Racine officials present draft comprehensive safety plan and group-violence intervention; police report mixed crime trends

RACINE, Wis. — City staff on Thursday presented a draft 2025 Comprehensive Safety Plan and described a Group Violence Intervention (GBI) model the city is using to target a small number of people responsible for a large share of recent gun violence.

Director Derek Tate, community safety director, told the Public Safety Committee the plan grew out of the City of Racine Office of Violence Prevention and was shaped by community conversations and a state grant. "Our vision is ultimately that no matter who you are, where you live, where you come from, you have a right to be safe in this community," Tate said.

The plan and presentation laid out five priorities: stopping shootings and violence; creating safe, connected neighborhoods; promoting healthy social development (especially for youth); using infrastructure and environmental design to reduce risky behavior; and rebuilding trust between law enforcement and residents. Tate said the work draws on a public‑health approach — defining problems, identifying risk and protective factors, deploying interventions, and measuring outcomes.

Tate said the plan was funded by the State of Wisconsin Department of Administration’s Blueprint for Peace grant and informed by nearly 900 resident surveys and community conversations held June–October 2024. The draft is intended to guide city work for three to five years, with a formal refresh beginning no later than 2028.

Tate outlined the GBI model the city is using as its primary short‑term intervention strategy. GBI focuses on a small high‑risk group identified through data and multiagency "shooting reviews" and combines a coordinated message from law enforcement and community partners with offers of services. He described the notification and outreach sequence: biweekly shooting reviews to identify high‑risk individuals; "custom notifications" in person to those individuals about legal risk and offers of help; immediate intensive case management for those who accept services; and focused supervision and enforcement when necessary.

Tate described the profile used locally for identification: mainly males about 15–30 years old with substantial prior law‑enforcement contacts (the presentation cited "five plus arrests or contacts" in many cases) who are tied to a loosely organized group or crew. He said outreach is intended to be nonjudgmental and based on relationship building to reduce immediate risk.

Police officials joined the presentation. Chief Ramirez said public safety remains the department’s top priority and endorsed GBI as a complement to existing community policing, investigative work and federal partnerships. Ramirez reported year‑to‑date figures through August: calls for service at 39,845 (up about 9 percent compared with the prior year); five homicides this year versus four last year (a 25 percent increase); a 42 percent decline in nonfatal shootings compared with the prior year; and 134 guns recovered so far this year (about 50 percent fewer than the prior year). Ramirez said shots‑fired incidents and other indicators entered a downward trend after a violent peak in 2022.

Committee members asked for sources and definitions for the survey and demographic statistics. Tate said the percentages in the report come from the locally administered survey (nearly 900 responses) and accompanying community conversations; he said the full report, prepared by Pain Consulting in January, includes respondent demographic breakdowns and appendices. Tate told Alder Weidner: "This grant will expire in '25," referring to the ARPA and state funding that helped stand up the department; he said the mayor’s proposed budget will address future funding and that staff would continue seeking grants.

Several alderpersons pressed for neighborhood‑level detail. Tate said the survey asked respondents whether they consider the city or their neighborhood their community and that results show different perceptions of safety; he said the project team can produce more targeted outreach but did not collect full addresses to produce a fine‑grained heat map from the initial survey.

Tate and police leaders emphasized that GBI requires multiagency cooperation — from patrol officers and investigators to probation, prosecutors and bond authorities — for "swift, certain and proportional" enforcement when criminal activity occurs alongside offers of services.

Votes at a glance: the committee later approved the meeting minutes and voted to receive and file the presentation. Both motions were carried by voice vote; the record shows "motion carries" but individual vote tallies were not recorded in the transcript.

What happens next: Tate said the department will create intra‑city working groups, continue resident engagement, produce an annual report on progress, and begin a formal plan refresh by 2028. He said the draft plan is intended to be a living document that staff will revise annually based on outcomes and community feedback.

Members of the committee and city staff indicated plans to share the slide deck and the draft report appendices with council members for further review. The presentation closed when the committee moved and carried approval of the minutes and receipt and filing of the item.

Community and technical details in the report — including the survey methodology, exact demographic breakdowns, and the list of individuals identified through shooting reviews — are described in the draft report and appendices, which the presenters said will be distributed to committee members.