Milwaukee Health Commissioner Bevan Baker says the city needs to address its violent crime as a public health threat.
Baker was among the leaders who testified Thursday before Common Council's Public Safety Committee. Its chairman convened the meeting in response to the surge in the city's homicide rate. The count of those killed already matches that for all of 2014, and quite a few of the victims have been children.
“The only item on the agenda today is file number 150442, communications from various city agencies relating to recent challenges to public health, safety and welfare,” Alderman Terry Witkowski told those attending, when he opened the meeting.
Health Commissioner Bevan Baker views the violence through the lens of public health.
“More than 50 percent of your health has nothing to do with clinical care, nothing to do with clinical health. Health outcomes are determined by the social determinants of health. Social and environmental factors that create the circumstances that we live in,” Baker says.
So Baker says it should not surprise anyone that crime is highest where the greatest health disparities exist. He cites a specific way the city is addressing a health problem that can contribute to violence – workers are removing dangerous lead paint from houses.
“Children impacted by lead hazards may grow up to have impulse control, may lead to their inability to discern things, their low educational attainment. They’re more likely to struggle. And when we look, and then we superimpose those who are impacted by lead hazard over the same zip codes that have a high propensity for violent crime we begin to see kids who are, who have had cognitive development, delayed development, brain development issues,” Baker says.
Baker says Milwaukee is fixing its lead problem faster than most large cities, but there are still around 130,000 homes with problems. They tend to be located in the central city, where the housing stock is older. Baker also spent time talking about Milwaukee’s office of violence prevention. Terry Perry is the director. She says one goal is to ease trauma, particularly among children who witness violence. Perry says just last week a Mobile Urgent Treatment Team took to the streets in one police district. The team is comprised of therapists and police can call on them 24 hours a day.
“What the MUTT Team will do is we’ll assess the incident. We’ll interview the children that were at the scene witnessing the violence, we’ll make a determination as to whether or not there may just be a short term intervention with some support. The team expects to do follow up visits at the home to see how things are going with children or the child and the family,” Perry says.
Perry says the hope is to include police on those follow up visits as a way of showing people that officers care about more than arresting people.
Representatives from other city agencies also attended Thursday’s meeting on public safety in Milwaukee. Ald. Witkowski says that while not all crime can be prevented, more can be done in Milwaukee. The city’s health department has been charged with looking into best practices in other places to possibly implement locally.
