Emergency response to last week’s Milwaukee City Hall threat a ‘failure,’ alders say

Last week, Milwaukee’s City Hall and nearby municipal building were evacuated after what turned out to be a false alarm of a shooting.

But emergency services’ response to the alarm was lacking, said city alders on the Public Safety and Health Committee Thursday.

“Ultimately, I confirmed that this was a serious situation not by an announcement over the PA system, or a text, email, but rather by seeing four or five officers coming the City Hall stairs with long firearms,” said Common Council President José Pérez.

“It’s very clear that there were some oversights, and that this was absolutely not a perfect operation,” the mayor’s council liaison, Amber Danyus, told alders.

On May 15, staff in the Zeidler Municipal Building mistook sounds of a slamming door — from a recently-fired employee — for gunshots.

They called 911, prompting a police response and evacuation of Zeidler and City Hall next door.

Officials sketch out timeline of emergency response

The 911 call from Zeidler staff came at 3:03 p.m., Milwaukee Emergency Management Director Ryan Zollicoffer told alders.

He said the mayor’s chief of staff emailed “all the electeds and all the employees” 20 minute later, at 3:23 p.m. about a possible shooting.

But alders on the committee all said they never got the email. Pérez went back through his inbox mid-meeting to confirm.

“I just checked, I searched this email,” Pérez said. “I got nothing from the chief of staff.”

“I will double-check on that,” Zollicoffer answered.

At 3:30 p.m., a lockdown announcement went out over the municipal complex’s PA system, Commissioner of Public Works Jerrel Kruschke told alders.

According to Kruschke the warning sounded in City Hall. But in the adjacent Zeidler building “where the incident occurred, the announcement did not go off,” he said. “The speakers were not working at that time.”

So his office made individual phone calls to each floor of the municipal building, Kruschke said.

By that time, there was a substantial police presence around the two buildings. Police let employees out of the building in waves until well after 4 p.m. As people trickled out, Milwaukee Police Inspector Sheronda Grant told reporters there was “no indication that a shooting, shots-fired incident, took place.”

Confusion grew in communication gaps, alders say

Before hearing the PA announcement or seeing armed officers in City Hall, Pérez said he first learned of the situation from a staffer.

“It was a knock on my door by my legislative assistant, with a city clerk staffer, who said she was informed by the Mayor’s police detail that there were shots fired in the next building,” he said.

He looked in the hallway, he said, and saw the mayor’s office was “completely black.”

“We knew nothing. To go outside in the hall, see the mayor’s office completely blacked out, because they took whatever precaution they needed to, they knew something in real-time,” he said. “They took action, other people were left in the dark.”

After the PA announcement didn’t play in Zeidler, at least one employee left work around 3:35 p.m. not knowing there’d been a lockdown order, according to an email from that employee Pérez read out loud.

“I didn’t know there was supposed to be a lockdown until I got to the bus stop and checked Fox 6’s website on my phone,” Pérez read from the email.

Kruschke said Zeidler’s PA system has been fixed since last week. He also said the city will improve email communications in emergencies.

“I don’t think there’s a protocol for actually sending out the email. I think that’s where the gap is,” he said. “I think this, in the future, is going through just a general E-Notify so everyone gets it. I think that’s the solution here.”

“This could’ve been a tragedy,” Pérez said. “Because it wasn’t doesn’t negate the fact that this was a complete failure as a test-case, or an exercise.”