Karin Tyler: Facing the Challenge of Violence Prevention in Milwaukee

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Photo by Tom Jenz

Karin Tyler

Karin Tyler

Violence prevention looms as Milwaukee’s most important challenge. The city’s well-funded Office of Violence Prevention (OVP) will play an important role.

OVP’s Operations Manager Karin Tyler knows the neighborhoods. She was raised in the central city and experienced trauma and dysfunction. Her life story could be a dramatic movie directed by Barry Jenkins and starring Viola Davis. The daughter of civil rights activist parents, Tyler grew up on 12th and Keefe. “As children, we participated in protest marches with my parents. My dad had marched with Martin Luther King. He worked at Delco Electronics, and my mother was a nurse,” she said. 

Tyler was a teenager when her parents divorced. She lapsed into personal problems: bouts of anger, drugs, hanging on the streets and suicide attempts. When she was 16, she had a child and the experience straightened her out. “My son and I kind of grew up together,” she explained. 

As a young mother, she was living in an apartment with her boyfriend and was raising a second child with him. “My boyfriend could get violent, kicked my door in, climbed on the balcony, and assaulted me sexually. One day, he had a gun to my head. saying, ‘If I can’t have you, no one could.’ I think he wanted to kill me, but he didn’t have the courage. Eventually, he was incarcerated. As a result, I dealt with depression, anxiety, trauma. It took a long time to get myself together.”

If that near-tragedy wasn’t enough heartbreak, Tyler later lost her oldest son to homicide in 2011, and in 2018, her father, who was a crossing guard, was killed in a hit and run accident. Through an understatement, she told me, “I feel I can personally help abuse victims because of my own background experiencing the world of violence.”

How did you get involved in helping abuse victims and families? 

At least 25 years ago. I got a job at the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin (now Vivent Health). I was coordinating a citywide harm reduction program for women. We were doing outreach on the streets, passing out condoms, needle exchange, safe sex practice information. I’d be going into jails and talking to incarcerated women. Then, I got into substance abuse counseling, and I became a clinical supervisor. Fifteen years ago, I took a job with the city of Milwaukee as a disease intervention specialist. I did that work for about 10 years, but then in 2011 at Christmas time, my son was shot and killed through a home invasion. I fell apart with grief and depression, just staring out the window for months. His death challenged my own spiritual beliefs. Fortunately, I came back to life and returned to my job of helping people.

So how did you come to work for the Office of Violence Prevention?

In 2018, Reggie Moore was head of the OVP. I asked if I could work for him, and I got the job. But right about then, my dad was killed in a hit and run accident. My son and my dad are buried side by side. So, I lost my son and my dad within about six years. I started my job with the OVP when my dad was dying in the hospital. 

Violence prevention is one of Milwaukee’s biggest challenges as described in the recent MPD Violent Crime Prevention Plan. Can you explain the job of the OVP?

We are making changes, focusing more on the collective impact model. At OVP, there were always good goals, but now we are getting more hands-on. We’ve been meeting with city departments and community organizations. We are focusing on districts where the most crimes occur. These we call public safety Promise Zones. Our director, Ashanti Hamilton, initiated Promise Zones in his district when he was an alderman.  

How are you doing the hands-on work in the communities?

We are starting to partner with outreach people, residents and organizers that will set up their own plans for safe neighborhoods. We also received a wonderful grant that deals with trauma and healing and equity. We have been actively working with Police Chief Norman. He has been very involved, asking how the MPD can help. He provides us with crime data on a daily basis, and his leadership team has been very helpful.

Your present job with the OVP is Operations Manager. What are your job responsibilities?

I am the chief advisor to Director Hamilton. I have the most experience within the OVP. I am also head of our leadership team. We recently hired two new managers - a community violence manager and a ReCAST manager. 

Through your years at OVP, you were involved in crisis response and referrals related to domestic violence and sexual assault. What is it like working with or consulting victims?

I have been a technical assistant to community groups who do violence prevention in the homes. But I did have specific serious cases. For example, there was a woman whose abuser would come and strangle her and plead, “Stop struggling. I just want you to fall asleep.” Just horrific stories like that. 

She couldn’t get her abuser arrested?

She tried, but he would disappear. Her word against his. I would tell authorities that these kinds of victims are not safe. To remove violence victims from their homes, we needed more money for housing. You can’t expect a victim to keep going back to her own house. Abusers are diligent in getting into houses of their victims. There are also other obstacles: public defenders, prosecutors, judges, jails, restraining orders not enforced. At some point, you are not dealing with a victim but dealing with a system.

People ask, “Why does she stay?” They don’t ask, “Why does he come back?” Women are navigating so many issues. Their children may be threatened. Do they have access to their children at school? They may have filed a complaint, but it wasn’t successful, so they are scared to death. The abuser may threaten her family members or the elders. Her own family may not support her because she says she will leave him but changes her mind. We try to support a victim through the whole process including the bad times. What’s frustrating is the majority of abused women will return to their abuser. I see one solution in dealing with abusers is credible messengers--former perpetrators or victims of violence, service providers like myself who have experienced violence.

How does the OVP obtain their information about domestic abuse incidents or ongoing violent behavior?

We receive referrals directly from the community, community organizations and system partners, and we get daily incident reports directly from the police department. A lot of the information is about retaliatory violence, a man abusing a woman but disappearing. We work closely with the WE ARE HERE initiative.

As I recall, WE ARE HERE MKE assists victims of domestic and sexual violence and includes all cultures: Black, Latino, Hmong, Indian, Muslim and LGBTQ citizens.

That’s right. Their counselors and volunteers are sensitive to cultural issues that might come up for the victim.

Grassroots community organizers—Vaun Mayes and his ComForce MKE, Tory Lowe, Tracey Dent and Antonia Drew Norton and her ASHA Project—they all tell me they would like financial and also on-the-ground help from the OVP. Will that happen?

I understand their needs. I’d rather financially support some of these on-the-ground community organizers than the large non-profits. They do great work. They are connected with the residents on the streets. Their outreach is amazing. But we are funding Antonia and the ASHA Project and the WE ARE HERE collective. As for the others, we have identified 13 Outreach teams for funding. They will be active in the Promise Zones with the most criminal activity. For example, last summer we did a 14-week Safer Summer MKE initiative and that included Vaun Mayes and many other outreach teams like the Nation of Islam.

Apart from the OVP, you are the co-founder of the Mother’s Love Movement, which galvanized mothers who have lost children to violence in order to prevent future violence.

The Mother’s Love Movement includes moms whose children have been killed. In the summer, we do a mother’s street march. Through our crisis response network, we try to help and support mothers who have experienced recent losses. The mother has to plan a funeral, work with detectives, do paperwork, experience grief. We want people to understand what it’s like to lose a child, to have compassion.

Currently, the OVP has a yearly budget of $3.7 million. The City of Milwaukee has provided the OVP an additional $8.4 million from the federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). This $8.4 million funding is to be spread out over five years. I know that the OVP has been active in hiring new people. How is that going?

We recently hired two new managers. We now have seven people in place. We hope to soon hire six more. We soon will have a community violence manager, a data evaluation coordinator, and a grants and budget coordinator. We are working to do a better job of showing the impact of violence prevention to the public. We support a lot of organizations, and we need to publicize our efforts. 

I think you are required to have the Milwaukee Department of Employment recruit potential employees, right?

The process can be slow. We need urgency. In my opinion, we need to approach the violence crisis like governments and nonprofits handled COVID. When are we going to take the violence crisis as serious as we did COVID, an emergency pandemic? I’m trying to challenge the system and the process, and how slow it all happens. Tonight, somebody will die due to violence. What are we going to do about that? If people don’t care about that young man on the block getting shot on the street, who is?