the city’s central north and south side neighborhoods, receive their water through lead service lines.

According to Health Department data, measured cases of dangerous lead levels in children’s blood have declined significantly since 2003. That year, of approximately 22,000 children under 6 tested, 8,663 — 37.9 percent — had blood lead levels above 5 micrograms per deciliter (µg/dL), the level at which the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend that public health action be taken.

Of almost 24,500 children under 6 tested in 2016, 11.6 percent — or 2,851 — had levels above 5 µg/dL.

Despite this progress, community advocates and city officials have said the city’s response has not been sufficient, especially as it relates to testing children and making sure families have accurate information about the effects of lead and how to protect themselves.

“No amount of lead is safe and no source of lead is unimportant,” said acting MHD Medical Director Geoffrey Swain during a recent Common Council Steering & Rules Committee meeting. “We have a very long ways to go.”

According to Health Department data, in 2015, five ZIP codes (53205, 53206, 53208, 53210 and 53212) had more than 13 percent of children test above 5 µg/dL. All five ZIP codes have populations that are majority African-American and poverty rates higher than the citywide rate of 29 percent.

Lead and mismanagement

Paint, water and soil can all be sources of lead, and lead ingested or inhaled from any source increases the total amount of lead in the body. Until recently, Health Department officials have said paint is the primary source of exposure, a claim disputed by peer-reviewed research and EPA estimates that 30 percent of people with high lead blood levels do not have an immediate lead paint source.

According to a 2014 report by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS), exposure to lead can result in childhood brain damage, leading to aggressive behavior, stunted intellectual development, mental health problems and a higher likelihood of committing violent acts. Adults who were poisoned as children can have reproductive issues and exposure as an adult can increase the likelihood of kidney disease, high blood pressure, depression, stroke and memory loss, including Alzheimer’s disease.

The Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, which has been the subject of recent scrutiny, employs a two-pronged strategy: replacing windows in homes with lead paint and following up with children who have high blood lead levels.

A recent report produced by MHD stated electronic records for 2015 and 2016 do not show any follow-ups sent for children who tested between 5 and 9 µg/dL. Since 2015, thousands of children did not receive the required follow-ups — either letters or in-home visits for those with higher levels of exposure.

Health Commissioner Bevan Baker resigned after Mayor Tom Barrett discovered the issues; since then, other concerns have come to light. Health Department officials have testified that MHD was not testing water for lead in the homes of children who tested positive for lead poisoning, despite claiming last summer that they were. And MHD struggled, during the second half of 2017, to abate homes with lead paint because of insufficient staffing levels and the complexity of identifying qualified homes, according to testimony. Weeks after the revelations, MHD released an extensive report detailing the deficiencies.

Since the mismanagement was brought to light, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) conducted a review of the CLPPP and issued a stop order for lead abatement activities, of which it funds a large portion, until corrective actions are taken. DHS will also conduct a review of the program.

These reviews came in the wake of calls from activists and aldermen for an independent investigation of the department.

Messages and mistrust

The Health Department initially fought and later delayed a resolution passed in November that added women of childbearing age (15-45) to the high-risk pool for lead exposure. The measure also clarified that using a water filter is the most thorough means of ensuring lead-water safety, and expanded the age that children should receive regular testing to all those under 6.

After the resolution passed, the Health Department claimed it had been doing what the measure directed all along, and consequently did not intend to change messaging or direction to care providers and filter distribution partners.

However, at a Steering and Rules Committee meeting on Jan. 31, MHD spokesperson Sarah DeRoo said the department is in the process of informing care providers of the updates and plans to advertise in community papers, a step suggested by residents in interviews with the Milwaukee Neighborhood Service early last year. DeRoo also said that Baker discussed the changes on a radio show late last year.

Advocates have criticized MHD and city officials for “reactionary” communication that they say has failed to convey the urgency of the situation. This, they say, has hindered the ability of people to adequately protect themselves and their families.

“I think what we’ve mostly been getting from the city is just enough of a message to get by,” said Kirsten Shead, co-chair of Milwaukee Water Commons’ drinking water initiative, adding that there has been “a general hesitancy” to admit that lead in the water is a big problem.

Barrett has recently defended his response to the issue saying, “Within days, if not hours, if I find out something that I believe the public should know, I share it with the public.”

After Barrett sat on a panel with Virginia Tech Professor Marc Edwards, one of the leading national voices on lead in water, in late 2016 Barrett urged everyone who lives in a home built before 1951 to get a water filter.

However, until late last year the Health Department’s Lead Safe MKE website promoted “flushing” more prominently than using water filters. Flushing — which requires residents to run water for at least three minutes after water has sat in pipes for prolonged periods — has been found to be an inconsistent method of protection.

According to MHD, 1,611 filters were distributed by the Social Development Commission (SDC) and Sixteenth Street Community Health Centers (SSCHC) over two months at the end of 2016, as part of a pilot program. From the beginning of 2017 through the end of January, 1,769 filters have been distributed by SDC, SSCHC, Health Department programs, WIC Clinics and the Department of City Development.

Shead pointed out that the number is relatively small, compared to the 70,000 homes with a lead line. She noted that the real question is whether those filters have been installed on people’s faucets and are being used.

“I think we need a much more robust message and campaign around getting filters out into the community,” Shead added.

“This very much echoes the zeitgeist of every other health department I know,” said Yanna Lambrinidou, a national expert and activist who sat on the EPA’s National Drinking Water Advisory Council Lead and Copper Rule work group.

Lambrinidou said public health officials in municipalities around the country, including Milwaukee, have created an environment of “manufactured ignorance” around the issue of lead in drinking water. She said many officials “just repeat and parrot and replicate and sell the dogma that is being passed on to them” by the CDC and other public health institutions.

DeRoo defended the Health Department’s communications. She wrote in an email to NNS that, throughout its history, the department has executed “different advertising and outreach efforts to both the public and medical providers, including billboards and newsletters.” In the past year, advertising has included ads on bus exteriors, bus shelters, billboards and community websites; in addition, MHD has done direct outreach, created partnerships (including with Molina Healthcare, to test children), held events and attended community meetings, according to DeRoo. (DeRoo, who served in her position since September 2012, left the department as of Feb. 23.)

Despite those efforts, few people appear to have adequate information. An informal survey by Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service of residents of homes that the city lists as having a lead service line found that only two of 19 people were aware of that fact. Seven of the 19 were generally aware of the detrimental nature of lead exposure, three of whom had a child or grandchild who has been lead poisoned.

Many of those who did not know they had a lead lateral were not surprised. Some said that they have known for some time that many of the homes in the city have lead pipes, just not theirs specifically.

“It’s the government — you can’t trust the government,” said Gavin Weitzer, 33, who did not know his home was serviced by a lead pipe. He said he drinks bottled water, but boils water for cooking, which can actually increase the concentration of lead.

Lead poisoning cases are most highly concentrated on the near north and south sides, in low- and middle-income communities of color.

Ald. Milele Coggs said the city needs to use non-traditional communication methods because the populations that need to be reached don’t use traditional methods.

“We can say that we sent out some piece of paper to people’s homes, and we’ve got it on our websites … it’s still not enough, and we all know that,” said Ald. Jim Bohl. “Something more has got to be done.” On Monday, Bohl proposed “an intensive, citywide effort” to deliver 50,000 filtration devices to homes at no cost, along with an education campaign.

Residents have also suggested the Health Department provide educational materials at libraries and advertise on Facebook. Some said receiving a phone call or seeing signs posted where lead lines exist would get their attention.

Moving forward

FLAC Spokesperson Robert Miranda called the Health Department’s efforts “half-measures.”

“These are not comprehensive, strategically planned, well-organized campaigns to remove this very toxic, very dangerous situation from our water supply,” Miranda said.

“We need to be confident that the water coming out of our taps is safe to drink,” said Ald. Nik Kovac. “And if we’re not confident then we need to make radical reforms to make it safe.”

Edwards, the Virginia Tech professor, and Michael Carvan, a professor at UW-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences, have said water that travels through lead pipes should not be considered safe and that the only long-term solution is to remove the pipes.

Since partial replacements were suspended in late 2016, the city’s policy has been to fully replace lead service lines. Through November, Milwaukee Water Works (MWW) fully replaced 500 lead laterals in 2017. In 2018, $8.8 million will go toward replacing 800 service lines, including lines attached to water main projects, licensed child care facilities and where leaks occur, as well as the remaining portion of partially replaced lines. MWW plans to fully replace 1,000 lead lines in 2019.

In projects that affect private residences, the homeowner must pay for the portion of the line that extends from the sidewalk to the home. Homeowners will pay no more than $1,600, which can be spread over 10 years. Only those affected by a city project or leak are eligible for the cost-sharing program.

City officials have dismissed the possibility of further accelerating the process of replacing lead laterals, or paying for the part of the line they consider property of the homeowner.

In December 2016, FLAC sent a letter to all city officials that estimated the total cost of replacing lead laterals citywide at $511 million. The letter suggested using General Obligation Bonds, Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds and funds from Milwaukee Water Works to replace all lead lines over 20 years at no cost to homeowners. It also suggested creating an Environmental Remediation Tax Incremental District. The city has not responded to these proposals.

Kovac said a local sales tax, much like one suggested by Ald. Robert Bauman in 2015 to fund the Bucks arena, parks and cultural institutions, might provide additional funding for lead line replacement. However, the Republican-controlled state legislature, which must approve any local taxes, has not been friendly to the idea. The legislature ignored Bauman’s proposal, along with other proposals to help fund city and county services.

Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin introduced an amendment to the Water Resources Development Act that would invest federal funds to replace lead lateral service pipes.

However, Bohl noted that even removal of every lead service line doesn’t guarantee people will be safe because lead pipes might exist in the home. Similarly, he said even some generic bottled waters can’t be trusted to be lead-free as they are “straight from the tap in some factory, just run through a minimal filter.”

Shead, Hunger Task Force Executive Director Sherrie Tussler and others say the city’s focus should be on better lead education and more communication about the advantages of filtering. Shead said information about where people can get filters would be helpful.

MHD has provided some examples of filters that sufficiently protect from lead.

Kevin Engstrom, director of environmental health at SSCHC, said parents and care providers need to be more aggressive about testing children. However, he also emphasized the importance of going to people, instead of waiting for them to come.

“It’s not just giving a brochure and saying, ‘You should go here,’” Engstrom said. “With poverty and struggle and barriers, we just want to eliminate any of those steps, any of those barriers, any of those reasons to not get a kid tested.”

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