Here’s something worth celebrating for anybody who’s tired of hearing that the answer to violent crime is stripping law-abiding people of their rights: a Detroit program that goes after the actual causes of violence appears to be working, and it doesn’t involve a single new gun law.
What the Study Found
According to a study from the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions initiative, the city’s ShotStoppers program is tied to a 45% drop in homicides and nonfatal shootings over three years in the Detroit neighborhoods it covers.
The year-two numbers are more granular and hold up on their own. From August 2024 to July 2025, CVI zones saw a 33% decrease in homicide victims and a 38% decrease in nonfatal shooting victims compared to the previous 12 months. In the rest of Detroit over the same window, homicide victims dropped 12% and nonfatal shooting victims dropped 26%. The zones covered by the program roughly doubled the rest of the city on both counts.
For national perspective, the U.S. homicide rate has fallen roughly 30% over the same three-year stretch. A 45% drop in the targeted zones outpaces that and beats the sections of Detroit that fall outside the program. It’s not a randomized controlled trial, but the built-in comparison to the rest of the same city is a lot better than the “we passed a law, look what happened” analysis gun control advocates usually offer.
How ShotStoppers Works
The City of Detroit launched ShotStoppers in 2023 as a Community Violence Intervention program, funded initially with $11 million in American Rescue Plan Act dollars. Following the two-year pilot, it’s now been permanently integrated into the new Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood and Community Safety with a mix of city and state funding — a real institutional commitment rather than a one-off grant.
The city describes it as a community-centered strategy run without law enforcement, paying community-based organizations to reduce violence in specific “CVI zones” — 3- to 5-square-mile areas with a history of high gun violence. Six teams cover the map.
The funding structure is where the incentives get interesting. Each team receives roughly $175,000 per quarter in base funding, plus up to another $175,000 per quarter in performance bonuses when its zone cuts homicides and nonfatal shootings faster than the citywide average. Put up results, get paid. That’s a model TTAG has seen work in Indianapolis and one that separates programs actually reducing violence from programs that just spend money.
The strategy runs on two tracks. First, teams connect with “shooters” directly, working the theory that violent people run in the same social networks — reach one and you reach the whole circle. From there, teams combine short-term efforts such as conflict resolution and mentorship with longer-term support: peer cohorts, job skills training, and food and housing assistance.
One team, New Era, focused on community engagement by hosting mobile block parties and resource fairs in neighborhoods hit by disinvestment. As a New Era team leader described it to Poverty Solutions researchers, the funding “helps put gas in the vehicle that we already have.” Michael Peterson, Detroit’s CVI Program Director, told the study authors he’s “obsessed with” finding ways to refine the model further.
Why This Matters
TTAG has long argued that “gun violence” isn’t actually a public health problem — it’s an interpersonal, cultural, and economic problem that shows up disproportionately in specific neighborhoods within specific cities. ShotStoppers is what taking that framing seriously looks like in practice: identify who the shooters actually are, work their social networks, pair intervention with real economic opportunity, and measure whether it worked.
This is what going after the root causes looks like. It’s an assault on the reasons people turn violent in the first place. Remove the guns and violent people stay violent people. Address the underlying cause, and the hardware stops mattering.
It’s also worth being honest about the track record of the broader category. Not every CVI program produces these numbers — some cities have spent Medicaid dollars on violence-intervention programs with nothing to show for it. That skepticism makes the ShotStoppers result more notable, not less. This one has documented outcomes in a comparable-neighborhood control, quarterly performance incentives tied to actual results, and a city government willing to make it permanent when the pilot worked.
If it holds up, it’s money well spent. And every dollar it earns is a dollar that didn’t have to be spent restricting the rights of Americans who never shot anybody in the first place.