A verbal agreement between City officials and three nonprofit organizations to address gun violence in Madison seemed in peril Tuesday, but is back on track after longtime community leaders overcame differences and agreed on a plan to move forward.
Some said the tensions between Boys and Girls Club of Dane County CEO Michael Johnson and Nehemiah Community Development Corporation founder Reverend Alex Gee were the result of “divide-and-conquer” tactics on the part of Mayor Paul Soglin — tactics that worked “for a hot second,” Johnson said.
“I think there are people who don’t want to see us working together,” Johnson said. “We weren’t communicating … and I think the mayor played on that.
“We’ve all been uncomfortable the last couple of days,” Johnson added. “(Monday) we met with both deputy mayors (Enis Ragland and Gloria Reyes) and it was a very uncomfortable meeting, but I think sometimes when you deal with the kind of issues we’re dealing with in our city, sometimes you gotta make each other uncomfortable.”
On Saturday the Wisconsin State Journal reported that Soglin planned to offer $75,000 in contracts to Nehemiah and to Madison-area Urban Ministry (MUM) to provide short-term rapid response services to prevent and respond to shootings. Alder Matt Phair has since told Madison365 that contract arrangement was “tentative” and should probably not have been announced.
“(City officials) did not play a good part in making sure that everything was transparent,” said Focused Interruption Coalition member Anthony Cooper, who works as Reentry Services Coordinator for Nehemiah. “Just to put out that these two organizations are going to do x, y, and z, without having that conversation, and now you just have people who don’t know what’s going on and don’t know how to have that tough conversation. Alex didn’t really even know what was going on. The mayor just kind of threw (Nehemiah’s) name in the mix.”
MUM Executive Director Linda Ketcham immediately disputed the report. “We were approached by the City of Madison about this and we declined because we do not provide rapid response services in this way,” she posted on Facebook.
Nehemiah founder Alex Gee, however, did not publicly dispute the report, causing some to reach the conclusion that he would accept funds that could be better used by other groups like Focused Interruption Coalition, which has been responding to shootings for nearly three years.
A series of Monday meetings among community nonprofit leaders and the meeting with City officials seemed to lead to an agreement. Gee was not in the meeting with City officials and it’s not entirely what transpired Monday evening, but by Tuesday morning, Johnson had called Gee out on Facebook.
“It is disappointing that you met with the Mayor’s office and told us you stood in solidarity with us and have back peddled since they promised you a contract,” Johnson wrote in a now-deleted post addressed to Gee. “I can’t stand by and let you undermine these grassroots leaders who have developed the only violence prevention plan that exists in this city and all of sudden they are running to you because we have challenged their way of thinking! Black man wake up!
Several hours later, Johnson apologized to Gee on Facebook and then joined Nehemiah Director of Reentry Services Anthony Cooper and Ex-Prisoners Organizing (EXPO) Statewide Director Jerome Dillard in Gee’s office, hashing it out.
“I allowed some divisive tactics to get in the way of my relationship with Pastor Gee and because we weren’t communicating, I said some words that were not fair to him or his church,” Johnson said. “So I went over to his church and apologized to him and to his family. We sat down, we cried, we talked about leadership and talked about how we move forward collectively.”
By the end of that conversation, a new agreement had been reached, for sure this time: Nehemiah will contract with the city; Focused Interruption Coalition will provide peer support as well as on-call support for crisis support in the immediate aftermath of a shooting incident; Boys and Girls Club will act as fiscal agent for FIC, meaning BGC will manage FIC funds but not benefit in any way from the contract; and Cooper will serve as FIC’s executive director.
“We are going to develop an MOU (memorandum of understanding) in terms of what FIC will be responsible for, what Nehemiah will be responsible for and what the Boys and Girls Club will be responsible for,” Johnson said. “We’ll also set protocols in terms of how we respond as teams in the community and work out those levels of details.”
Gee did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
How We Got Here
Tensions seem to have been brought to a head by a Soglin press conference last week.
Following shooting incidents on May 15 and 16 — the latter of which injured one — Alders Matt Phair and Maurice Cheeks introduced a resolution to allocate up to $75,000 to nonprofits for a short-term crisis response that would provide peer support and coaching to those at risk of criminal behavior and to help individuals and families connected to gun violence.
The $75,000 would come from a $400,000 budget allocation in this year’s budget, the first such allocation in a $3 million commitment Soglin made last summer to implement the 15-Point Plan formulated by members of the Focused Interruption Coalition, Johnson, Cheeks, Phair and others.
Nearly six months into the year, none of that money has been spent, causing some frustration among advocates.
““If the mayor wanted it to happen, it would have happened January 1,” Johnson said. “I’ve been around city government long (enough) to know when somebody’s punting the football. Right now, there’s not a penny being put on this. They gotta get serious. Until we have boots on the ground, I don’t mind applying the pressure and I don’t mind working with the mayor and his team, but they have to stop playing games.”
Soglin held a press conference the day after the May 16 shooting at which he did not announce the budget resolution, but instead called for more community members to come forward with information regarding gun crimes. He also said two things that weren’t exactly true.
First, Soglin said the City “deployed” a citizen rapid response team for the first time as “an experiment” in response to the shooting.
In fact, Deputy Mayor Gloria Reyes did call Anthony Cooper, a member of that team and executive director of the Focused Interruption Coalition, when she learned of the shooting, but he had already heard about the shooting and was already en route to the scene. He and Michael Johnson went to the hospital to assist and support the family of the victim, as did Reyes.
“She came out there. She was out there,” Cooper said. “For a deputy mayor to do something like that, I’ve never seen nothing like that. I really give her kudos for being there on the scene. When Mike (Johnson) got there we all went to the hospital. She stayed at the hospital as well. That’s something you don’t typically see in any city.”
Second, Soglin characterized “rapid response team” members as investigators of a sort.
“Besides the normal law enforcement at the shooting last night, there were some individuals present who were not police officers who had some follow-up conversations and tried to get the trust and obtain more information about the incident,” Soglin said in his press conference last Wednesday. “One of the things that we’re focused on is having individuals who have credibility on the street who are not law enforcement having a, shall we say, post-investigative role in terms of talking to individuals who are witnesses or victims and seeing if they can build trust and confidence and get the necessary information.”
Not so, say those who were there — who have no desire to become known as police informants.
“He put our lives on the line,” Cooper told Madison365.
The allocation of just $75,000 of a $3 million commitment — announced in a haphazard way when contracts were still tentative — led some to level charges of “divide and conquer.”
“They want us fighting over peanuts,” Johnson said.
Now that fences have been mended, the resolution to provide funding will most likely be taken up at a special Finance Committee meeting just before the June 6 Common Council meeting, Phair said.
“We still have work to do,” Cooper said. The experience of the last few days, he said, have shown that “we are stronger than that, and we can come together to make sure that things happen the right way, and that we are all on one united front saying we’re locking arms to be able to go forward to help the community.”
