Negus Vu is from old-school Detroit. He grew up in the 1990s and remembers hearing gunshots every night on the West Side of the city. “I grew up in a gang neighborhood, gang-related neighborhood,” Vu, 42, recalled. “I definitely was surrounded by violence. I became desensitized to it because it was an everyday thing.”
Decades later, as a grassroots leader of The People’s Action — a nonprofit that works to improve the lives of low-income Detroit residents through advocacy and resources — Vu witnessed the same desensitization he experienced, especially among young people. During the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, Vu said, gun crimes soared.
As boredom, social media fights and socioeconomic issues drove gang conflicts throughout the city, the number of homicides increased by nearly 19 percent in 2020 compared to the previous year, consistent with national trends. Gun violence hotspots in Detroit proliferated over the next couple of years.
The toll on Black communities was part of a decades-long pattern. According to police data, there were 1,994 homicides in the city from 2017 through 2023; about 90 percent of victims were Black, and 90 percent were by gun.
To combat the surge, Vu and others pushed the city to fund community violence intervention, especially for the neighborhoods more afflicted. They were responding to the city’s decision to install gunshot detection technology and wanted to ensure the police weren’t the only resources deployed.
“We don’t want [the cops] just jumping out if there’s a shot detection, and you’re frisking and you’re harassing people,” Vu said. “The key element above all is genuine love for these individuals, and with genuine love, you’re going to be able to make an impact in their life and in their family lives.”
Violence in those hotspots has since been dramatically reduced, according to city officials, thanks in part to Vu and other community-led groups cooperating with the city through a program called ShotStoppers, launched in 2023 by Mayor Mike Duggan’s Office. (ShotStoppers is separate from the similarly named ShotSpotter surveillance technology.) It provided six organizations with funding to autonomously implement their own community violence intervention strategies in specific areas.
For the groups to receive more funding, reductions in nonfatal shootings and homicides had to outpace the citywide trend. By the end of October 2024, the city recorded a 45 percent year-over-year drop in homicides in the areas where ShotStoppers was implemented, versus 18 percent in places without it.
The decline was more pronounced than the countrywide trend as the pandemic wore on. Detroit ended 2024 with 203 homicides, the lowest number since 1965, according to the Detroit Police Department.
Now, the city could lose the $10 million initiative, funded with federal dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act, the Joe Biden-era’s economic stimulus package set to expire this year. It’s unlikely to be renewed as President Donald Trump’s administration takes steps to cut relief packages in his second term.
Though some states — such as neighboring Wisconsin — will continue funding similar programs by taking matters into their own hands, Michigan is in limbo. In 2024, lawmakers there passed two bills to increase public safety and violence prevention funding by more than $200 million, which would have funded ShotStoppers in perpetuity. But the legislation died in the House at the end of the legislative session. To be revived, the bills would need to be reintroduced in a House where Republicans now hold a majority.
“We worked so hard, we sacrificed so much, and we’ve learned from the mistakes that we’ve made,” Vu said, noting that his organization’s progress is contingent on sustaining the relationships it has built. “The magnitude of what is going to happen when the ARPA dollars run out is… diabolical.”
Activists on the ground said Detroit’s success should be viewed as a benchmark for similarly sized cities in the Midwest. Its gun violence decline is a testament to what’s possible when local groups, police, and elected leaders collaborate.
But the initiative contradicts newly elected President Trump’s calls for punitive enforcement and prosecutions. In one of the executive orders he signed on Inauguration Day, Trump directed state and district attorneys to prioritize “public safety and the prosecution of violent crime, and take all appropriate action necessary to dismantle transnational criminal activity in the United States.” He also pledged to involve federal law enforcement, as he did when launching Operation Legend in 2020.
Local officials said that since ShotStoppers began, the Detroit Police Department has been more strategic in its approach to enforcement. “We realized that we cannot arrest our way out of crime,” said Franklin Hayes, the department’s deputy police chief in charge of its Crime Strategies Bureau, adding that cutting violent crime is not just about making arrests, but bringing resources to those areas that usually struggle. “We’ve looked at the historic areas where we’ve seen violent crime happen, and then we just focus on those areas.”
Over the past two years, many Detroit neighborhoods have seen a decrease in violent crime, particularly homicides. For example, in Farwell, Franklin Park, Midwest and Brightmoor — which had double-digit homicide numbers in 2022 — homicides dropped an average of 54 percent, according to police data.
“I used to lock up 100 African American men a day,” said Pamela McClain, a former commander of the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office. “Now we’re on the other side of helping them with workforce development, workforce training, squashing beefs before they even get out. That’s unprecedented.”
McClain, who now works as a liaison between the Mayor’s Office and the community groups participating in ShotStoppers, said the success comes from the interdependency of all sides — local nonprofits, law enforcement, and politicians — and the trust they have built.
ShotSpotters takes a unique approach relative to other community violence intervention strategies. It is autonomous, allowing the groups to use the strategies they feel work best — resolving conflict, designating resource centers, and hosting community events — for the needs of the area.
Each of the six groups works in its own zone of the city — around 4 square miles — and started with a $175,000 grant investment. City officials then measured how many homicides and nonfatal shootings occurred in each group’s zone and compared those numbers to the rest of Detroit, including in the previous two years. If the numbers dropped more than in the rest of the city, groups could receive up to $175,000 more each quarter.
The city would not have had the success it’s experienced without the community partnership, Hayes said. He said he hoped decision-makers “see the results and the direct impact that this program has had. It is an anchor in our crime strategy.”
FORCE Detroit works in the working-class Warrendale neighborhood on the city’s West Side, where residents have a strong identity. FORCE’s goal is to reach those young Black men who can either be targets or shooters, and engage with them directly to de-escalate potentially deadly disputes.
As a volunteer after his release from prison in 2019, Dejuan “Zoe” Kennedy was helping to develop the group’s outreach efforts when he observed the nature of the gun violence they were witnessing. It wasn’t a result of people hanging out on the block or in front of convenience stores, selling drugs, or shooting at random — it was interpersonal violence. As FORCE’s newly appointed executive director, Kennedy is using his experience to direct the remedy for targeted violence: conflict mediation.
“We try to minimize the possibility of conflict amongst people who live around each other,” he said.
Grassroots workers know the city’s decline in violence is dependent on more than a single program, but those resources are key, they said, to sustain their progress. “A lot of people put in work for us to get to this point, but we still got stuff we need to work on as a community,” Zoe said.
The Trace’s analysis of gun violence trends over the past decade found that gun violence in major American cities plummeted between 2023 and 2024 after peaking in the two years prior. If the drop in Detroit’s most afflicted neighborhoods is any indication of the effects that resources like ShotStoppers can have, then it has “proven the value” of community violence intervention, Vu said. The freedom that each organization’s leaders have to put together their own strategies is replicable in other places, even if the circumstances around gun violence are different.
As questions about the future of funding swirl, some community leaders lament how politics has found its way into the conversation at all. “People forget when we talk about gun violence in our city, it’s young Black men carrying the weight,” said Ray Winans, who runs Detroit Friends and Family, another ShotStoppers group.
Zoe, FORCE Detroit’s leader, said he appreciates the credit the community is getting for the turnaround when so often it takes the blame for the violence. But he fears waking up to an old reality. “We made history according to everybody,” he said. “Who’s gonna go down in history for not making sure that bill is passed? We know who went down in history for everything else that happened in our city.”
Aaron Mendelson contributed reporting.
