In the wake of a weekend church shooting in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan leaders urged the state Legislature to continue funding community violence intervention programs.
The programs work directly with people affected by gun crime in an effort to stop the cycle of violence. The city of Detroit has said programs there coincided with a 37% to 83% reduction of violent, gun-related crime in 2024 and the lowest homicide rate in decades.
Norman Clement, the founder and executive director of Detroit Change Initiative, said the state budget being negotiated while running up against a deadline that could trigger a partial government shutdown threatens a loss of healthcare, social work, and public safety resources. “The tragedy of yesterday shows that public safety is desperately needed,” Clement said of the Grand Blanc shooting.
Bishop Bonnie Perry, the president of End Gun Violence Michigan, said the Grand Blanc shooter’s access to a firearm culminated in a “wretched, completely avoidable tragedy that is unthinkable in almost every other country in the world.”
Gun homicide is disproportionately high in urban areas like Detroit and in underserved communities of color, said Quincy Smith, the executive director of Team Pursuit, which is one of the community violence intervention organizations in Detroit.
Smith said relying on law enforcement alone is not enough, and a community-based approach is necessary. Part of the work Team Pursuit does is to pinpoint what factors make someone at risk of committing violence, he said. For example, said Smith, gangs fall into a cycle of revenge that can persist with continual retaliation.
Locals who know the community work to diffuse the situation and settle differences through dialogue. “Once people are talking, we try to address the root cause of violence, the unmet need that’s driving this behavior,” Smith said.
Negus Vu is the founder and president of The People’s Action, which provides rapid-response victim services in Detroit — work that resulted in a 49% reduction of gun crime in the group's area since 2023, he said.
“We stop the cycle of pain and trauma by helping people,” said Vu. The People’s Action offers mental health services and relocation to safer housing in the wake of gun violence.
Smith said funding the violence intervention programs is worth the cost. The costs associated with a gun homicide — things like crime scene response, medical treatment, prosecution, and incarceration — add up to just over $1.2 million, according to data from the National Institute for Criminal Justice Research.
The leaders questioned the reasoning behind the possibility of funding cuts and said they were concerned about a lack of care for at-risk communities. Ryan Bates, executive director of End Gun Violence Michigan, said if politicians are not in favor of passing stricter gun laws, funding CVI programs offers a viable alternative. Additionally, cuts to Medicaid, the single largest source of funding for mental health services in the United States, could prevent troubled individuals getting the help they need before resorting to violence.
“This is not a scare tactic, it’s a scare reality,” Bates said. “There’s 1,300 people in the state who are killed by a gun every year, and we have become numb to that everyday terror.”
“There’s pain in poverty, so it's an everyday struggle,” Vu said. “But if we can intervene, if we can stop the cycle of trauma, we can create a new future. Not just for the victim at the time, but for whole communities. But if we lose this funding, it can all fall apart. So people will die, and a cycle of violence will continue again.”
Wednesday is the deadline for state lawmakers to finalize the budget and avoid a partial government shutdown.
