A new study found that gun violence declined in areas of Detroit where the city is running a community violence intervention program.
The program, known as ShotStoppers, pays community organizations to address gun violence in zones of the city that have seen high levels of fatal and non-fatal shootings. The organizations identify and divert high-risk individuals, and operate community engagement programs.
ShotStoppers began in summer 2023 and just completed its third year of operation. It is not related to ShotSpotter, the city’s gunshot detection system.
In the second year of the ShotStoppers program, gun violence decreased more in areas where the community violence intervention (CVI) organizations operated than in the rest of the city, according to a study released Wednesday by the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions initiative.
The study found that CVI zones saw a 33% decrease in the number of homicide victims, compared to a 12% decrease in the rest of the city. CVI zones also saw a 38% decrease in victims of non-fatal shootings, compared to a 26% decrease outside the zones.
The U of M study highlighted results from August 2024 to August 2025, as compared to the prior 12-month period.
“They can show up and be in spaces that we can't. They know of things that are happening before we do ... That's the superpower."
Sam Stragand, senior program manager at Poverty Solutions, co-authored the study. He said that although the results couldn’t be directly attributed to the program, the decline of shootings in CVI zones was encouraging, especially since the rest of the city saw a smaller decline.
Stragand also said the change was particularly notable because the CVI zones, which had been selected for their historically high level of gun violence, saw homicides decrease “into the single digits.”
There are six community organizations in Detroit's ShotStoppers program, with each responsible for a different three- to five-square mile zone. Their success — and their funding — is measured by a simple, tragic metric: how many people get shot.
CVI programs have become increasingly common in cities across the country. But many programs operate city-wide, Stragand said, which can make it harder to measure the impact of individual interventions.
According to Mike Peterson, director of Community Violence Intervention for the City of Detroit, ShotStoppers' unique structure is critical to ensuring the program’s success.
“We didn't want to get in the weeds of just paying for busy work, if you will — compensating groups just for being active,” Peterson said.
“If you're responsible for an entire city, then when crime goes down, everybody raises their hand and says, 'Hey, it's because of us.' When it goes up, it gets a little quiet,” Peterson said. “We wanted to make sure … we could actually hold (organizations) accountable for what's happening within very specific areas.”
Organizations are given broad autonomy to decide how to reduce violence in their zone. Most pursue a range of interventions, including identifying at-risk individuals to de-escalate active conflicts, providing mentorship and training, and organizing community groups and event-based programming.
Many of the organizations’ “violence interrupters” have themselves experienced gun violence. Some have prior criminal records and are using “their own experiences — unfortunately, their own traumas — to help people try to not make the same decisions in the future,” Stragand said.
Peterson said organizers with those experiences can reach people who wouldn’t be receptive to a similar message coming from “somebody sitting in the mayor's office.”
“They can show up and be in spaces that we can't. They know of things that are happening before we do,” Peterson said. “And, honestly, they can relate in a way that traditionally law enforcement and government can't.”
Through the program, police can also alert organizations if a shooting has occurred, with the hope that organizers are “able to get in and have conversations with certain individuals to ensure that there is no retaliation or minimize the chance that there then becomes a back and forth between maybe a certain group or gang,” Peterson said.
He described the collaboration as successful, but emphasized that information sharing from police to community organizations was “a one-way layer of information.”
The City of Detroit gives $700,000 per year to each of the six CVI teams, with the possibility of earning hundreds of thousands more in performance-based bonuses.
The program was launched as a two-year pilot using funding from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. It is now a formal program within the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood and Community Safety.
All of the organizations were already in operation before the ShotStoppers program. But access to significant and consistent funding, Stragand said, allowed them to expand their hiring and programming, and to make long-term commitments.
Peterson said while he felt “very fortunate” to see the decline in shootings documented by the U of M study, he was “obsessed with” finding ways to improve the program.
The next step of the program, Peterson said, was learning from best practices and “trying to do the best we can to eventually make it be a part of the broader public safety ecosystem and response.”
“Just like you have police, just like you have EMS and fire, community violence intervention should be one of those pillars, one of those arms of public safety,” Peterson said. “And so it's going to take us continuing to standardize and perfect this as much as possible so we can have that.”
