Green Bay City Council approves hiring violence-prevention coordinator, using $1M state grant
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GREEN BAY - The city will hire a coordinator to lead its violence-prevention effort, using a $1 million state grant to address violence as a public-health problem.
The City Council on Tuesday approved a salary of up to $83,000 per year for the first year of a three-year process. It's the first step in a process that Gov. Tony Evers announced in March in Green Bay.
"Gun violence is a health epidemic, so we're addressing it as such," said Kevin Warych, operations commander for the Green Bay Police Department. "The traditional response to such violence is to try to arrest our way out of the problem, but that isn't working."
He said violence affects more than just a single crime victim. It can also affect the victim's family, his friends and neighbors, and the people who treat the victim at a hospital.
Costs for the program will be paid from the grant money; it's supposed to last through 2025. Funding comes through the Wisconsin Communities SAFER Fund, with money from the American Rescue Plan Act administered by the Medical College of Wisconsin.
Where did the idea originate?
The idea to form an office of violence-prevention emerged following a spate of gunfire incidents in the city, particularly on the west sides, in late 2021. Overall, reports that guns were fired in the city grew from 18 in 2018 to 82 in 2021, before dropping to 61 in 2022, city statistics show. Shooting deaths did not show a similar increase.
Evers announced on March 30 that the city would be awarded the $1 million grant. Monday's move by the City Council was the first step taken to form a team focused on preventing violence — and interrupting the chain of incidents of violence once they occur.
Because the city has yet to identify the director, officials could not speak to a timeline for beginning the project. Warych stressed that the police department won't take the lead on the project, but said Cheryl Reiner-Wigg, a 35-year city employee who is now the deputy director of the Community & Economic Development Department, would play a key role in getting things started.
What will the coordinator do?
The goal of the coordinator is to bring together people who can interrupt the cycle of violence. Specifically, the person will identify and hire a team of roughly three "violence-interrupters" who would work on a contract basis, Warych said.
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He said "interrupters" would likely be community-based people who could be sent to a neighborhood where tensions were brewing between rival groups, and "turn the heat down" between the groups. In a neighborhood where a shooting or other violence had occurred, the idea would be to prevent the one shooting from growing into several, by working to head off a retaliation or another subsequent incident.
Where else is this approach working?
Warych cited programs like 414 Life program run by the Milwaukee Office of Violence Prevention, part of Milwaukee's Blueprint for Peace. People from 414 Life planned to visit parks and have a presence where violence had been known to occur, and speak with people headed into popular nightlife spots where trouble had started. They also planed to convey "messages of peace" to people around some of the city's public housing areas.
Similar problems have shown some success, Warych said, in other larger cities that have had violence-reduction efforts, citing Indianapolis, Oakland, Portland and Washington, D.C.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Green Bay to hire violence-prevention coordinator to stop gun violence
