Detroit’s violence interrupters have new evidence behind them, and a push to stay

What happened

Detroit’s city-backed violence intervention program, ShotStopper, is “showing significant promise in targeted areas,” The Trace reported, citing a new University of Michigan evaluation. According to The Trace, the program launched in 2023 and runs in six zones, where community groups design their own strategies; it is unrelated to the ShotSpotter gunshot detection system.

The evaluation found a 33 percent decrease in homicides in ShotStopper areas, compared with 12 percent in the rest of the city, The Trace reported, at a time of record-level declines citywide. Researchers cannot say definitively that the program caused the sharper drop, according to the outlet. “It looks like the teams did have significant influence on decreases in homicides and nonfatal shootings in their areas,” Sam Stragand, a senior program manager at Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan and a co-author of the report, said, according to The Trace.

The groups work differently, The Trace reported. Force Detroit, on the West Side, focuses on people actively involved in shootings. New Era, in the Northwest, takes a community-wide approach that relies on local events and resources to build engagement. Stragand said Force Detroit was “by far the best performer out of the groups,” and that New Era “still had significant decreases in their area, as well,” according to The Trace.

Detroit has invested more than $11 million in ShotStopper over three years and now wants to make it a permanent public safety strategy, The Trace reported. City Council approved an additional $3 million for the 2025-2026 fiscal year, and the adopted 2026-2027 budget includes $10.8 million for community violence intervention, a $3.4 million increase over the previous year, according to the outlet. Long-term funding still remains a question, The Trace reported, and the groups work in neighborhoods facing disinvestment and limited economic opportunity, problems they cannot solve alone.

Our reflection

Behind those percentages are people who did not die. Somewhere in those six zones, a grandmother did not have to pick out a casket. You will never meet them, because what saved them was a shooting that never happened.

The quieter pain sits with the people doing the work. For three years they have built trust on blocks the rest of the city learned to drive around, on money nobody has promised past the next budget. Trust like that takes years to earn and one lost funding cycle to break. When a city keeps its peacemakers on trial-run money, it tells them their lives are a pilot.

Before we point at City Hall, look closer. Most of us love a pilot. It lets us feel generous without being bound to anything. Plenty of us do it with Jesus himself: try him for a season and keep the exit open. Faithfulness is fruit the Spirit grows slowly, and it does not grow in a twelve-month trial.

When Jesus came near Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept. The city had missed the things that make for peace. He did not critique it from the hillside. He went inside and took its violence into his own body at the cross. Then he walked out of the tomb, which is why we refuse to call any zip code finished. Jeremiah told the exiles in Babylon to plant gardens there. He told them to seek the welfare of the city they were in. Nobody plants a garden for a pilot program.

The evidence here is honest and limited. The researchers will not claim cause, and neither will we. Still, two groups with opposite methods both saw significant decreases: the people closest to a block know things a central office cannot. Moving from a three-year experiment to a standing line in the budget is how a city tells those workers it plans to stay.

That conviction drives our JCVI work out of Miami and our other hubs: reach a young person at first contact, before a record exists, and stay through re-entry. It only works if the people doing it can promise they will be there next year.

So this week, find out where your own city’s violence intervention money comes from. If it lives on a one-time grant, call your council member and ask, by name, for a permanent line. Then pray for the peacemakers on your side of town, and put something behind them.

Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace!

Luke 19:42

Source: The Trace, “A Violence Interruption Program in Detroit Has New Evidence Behind It. Now Comes a Push to Make It Permanent.”