The murder of 25-five-year-old Kejuan Master happened just feet from a daycare center on Colerain Avenue in Mount Airy.
Six shots rang out at about 1 p.m. on Sept. 2 in front of the daycare, according to witnesses, hitting Master and an unidentified woman. The woman, who survived, crumpled in a neighboring driveway. Master ran a few buildings down, collapsed and died.
Children were inside the daycare at the time, though none were injured in the shooting. Nearby Mount Airy Elementary School was briefly placed on lockdown as police looked for the shooter.
The scene was terrifying, witnesses say.
“By the time police got here, they were trying to revive the gentleman,” business owner Bonnie Berding told reporters at the time. “They must have worked on him 15 minutes, and so that was pretty shocking to see.”
That shock doesn’t always go away. Shootings like the one that killed Masters have ripple effects throughout communities like Mount Airy, experts say, causing deep-seated trauma that can linger for years in the minds of community members, especially the youngest ones.
While the city’s emergency response teams are currently trained to apprehend suspects, make the scene safe and treat physical wounds, the psychological injuries sustained by witnesses and victims of gun violence have often gone untended. But a proposal the city of Cincinnati is currently mulling could change that.
The plan seeks to create emergency psychological trauma response teams that would accompany traditional emergency responders to crime scenes like Master’s murder. Those teams could provide immediate services and also refer victims and witnesses to longer-term treatment for trauma.
“We remove the bullet, we sew up the wound, but the trauma remains,” says City Councilwoman Yvette Simpson, who first proposed the response teams this summer. “Over and over, being exposed to those things creates a trauma in those children, who are then more likely to be victims or perpetrators of violence. There’s a desensitization that takes place.”
Simpson points to studies that show children who live in communities with high levels of violence can over time develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms akin to those suffered by soldiers coming back from combat. A federal study released last year on Atlanta’s most violent neighborhoods found that as many as one-third of residents in those neighborhoods exhibited symptoms of severe PTSD.
Cincinnati city administration Oct. 26 issued a largely favorable report about that proposal, which comes from an emerging, wider approach to violent crime that views phenomena like gun violence from a public health perspective.
Using the framework of epidemiology to search for solutions to shootings, plans like Simpson’s view violence as contagious, like a disease, inflamed and continued by exposure to past violence. Nonprofits and other city governments have recognized the link and have taken steps to address the ongoing trauma of gun violence in other communities.
Youth Alive, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit, has a crisis response team that engages with victims and witnesses of gun violence in the city. The group’s executive director Anne Marks says that the trauma of gun violence creates a cycle that is difficult to break.
“People talk about trauma as something that’s really interconnected to violence, and some people talk about it as the result of violence,” Marks told a Bay Area NBC affiliate in February. “But I would say that trauma is really the root of violence in many ways.
“It doesn’t start when you’re 18. It starts when you’re 6, 7, 8. So there’s two things you can do. You can either turn it inwardly, maybe do drugs or commit suicide, or you do it outwardly and then you begin to hurt other people.”
Breaking that cycle means treating trauma early, and cities are increasingly considering the idea that having mental health professionals among the first responders to violent crime scenes could help accomplish that. San Francisco last month announced it would have five mental health specialists available to accompany police to the scenes of violent crime to help victims and bystanders, as well as to provide crisis response when police are dealing with a suspect with possible mental illness.
Boston has taken another approach rooted in the same set of ideas, establishing trauma recovery teams in community centers in eight neighborhoods especially wracked by gun violence. Those teams, made up of trauma-trained mental health professionals and community workers, started work in March of 2015.
In its first year, the program made 1,159 referrals for long-term mental health care, and nearly 900 of those referred made at least one visit. A total of more than 5,500 mental health visits were made through the program in its first year, according to data cited by Monica Valdes Lupi, executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission.
Some in Cincinnati hope trauma response teams can do something similar here. That’s important in neighborhoods like Mount Airy, which has had a violent year.
In February, two apparently unrelated shootings rocked the neighborhood on the same night, including one on Colerain Avenue near where Masters died. Just weeks after Masters’ shooting, in October, two double shootings, also apparently unrelated, happened in the neighborhood.
It’s not the only neighborhood in the city suffering from gun violence, of course. Overall, Cincinnati has seen an uptick in shootings. On one day in late July, for example, seven people were shot and three died in Millvale, West End and Avondale.
Cincinnati saw about 460 shootings last year, according to Cincinnati Police Department data, compared to an abnormally low 375 in 2014 and an average of 400 over the previous four years.
The problem has gotten pronounced enough that, earlier this year, The New York Times profiled the city’s gun violence. The Times article, which ran in May, highlighted an August 2015 shooting spree in Madisonville that killed two and wounded five more.
The thorny issue of neighborhood violence is tangled up in larger systemic issues around class and race. A 2013 report by the Kaiser Foundation found that about 20 percent of Americans have a personal connection to someone who has been a victim of gun violence. But more than 40 percent of African Americans know gun violence victims. About 40 percent of Americans worry about becoming a victim of a shooting, but more than 60 percent of blacks and 70 percent of Hispanics have those fears.
Those numbers more than likely come from the disproportionate number of minorities segregated into low-income communities where economic desperation sparks increased violence. Cincinnati neighborhoods like Avondale, Millvale, Mount Airy and others that see the most violent crime are predominantly black and low-income. CPD data shows that 93 percent of the victims of non-fatal shootings in the city last year were black.
Simpson and other advocates of the trauma response team model hope the public health approach can reduce some of those disparities. But before that can happen, the proposal has to be put into practice.
The city’s recent report recommended establishing partnerships with mental health professionals already working on trauma response, including those within the city’s health department and at places like the University of Cincinnati Hospital’s Psychiatric Emergency Services, which has a mobile response unit.
There’s also the Crisis Intervention Team model, which trains law enforcement officers to respond to mental health emergencies. In Hamilton County, there are about 80 law enforcement officers with CIT training per 100,000 people, which is above average. That training could be expanded, the report says, and officers with such training could give supplemental mental health assistance.
Simpson says leveraging already-existing resources could be key to getting the idea off the ground. She hopes to have the program up and running in pilot form in the coming months.
Results might not be immediate, supporters say, but could be pronounced in years to come.
“These things happen over time,” Simpson says. “There’s a buildup happening. If we can treat that, that’s a long-term solution to violence.” ©
This article appears in Nov 23-30, 2016.