Last November, William Kennedy was hanging out at his girlfriend’s house on the east side of Detroit with his girlfriend, her 2-year-old son, and another friend when her ex-boyfriend unexpectedly appeared at the front door. “‘If I kick this door in and somebody’s in there, they dead,’” Kennedy recalled the man saying. “When they came into the house, he told his homeboy to shoot me.”
When one of the men shot at him, Kennedy fired back with his own weapon and hid behind a wall. “I don’t know if it was a machine gun or a switch,” Kennedy said of the attack, “but it was a whole lot of bullets.” After the shootout, he heard the toddler crying; a bullet had gone through the boy’s leg. Kennedy drove him and his mother to the hospital, then he left.
He knew the police would be after him because a child had been hurt, so Kennedy called Ray Winans, the CEO of Detroit Friends and Family, a nonprofit that primarily does outreach work, provides mentorship, job training, and other support to young people on the east side. Kennedy had known Winans since he was a kid, and he knew the activist would help him safely surrender to the police because, since 2022, Winans has spearheaded a “safe surrender” initiative. Within hours, Winans escorted Kennedy to the station, where Kennedy explained his version of events and provided the police with his concealed carry permit.
“They said they was about to issue a warrant and would’ve had no choice but to kick in doors and figure out where I’m at,” Kennedy said, knowing from having grown up in Detroit that those situations with the police can turn deadly.
The safe surrender initiative in Detroit is a unique approach to violence intervention; it’s likely to be the only strategy of its kind. Winans and a handful of other activists connect with suspects directly or through their contacts in the community, and help them approach the police without fear of prompting the kind of violence that is more likely in unmediated situations. Sometimes, the person has committed a crime or taken part in a crime. Other times, as with Kennedy, they’ve been involved in an incident that requires further investigation.
The activists working the program have facilitated more than a dozen surrenders in just under three years. Both police and community leaders said that’s helping build more trust in law enforcement in Detroit’s neighborhoods.
“I think a lot of people know the work we do in the community, and the ties we have, and the relationships we have, that they know they can trust us,” Winans said. “Their thinking is ‘let’s contact them guys and they can tell us what to do, or what lawyers to call.’”
Safe surrender is part of a slate of initiatives that city leaders and elected officials have endorsed in recent years that allow community groups to take the lead on addressing gun violence in their own ways, including through conflict resolution, community engagement, and providing designated resource centers for those who need them. These efforts have won some credit for historic declines in gun violence over the last couple of years, though the progress could be threatened by an onslaught of recent federal cuts.
“All the different CVI groups in the city play a big part in deterring the crime,” said Kennedy, who works as a juvenile detention center specialist. “Nobody can do what these groups do.”
The seed for a safe surrender initiative was planted around 2018, said Winans. “It was something small we were just doing every now and then,” he said, adding that a few incidents of police kicking down doors and getting violent with suspects and their families prompted Winans to take action at the time. Detroit Friends and Family wanted to find a way to decrease the possibility of those scenarios.
Then, in 2022, the group applied for ShotStoppers, the city’s community violence intervention funding program. Each organization selected has its own designated area to cover. Among its proposals, Detroit Friends and Family included safe surrender along with other youth-focused programming. By 2023, the group and the six other organizations that had applied for ShotStoppers funding received $700,000 to implement their ideas, including safe surrender. The funding covers program expenses and salaries for its staff of seven. In the last year, it has been able to work with other groups throughout the city and expand its method to the west side.
Franklin Hayes, the deputy chief of strategic policing in Detroit, remembered one of the first calls he got from Winans in 2023, telling him that someone wanted to turn themself in. “This gave them an option to face accountability and minimize the risk of having an unfavorable police response,” Hayes said. The initiative helps the police focus on other things, he said, but it also gives them more credibility within neighborhoods.
Winans is not doing this work to help the police, though. He views the effort as a way to protect and preserve the community, and to reach people who are deeply embedded in violent conflicts and often don’t think about asking for help. “Those guys know they can call on us if they get into trouble,” said Darrell Ewing, an activist with Detroit Friends and Family, who also helps run safe surrenders. “We can get two people in a room that’s been trying to kill each other for years.”
Since the initiative is part of Detroit Friends and Family’s larger violence intervention model, its metric for success is the overall decline in fatal and nonfatal shootings in a specific target area compared to the rest of the city. In the last quarter of 2024, the organization cut shootings by 83 percent in its zone compared to 35 percent in areas without any intervention programs, according to city data. While Winans said the group has managed around 14 surrenders, Hayes said it has achieved more, just by spreading the word. “We’ve had people walk into police headquarters and say, ‘Hey, I heard there was a safe surrender program, I want to turn myself in.’”
