Q&A with Milwaukee's Office of Violence Prevention on the city's feuding cliques
The fact that there has been a yearslong and at times violent conflict between social cliques in Milwaukee is a reflection of the poor conditions they’ve been forced to live in, violence prevention officials said.
On May 22, law enforcement in Milwaukee shared the details of the arrests and charges against a collection of “cliques” that have been feuding with each other since late 2020 and produced an outsized portion of city’s shootings and homicides.
The cliques are not the same thing as gangs, Police Chief Jeffrey Norman and Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm said.
While gangs have formal hierarchies and memberships, and concentrate on controlling territory or criminal enterprises, none of those factors are at play with regard to cliques, they said. Cliques are far more informal and their conflicts center around “petty disputes,” often over social media, and street credibility, law enforcement officials have said.
They appear to form around the idea of honoring victims of fatal violence and are motivated by thrill-seeking and gaining clout from social media posts. Law enforcement publicized criminal charges against 61 people in connection to the issue. They range in age from 16 to 31.
The destruction of the conflict – over 100 shootings and at least 25 homicides – was inflamed by disruptions from the pandemic, social media, easy access to firearms and car theft, officials said.
More information on the cliques can be found here.
The Journal Sentinel spoke with three members of the city’s Office of Violence Prevention – Director Ashanti Hamilton, Operations Manager Karin Tyler and Community Violence Prevention Coordinator Quinn Taylor – to provide more context on the dynamics behind the feuding groups.
Their comments have been lightly edited for clarity and conciseness. Here’s what they said:
What more can you say about how and why these cliques form?
Hamilton: They become an identified group based off of a shared experience of trauma – the loss of a friend, especially one that dies in a tragic way. And they kind of form this bond around that tragic event. I think in some cases it’s... in order to serve as a sense of protection, a sense of honoring and then in some cases to exact some kind of action or protection of that person who died. It’s to get back at another group who caused the incident, because they feel like that’s the only family, protection, form of love and protection that they identify with.
How does social media influence the conflict?
Tyler: First of all, we’re dealing with a generation who’s always lived with the internet, so it’s kind of different from my generation. They’re used to that instant gratification.
Hamilton: This generation, I’ll say “social media natives,” has always grown up with this. It becomes a very quick way to gain notoriety, a very quick way of being able to transmit insults. Something that used to be name-calling, an embarrassment, on a bus or a playground and might end up in a fight, now has a platform that’s shared and reshared and causes a sense of trauma all by itself. The number of people that get to see this and the type of notoriety that can come from the social media conflicts, the types of things that can cause that kind of embarrassment and trauma for a young person, can lead them to escalate those types of conflicts very quickly. It’s very clear that social media is playing a very strong role in carrying these conflicts to the next level, with the number of people that are able to egg this on as well as how quick this can travel in the community.
What other factors push people in these directions?
Hamilton: Some of these groups don’t even necessarily form from a single tragic event. Some of the groups form because of a shared experience of poverty. They’re in the same neighborhood, they stood out in front of the same dilapidated houses, they got kicked out of the same schools. They hung out together at school or in these neighborhoods. Some of these experiences are not like one single tragic experience, it’s kind of (a collective pain). Especially in some areas of the city, where you see generations of people who have lived under the same conditions for a couple generations already, that this has been an experience not just for them, but has been a shared collective pain for their parents, for their grandparents, and most of the people that living in their environment. That identifier, that shared use of language, that shared experience, having gone to schools that let them down, a shared lack of access to quality education, a shared lack of access to quality employment, shared environment of what people call a “ghetto.” When you start to identify that, it becomes pretty obvious there’s a lack of support, lack of love. Not even just from your parents but from the community you’re trying to navigate through.
Tyler: One thing Director Hamilton has us do now is really connect with the family members of these individuals, so when we start interacting with the families, that’s where start to see these disparities.
What kind of headway have violence interrupters made with some of the people involved in this conflict?
Taylor: We have 13 outreach teams, about 65 credible people, who have lived experiences in these environments and who have learned to navigate through systems that give support, that help with what we’re seeing in communities. We got them to help individuals in communities navigate through these systems to give them the ability to help them solve some of their own problems. One thing we want to focus on is the trauma people are dealing with… creating healing resources and offering the pathway to other resources in our communities that are designed to deal with a lot of this.
Tyler: We have four specialized teams within those 13 teams that deal with interpersonal violence, they deal with mental health and drug overdose, they deal with human trafficking.
Hamilton: One of the goals is trying to change the interaction (between people) that have traditionally not engaged systems and institutions, even those that have programming specifically for them. (There’s) a mistrust. They have been mistreated. If they had some assistance navigating, if we were able to engage credible, culturally aware clinicians, therapists, to actually come into the community and give these types of services within the community, in their neighborhoods, churches that they’re familiar with and community based organizations that they have relationships with already and bring those services into those spaces. Our hope is to help rebuild relationships within the families, within the youth that live in these communities, so there’s a better relationship and a more positive way of dealing with each other than what we’re seeing happening right now. We are ready to bring de-escalation and mediation skills, parenting skills, healing hubs in these spaces, counseling services. Instead of having them drive out to Froedtert or some clinical office somewhere, they’ll have these resources right there in their community and people to help navigate it. We’ve engaged a number (institutions) already. We have contracts that are under negotiation right now.
Contact Elliot Hughes at elliot.hughes@jrn.com or 414-704-8958. Follow him on Twitter @elliothughes12.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Q&A: Office of Violence Prevention on Milwaukee's feuding cliques
