Tai Hooper, 34, and Hendriel Anderson, 40, roll into the parking lot of a Northwest Milwaukee housing complex and jump from their car. They’re running late. Both know the basics of the situation: A week earlier, Alexis Varnado, 17, had been playing Grand Theft Auto at her aunt’s house with her younger cousin when two young men came to rob the apartment. The burglars wore sweatshirts with the hoods pulled tight so that their faces were barely visible. They pushed the two into the younger cousin’s room and told them to lie in the closet while they ransacked the apartment. Three hours later an older cousin came to find the young girl and boy still crouched in the closet, afraid to move. Hooper and Anderson are here to check in on the girl.
Together the two comprise Milwaukee’s Trauma-informed Response Team (TRT). First responding officers in District 7 — which encompasses some of the city’s most volatile neighborhoods — give the team a heads-up when someone under the age of 18 is present at a violent scene. The most common category for referrals is battery, followed closely by domestic violence; shootings and homicides account for about 15% of the referrals, according to TRT’s 2016 tally. Hooper and Anderson collect the reports each day, and follow up in the timeframe that they see appropriate. If there was a sudden death, they give enough time that the family has had time to grieve a bit and bury the body. But in a case like Varnado’s, they’ll come by as quickly as the family will have them.
TRT falls under the umbrella of “trauma-informed policing,” a concept that at the most basic level means training officers to not exacerbate trauma at a crime scene. But in its ideal state, it is a model in which officers and clinicians work as equal partners to support people who bear the emotional scars of violent crime. TRT lies somewhere in the middle of this spectrum.
[For more of this story, written by Maura Ewing, go to https://www.buzzfeed.com/maura...ly0vaDDxY#.yujVMDDqz]
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