Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission May 2014 Voiceover: Beat Intro 00:00 This is the Beat—a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing topics facing our nation. Debra McCullough 00:08 This is Dr. Debra McCullough with the COPS Office. We’re here today with Dr. Mallory O’Brien, director of the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission. Dr. O’Brien is a trained epidemiologist and has worked in the field of violent injury prevention for the past 20 years. In 1994 she began her work developing, implementing, and evaluating a regional tracking system for firearm deaths called the Firearm Injury Reporting System at the Medical College of Wisconsin. From there she worked at the national level, assisting the development of the National Violent Injury Statistics System at the Harvard School of Public Health, which became the prototype for the National Violent Death Reporting System at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2004, the City of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, started looking at using a public health approach to address violence, which became known as the Homicide Review Commission. Dr. Mallory O’Brien has led the development, implementation, and evaluation of the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission since 2004. Dr. O’Brien, thank you for being here with us today to talk about the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission. Dr. Mallory O’Brien 01:32 Thank you, Debra. I’m very happy to be here. Debra 01:34 Now, as a founding director of this initiative, can you tell us a little bit about the motivation for this program? Mallory 01:42 Certainly. The motivation to develop the Homicide Review Commission really came from the city. The city was at a point where they were trying to determine, “How can we reduce the number of homicides?” There were a group of people that came to me from the police department, from the district attorney’s office, and from the mayor’s office to say, “What can we do differently to try and prevent homicides?” The motivation was to really determine the best way or best ways—because we know there’s not one simple answer—to reduce the lethal homicides or the lethal violence in the City of Milwaukee. Debra 02:26 What key elements would you say distinguish the approach of the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission from traditional law enforcement approaches to violence? Mallory 02:37 The perspective that we take in the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission is that homicides are preventable. That, I think, is what distinguishes us between traditional law enforcement. We’re focusing on a prevention piece and traditional law enforcement is primarily responding to crime. That’s the biggest, I think, significant difference between traditional and what we’re trying to do. Having said that, I will also say that I think there’s similarities between the public health approach and prevention and what law enforcement does from a community policing, problem-oriented policing perspective. When we think about the public health approach, we are really looking at looking to determine what is the problem, what are the causes of that problem, what can we do to prevent and look at implementing prevention strategies. Once we’ve implemented those strategies, do an assessment to determine, “Are they working or not?” If they are, then we look to expand what we’re doing and grow that prevention strategy. That is essentially what you’re doing if you’re doing any kind of problem-oriented policing. If you’re using the SARA model—which is scanning, analysis, response, and assessment—that is essentially what I’ve just described as the public health approach. When I am talking to law enforcement and when I’m talking to public health professionals, I always like to point out that, although there’s a public health approach and there’s a problem-oriented policing approach, we’re essentially doing the same thing. We’re just using a slightly different language. Debra 04:31 Could you talk about some of the public-private partnerships involved in the commission, and the importance of partnerships when taking a public health approach? Mallory 04:42 That is a great question. The way the Homicide Review Commission works is we have a number of reviews that we do on a case. A case comes in—you have a homicide—there are people that work with me that automatically put this information into a database. We make a referral to one of our private partners who’s out at Children’s Hospital. It’s called Project Ujima. They will do a social and emotional assessment of the victim’s family and determine at that point how can they assist the family. It might be helping them move if they’re in danger. It might be working with the younger siblings on their trajectory to be the next gang member. We make that referral right away to one of our private partners. The next thing that we will do is what we call a Criminal Justice Review, where we bring all of our partners to the table to talk about the who, what, when, where, and why the homicide has occurred. Based on that information, you’ve been doing this for a while, you begin to see trends. You can develop recommendations or strategies that could have prevented that homicide and homicides that are very similar in nature. That’s a whole bunch of public partnerships. The next review that we do is something we call the Community Service Provider Review. In this review, we meet once a month and we talk about cases that are closed. We bring together not only our law enforcement partners—we bring the Milwaukee Police Department , we bring our prosecutors from the district attorney’s office, community prosecutors, and community liaison officers to the table—but we bring all of the community groups that we work with. We’re bringing in the community-based organizations that are working in the neighborhood that can augment the data that we have from Criminal Justice Reviews and really begin to think, from a community perspective, how could we prevent this homicide and how can we prevent similar homicides and go through the same process of developing recommendations. We also have an executive committee for the Homicide Review Commission. Those are the decision makers in our community that could help move a recommendation from a suggestion to implemented recommendation. For us to be successful, we have always engaged with our partners at multiple levels: the health department, the police department, our department of corrections, our public schools, to name a few. Then we have all the other groups that we work with. We work with the Family Peace Center, which is focusing on domestic violence. We work with Running Rebels, which deals with helping juveniles or youth. We would not be successful if we did not have those partnerships. What the Homicide Review Commission has done, it has created a forum for these kinds of discussions. Prior to the existence of the Commission, there wasn’t a place or an opportunity to get all of these different players into the room at the same time to have these kinds of discussions. What’s developed out of those discussions are partnerships, opportunities to collaborate, and we’ve been able to develop some really exciting strategies where there’s collaboration between multiple partners that participate in the homicide review process. Debra 08:26 Speaking of collaboration, there are a number of other violence intervention strategies that are being adopted across the nation. For example, there’s Cure Violence, previously known as Cease Fire, and the Group Violence Intervention and Drug Market Interventions promoted by the National Network for Safe Communities. Do you see these approaches as being able to be used in conjunction with the Milwaukee approach? Is there a way to blend these approaches? Mallory 09:02 That’s a great question and it’s a conversation that I’ve been having with folks across the country. I very much see that the homicide review approach can be used with the Cure Violence approach and the National Network for Safe Communities. If you look at each piece of what we all do, there are clear opportunities to connect them and to provide opportunities to collaborate. If you look at the approach of the National Network for Safe Communities, one of the first things a jurisdiction is going to do as they’re setting up their approach is to do a homicide incident review. We’re doing that all the time so we’re pulling that information in. If somebody in Milwaukee wanted to do a call in, the first thing they would do is take the information we’ve already learned from doing the homicide reviews. We obviously take it to a much deeper level because we’re bringing the community in to talk about our cases but it is certainly one of the first things you’re going to do with the National Network for Safe Communities. The other thing I’ll say on that note too, before we go on to the Cure Violence, is that when you’re doing a call in and you’re following the National Network for Safe Communities approach, you’re going to see some pretty immediate response to violence in the geography that you’re focusing on. What I think happens with the Homicide Review Commission, is because you’re taking these reviews to a much deeper level and you are looking at opportunities to collaborate and develop prevention strategies, you’re really looking for a system change. While the National Network for Safe Communities is focusing on the individuals, we are focusing more on what can we collectively do differently to prevent these cases. Sometimes it means a legislative change. Sometimes it means a change in the standard operating procedure. Sometimes it means a change in the way we’re sharing information between entities. So I see those two as being very complementary. I also see that if you’re doing Cure Violence, from my perspective, if we had something like that in Milwaukee, I would be ecstatic to have those individuals participating—those individuals that are participating in Cure Violence—also participate in our community service reviews. They would be able to bring lots of information from the street that we may not get from any other source. I see them as being very complementary. Debra 11:44 Dr. O’Brien, your training is in the field of public health and much of your career has been devoted to the reduction of gun violence through public health approaches. Now, while these approaches are gaining some attention in law enforcement, they are not universally recognized among police and sheriffs. Are there any key points that you would make to police executives to help them understand how the public health approach can help them address violence in their communities? Mallory 12:17 The way I try and reach out to the police executives is really to get them to understand that when we talk about the public health approach, they need to recognize that they’re doing a lot of what we consider the public health approach through their problem-oriented policing. I think that one of the big things that can be helpful to the police executives is that they don’t have to do it by themselves. Using the public health approach means that you’re going to be collaborating with lots of partners. It no longer becomes the police solely having to address a violence issue but you have a whole host of players that can help you address that particular violence issue. Again, I get back to people—I know that law enforcement often sees public health approach as being something foreign to them. I think once they begin to realize the public health approach is actually very similar to what they’re doing, we’re just using a slightly different language, they begin to see how there are many similarities. That really helps the police executives to see how this public health approach can be used to reduce violence in their communities. Debra 13:36 For our listeners who are interested in learning more about the Milwaukee approach and who are looking for some resources, do you have any recommendations of where they can go or who they can contact? Mallory 13:49 That’s a great question. Yes, they can always contact us. We have a website. If they do a Google search and just Google Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission, it will pop up. The other thing that’s really exciting is that we are able to provide training and TA [technical assistance] on how to develop a homicide review process. We’ve been funded by the COPS Office to do this national training and TA. We have the capacity to help jurisdictions learn how to do this. Over the next two years, we will be doing six trainings. They’re two-day trainings. We bring people here to Milwaukee. They get to observe a review, a couple of reviews. They get all the tools that we’ve created over time, and we give everything to them. By the time they’re done with the two-day training, they should have everything they need to establish something like this in their community. What I will say is that it doesn’t have to be exactly like what we do, but there are key aspects to what we do that I think every jurisdiction should consider doing. What’s included in, what I mentioned, our capacity, is that we have the funding to pay for travel for a couple of people from each jurisdiction to come to the training and then provide them, again, as I mentioned, with all the tools that we’ve created over time. That includes all the data extraction forms, grants that we’ve written, all the databases that we use to maintain the data that we collect through the review process. I just put that out there. We’re looking right now to fill our training sessions. If people are interested, please go to our website. There’ll be a form that you can fill out that gives us a little information on what you’re jurisdiction is like and what the problem is that you’re trying to address. Debra 15:42 Dr. O’Brien, thank you so much for speaking with us today about the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission. Thank you for your expertise and your time. Mallory 15:53 Thank you! This has been a wonderful conversation and I thank you very much for the opportunity to share the great work that we’re doing in Milwaukee. Voiceover: Beat Exit 16:02 The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice, COPS Office. The COPS Office helps to keep our nation’s communities safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies, developing community policing publications, developing partnerships, and solving problems. Voiceover: Disclaimer 16:18 The opinions contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or polices of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific agencies, companies, products, or services should not be considered an endorsement by the authors or the U.S. Department of Justice. Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues.