For Milwaukee’s homeless, help can be hard to come by

Tents around King Park in Milwaukee. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)

As the nation watches the Republican National Convention (RNC), will public attention finally focus on  the plight of people living unhoused in Milwaukee, the RNC host city? It’s a question residents are asking following the killing of Sam Sharpe, one of the many people living in and around the city’s King Park community. 

Sharpe was killed Tuesday by police officers from Columbus, Ohio, who’d been deployed to Milwaukee to assist with security for the RNC. Body camera footage shows that while standing near the park discussing ways to patrol the convention, one of the officers noticed a fight between two people across the park. At least one of the individuals, the officers said in the body camera footage, had a knife. With guns drawn, the officers rushed over and fired a barrage of shots within 14 seconds of noticing the fight. Sharpe was killed on the spot.

One of Milwaukee’s most vulnerable communities 

On Tuesday evening, a vigil was held to mourn Sharpe. Just hours before, the ground where the mourners stood was behind a barrier of crime scene tape, spanning the entire perimeter of the park and some of the surrounding neighborhood. Homeless outreach groups joined the crowd, listening to heartbreaking speeches delivered by local activists, and shedding tears quietly as they prepared for another night of providing services to some of Milwaukee’s most under-served residents. 

A Street Angels outreach worker attends the vigil for Sam Sharpe, held in King Park. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)

Eva Welch, co-founder and executive director of the homeless outreach group Street Angels, was among them. She’d seen Sharpe only a day before at the Street Angels’ new mobile hygiene-focused “Showers of Hope” program. With two outreach buses filled with supplies from clothing to food to toiletries and other necessities, the Street Angels combed both north and south Milwaukee looking for people living without housing. 

“On Mondays we go to the Guest House,” Welch told Wisconsin Examiner. “He was there. He didn’t shower, but he just came for supplies and he talked to us. And he just kept saying, ‘I love you guys’…I think he said it 10 times yesterday.” 

“From what we’ve seen he was a great guy,” Welch added. “He was polite. He was grateful. He had a dog that he loved like his own daughter, which is another loss that our friends are going to be experiencing because they all came to know and care for the dog.” Sharpe’s dog, Welch said, was taken in by a local no-kill animal control rescue organization. 

Welch had watched video of the shooting as it circulated online Tuesday evening. She doesn’t agree with statements made by Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman, who said the officers were acting to save someone’s life. “They have so many non-lethal ways to control situations, to defuse situations, none of those were attempted,” said Welch. 

Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman (Photo | Isiah Holmes)

Norman said that five officers fired their weapons, two knives were recovered from the scene, and that King Park had been identified as an “area of concern” by police. The Milwaukee Area Investigative Team, composed of numerous local law enforcement agencies which investigate officer-involved shootings and in-custody deaths, is handling the investigation. The lead agency for the investigation is the Greenfield Police Department. Milwaukee PD spokespeople said that the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office will review the investigation upon completion to determine if any officers will be charged. So far this year, the Columbus Police Department has been involved in eight shootings, including the one that killed Sharpe. 

Resident have questions about why the Ohio officers were a mile outside the RNC’s security footprint. “I don’t even know why police from Ohio are monitoring our streets, where fights happen. You know, you ask any outreach worker here from any agency and they’ll tell you, ‘Yeah, fights happen there. But nobody usually ends up dead.’ And now that the police were involved in the one scrabble that they were involved in, somebody’s dead.” Welch hopes that the conversations around the shooting will not lead to further demonization of people living unhoused in Milwaukee. “People seem pretty supportive right now,” said Welch. “I don’t know what it’s going to look like in the future, but I hope that people realize the amount of people that are unsheltered in Milwaukee County. We’re going to be serving over 300 people tonight.”

Hundreds of people living on the streets

For Welch and other Milwaukeeans, King Park is not an unfamiliar place. In 2021, Wisconsin Examiner covered the rise in people living in about 16-20 small tents in King Park, with the numbers varying each  day. 

Seeing Milwaukee police officers or sheriffs wasn’t uncommon in the area. Often, however, it’s outreach groups, not police, that had the most regular interactions with the park’s residents. A day before the shooting, on Tuesday, activists from the Poor People’s Army pitched tents in King Park with plans to march down to the RNC, calling attention to a growing crisis of homelessness across the country. Not only in King Park but also in other parts of Milwaukee, the level of need witnessed by outreach and community groups has been staggering, volunteers say. 

“Right now, there used to be an area under the bridge downtown where the vast majority of the homeless people would gather and find shelter and find safety,” Radontae Ashford, pastor at the Infinite Church, told Wisconsin Examiner. “Before the RNC came to town they moved that area, shifted that area here to 14th and Vliet. And now you have a plethora of individuals, about three entire neighborhoods of people living in tents. They need everything. They have nothing..They have nothing. Even the tents that they have were provided for them. They need water. They need food. They need basic hygiene. They need shelter. They need a place to stay. They need mental health resources, therapy, all kinds of things. Clothing. These are people that are without everything; they have nothing.”

Radontae Ashford, pastor at the Infinite Church. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)

Since the winter, many organizations have seen the number of people living on the streets rise steadily. “There’s definitely been increases, even over the winter months the numbers that we were serving were higher than any previous year in the nine years that we’ve been doing this,” Welch told Wisconsin Examiner in an interview conducted a few days before the RNC began. “Currently we’re serving anywhere from 280 to nearly 300 people a night. And we have two outreach buses out for six to seven hours, three nights a week.”

Eric Collins-Dyke, deputy administrator for Milwaukee County Housing Services, agreed. “Definitely emerging from winter into Spring, early April I think was when we started to notice more of an increase outdoors,” Collins-Dyke told Wisconsin Examiner in an interview before the killing of Sharpe on Tuesday. “I think this year what we’ve seen is the increase has been a little more…it’s coming quicker than usual.” Collin-Dyke added, “We’re seeing increased acuity on the mental health side. And we’re seeing more of the aging population, with more physical issues. But we’re also seeing individuals — especially the Park and Rides [parking lots near public transit routes] for example -—who are working. You know, they have full -time jobs. They’re trying the best they can, and they’re essentially rent burdened.” These are people who paid 60 to 70% of their income towards their rent before ending up on the street, he said. Across the city and county Collins-Dyke’s team engages with 175 individuals. 

Street Angels has also seen an increase in people who are both working and living unhoused. “There are lots of encampments,” said Welch. “There are individuals who we just find along the way. Lots of people at Park and Rides has been the thing lately.” 

Tents around King Park in Milwaukee. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)

“The encampments kind of travel throughout the city, as well as individuals that just kind of sleep wherever that they can,” Welch said. His team has encountered more people living in cars and campers, as well as people who’ve had to choose between paying for their car or paying rent. “And many are choosing to live in their vehicle,” Welch said, adding, “we have many of our friends that work.” Street Angels has even encountered families living outside, though small children aren’t often seen since many local resources focus on young children and their families. 

A paper-thin social safety net 

“The economic aspect, I think, is more prevalent than it was before,” Collins-Dyke told Wisconsin Examiner. “And that’s concerning. I think it shows how thin the safety net is in terms of you could have a full time job, and you’re still experiencing that rent burden, and you’re coming into our system because we unfortunately don’t have a robust prevention system at the moment.”

Addressing those needs will require a multi-pronged strategy. With so many people in need of mental health services, developing a form of rapid response for those needs is crucial. There’s also a need for disability resources, hygiene and sanitation, providing storage, services for those who have children, pets and other needs. 

Both Collins-Dyke and Welch told Wisconsin Examiner that many support programs that began with the COVD-19 pandemic were a giant help, but many of those are timing out. Among them were emergency rental assistance funds and  a program that put unhoused people in hotels. “I think during COVID, what we tried to do from an advocacy standpoint was say, look, these kinds of funds that you have in response to a pandemic, these are the kinds of funds we need all the time, right? We need them annually, because we saw what they did.”

Tents around King Park in Milwaukee. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)

A housing navigator team has been added to the county team, as well as a landlord engagement program. “That funding that we got during COVID was something that I think we dreamed about. I think maybe coming 10 years down the road, and we got it then, and we saw how impactful it was,” said Collins-Dyke. “The COVID Hotel programs were housing hundreds of people,” said Welch. “And now, for many, those programs just abruptly ended. So that was kind of the beginning of the uptick. But then there were also other special funding and programs that were ending. I believe the food stamps got cut at one point, so it was really increasing the number of people that were needing to connect with us.”

Cooperation with grassroots groups has also helped. Every two weeks, Welch told Wisconsin Examiner, Street Angels sends a complete list of people they’ve verified as living unsheltered. Although Street Angels has expanded its programs by adding a bus and mobile shower services, it can be hard to keep up with the demand. “Putting us in the streets of Milwaukee two days extra a week will help us keep up,” said Welch. “But even our in-kind gift inventory supplies are dwindling as far as hygiene items and clothing. So yeah, it’s a lot to keep up with right now.” 

Using two outreach buses, the Street Angels cover both the north and south ends of the city. Their range stretches as far south as General Mitchell International Airport, the city of Oak Creek, as far north as the Good Hope area, parts of the inner-city, and also east into the downtown area and around King Park. 

In an interview with Wisconsin Examiner on Tuesday just a few hours before officers fatally shot Sharpe in King Park, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley highlighted local needs for affordable housing. Crowley, speaking from the RNC, said it has been beneficial, “being able to go across the entire county and talk about the affordable housing that is happening, like in the King Park neighborhood, directly impacting Black and brown families to be able to become homeowners.”

He also praised the Coggs Center, a building dedicated to human services, and a  mental health emergency center close to those who are likely, based on data collected by the county, to experience a crisis. Crowley wondered, “How do we find even more trusted messengers that are closest to the people? We can talk about the billions and trillions of dollars of investments. But let’s face it, these are numbers that are not real to some folks, because they’ve never seen a billion dollars…So how do we focus on the tangibles?”

Tents around King Park in Milwaukee. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)

In the richest country in the world, Welch said, “We should not have people sleeping outside, especially when weather can kill you here.” Things like drop-in centers where people can go would go a long way. “Right now in the city of Milwaukee, there is no shelter that you can simply just walk into and say I don’t have a place to live, and I need a place to sleep tonight,” said Welch. “There’s no place that you can just simply walk into at any given time.” Even the local rescue mission has certain intake days and times, Welch explained. “To end unsheltered homelessness, there has to be more shelter.” 

Prevention, shelter options, and more permanent affordable housing are all parts of the solution. First, though, people living unhoused in the city also have to be seen as what they are — human beings. “They’re our neighbors, they’re our community members, they want what everybody wants,” said Collins-Dyke. “And that’s a content, peaceful life. They want stability. Even though most of the individuals that we serve have gone through some incredibly complex trauma that oftentimes is hard to imagine, they don’t want to be in that situation. They don’t. They want to be indoors, and they want to move forward with their lives. And I think for the community to start understanding that, I think, is really, really important.”

Among the unhoused in Milwaukee, there are those with jobs or a families, and those who have nothing at all and need the most help.

“We’re talking about homeless people that do not have a job,” Ashford told Wisconsin Examiner. “So affordable housing is not affordable to them, because they don’t have jobs. They’re homeless, they have nothing. And unless we’re going to provide them with job training resources, education, things of that nature, then even affordable housing does not work for them. We’re speaking of the homeless. We’re not talking about people who need an adjustment on their rent payment. We’re speaking of people who do not even have a place to rent. They’re living without anything. Some of these people don’t even have families.” Ashford stressed that, “we as the strength of the community have to be willing to extend our hands to help the least of these, our brethren.”

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