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Yahoo
4 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Shootings dropped in Lansing, but untangling why is complicated
Police ballistic markers stand besides a child's chair and bicycle at a crime scene in Brooklyn where a one year old child was shot and killed on July 13, 2020 in New York City. (Photo by) This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence. As gun violence surged in cities across the country after the start of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd, shootings rose even more steeply in Lansing, Michigan. The worst period came in 2021, when the rate of fatal shootings reached 20 per 100,000 residents, two points higher than the national rate. 'That wave was so devastating,' said Marlon Beard, a community activist in Lansing whose 17-year-old son, Marshawn, was shot and killed in 2021. 'We all kind of asked ourselves what we can do about it.' In response, city officials and community groups raised enough money from federal grants and the city to establish a local Advance Peace program, a national violence intervention method that identifies known shooters, with support from the police, and enrolls them in an 18-month fellowship. By late 2022, violence interrupters hit the ground in southwest Lansing, mentoring, conducting skills training, and providing job opportunities to 15 participants. Within months, police data showed a decline in shootings. To better understand the program's efficacy, Advance Peace leaders commissioned a study by the Michigan Public Health Institute and Michigan State University. The study, published in March, found a 19 percent decrease in all shooting incidents from October 2022 to September 2024. More specifically, it found a 52 percent decline in fatal shootings and a 10 percent decline in nonfatal shootings. A program that works directly with shooters in Lansing is finding success — and police support But the overall drop also coincided with a national decrease in gun violence as the pandemic receded. Determining how much of the decline was due to intervention and how much it reflected national trends remains a key part of the puzzle in understanding gun violence trends in Lansing and similar cities. The end of the pandemic also heralded the federal Build Back Better Act, which included $5 billion for community violence intervention work, along with less direct funding that strengthened the social safety net that is crucial in many communities with disproportionate rates of gun deaths. That widespread funding anchored programs like this one. The first 18-month Advance Peace fellowship started in late 2022 with 15 fellows on the southwest side, where shootings were most prevalent. Fatal shootings and nonfatal shootings fell by 38 percent and 32 percent, respectively, in that area. But the drop in fatal shootings was greater in the three sections of the city where Advance Peace didn't have an initial presence, raising questions about the program's influence. The southwest did, however, have the largest reduction in nonfatal shootings compared to the other areas. According to the Lansing study, Advance Peace effectively engaged with the people most likely to pick up a gun, who were identified through family members, friends, other activists, law enforcement, and people recently released from jails and prisons. More than 90 percent of participants no longer use guns to go on the offensive, said Paul Elam, the chief strategy officer at the Michigan Public Health Institute and a key member of the team that implemented the program in Lansing. Elam later took a step back from street-level engagement to join the research team. 'We have evidence that this works,' he said. 'We have the evidence to prove that a public health approach works.' Joseph Richardson, a gun violence researcher and professor at the University of Maryland, said the Advance Peace model can be successful, but more data is needed to show that the program was driving the drop in shootings. 'There were significant reductions in fatal shootings where they weren't doing their work,' Richardson said, but added that continued research of community violence intervention programs is crucial to better understanding 'the role a CVI group plays locally. That's how we learn what steps need to be taken to implement the work properly.' The second fellowship, which covers the entire city, started in July 2024 and will continue working with 55 fellows until December, when the Trump administration's termination of $169 million in grants for violence intervention and community safety programs leaves cities like Lansing to scramble for alternatives. Half of Advance Peace Lansing's funding comes from federal grants, and its leaders are now strategizing about how to raise enough money to sustain the organization's 22-person staff and $3.5 million annual budget. 'If you remove that intervention piece, gun violence will go up again,' said Michael McKissic, who runs Mikey23, a nonprofit gun violence prevention program that trains young people in trades like construction, plumbing, and electrical work. 'We need that intervention. Our organization can't do that, other organizations can't do it. You need those individuals who are going to go in and show them the error of their ways.' The study showed that fatal shootings decreased by 19 percent more in Lansing from 2022 to 2024 than they did nationally — when gun violence was already dropping across the country post-pandemic. But the city's rate of nonfatal shootings fluctuated, ending with a 15 percent decline in 2024. Richardson said this is the kind of discrepancy that requires more analysis, but that continued research will be more difficult after the cuts from the federal government. Elam and the other authors of the study said gun violence prevention has always been an uphill battle, and hope the promising declines don't cause leaders to disengage with gun violence prevention. They also emphasized the positive feedback they've gotten from residents who say their boots-on-the-ground work has built trust, as well as city leaders, police, and the fellows themselves, most of whom are under 18 years old. 'We can talk to them,' one of the 16-year-old fellows told The Trace, referring to Advance Peace's credible messengers. 'They care about us, they're there for us.'
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
A program that works directly with shooters in Lansing is finding success — and police support
Lansing Police| Susan J. Demas This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence. The first fatal shooting of the year in Lansing, Michigan, was solved quickly. All four alleged shooters in the drive-by killing of 21-year-old Jaivion Husband on January 27 were arrested the same night. The circumstances around the men involved in the shooting were complicated; three of the four were fellows with Advance Peace, a violence intervention program that was launched in Lansing in 2022, after initial hesitation from law enforcement. The fellowship is designed to keep people who have been engaged in shootings away from situations like these through concentrated mentoring, daily communication, job opportunities, skills development, and monthly stipends. After the suspects had been arrested, Paul Elam, a criminologist at the Michigan Public Health Institute who helped bring Advance Peace to town, visited the fellows. One of them, a 19-year-old who had been with the program since the beginning, broke down in tears, telling Elam that he knew getting into the car that night was a mistake. 'He told me, 'I let you down, I should have called,'' Elam recalled. 'They let somebody influence them to hop in the car and go do something. He was able to articulate that he was changing his behavior, but he had this moment where he didn't do what he knew was right.' The tragedy reminded the leaders that a moment is all it takes. The fellows 'have so much coming at them daily,' Elam said. 'You don't know what they're being pressured to do.' In the two-plus years since Advance Peace came to Lansing, gun violence in the city has dropped by 52 percent, according to police data, and community activists, along with law enforcement, are pointing to the program's success. The program isn't perfect, some city leaders acknowledge, but it is making long-term strides to accomplish mutual violence prevention goals. Residents in Lansing said the actions taken by the police, including a focus on repeat offenders and illegal firearms, have also played an important role. To sustain the city's progress, police officers and community workers are navigating the streets carefully — cooperatively, but independently. Since its inception in 2010, Advance Peace has been effective in other cities including Richmond, CA and Rochester, NY. Unlike other national anti-violence organizations, this one doesn't focus on geographical areas, victims of shootings, or people who could potentially get involved with gun violence. Instead, their violence interrupters identify people through information from family members or others plugged in on the streets who are shooters — people often unknown to the police. Once they identify the shooters, they enroll them in an 18-month fellowship program, during which they work directly with community violence interrupters, or credible messengers, who check in on them multiple times a day. In Lansing, one interventionist works with as many as five fellows at once. 'If a shooting occurred this week, nobody's going to talk to the police, but they're going to talk to our people,' said Elam. 'The target population for us is folks who are engaged in gun violence, who are evading law enforcement and the justice system.' Throughout the mid-to-late 2010s, shootings in Lansing weren't concentrated in specific areas; gun violence was more sporadic and random, especially across the south side of the city, where 60 percent of the population lives. No particular demographic or age group was overrepresented among perpetrators or victims, a reflection of the city's relative progress in addressing the historic segregation that still dogs nearby cities like Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Kalamazoo. That all changed after COVID-19 hit and retaliatory conflicts worsened between different groups on the southwest and west sides — neighborhood beefs, escalated on social media during lockdowns, turned into shootings. Shootings in Lansing increased by 80 percent between 2019 and 2020. In 2021, the city notched the highest number of homicides ever, with 25. 'It was lawless. A lot of young men were engaging in this back-and-forth, cyclical gunfire, and you had kids dying,' said Michael Lynn, a local activist who runs The Lansing Empowerment Network and The Village Lansing, two organizations focused on addressing and providing wrap-around services to those most affected by gun violence. 'When the pandemic happened, it was like a bomb went off in the city.' Shootings in Lansing have been in decline since the peaks of 2021, similar to national trends and the result of strategic work by community groups and law enforcement after the surge in youth violence. Though the program now receives widespread praise, when Advance Peace was first introduced in 2021 as a potential option for tackling the worsening crisis, Police Chief Robert Backus said the model didn't 'sit well' with his colleagues. 'There was skepticism about how it focused on people you knew were your priority offenders,' Backus said. Marlon Beard, a credible messenger with Advance Peace, said at first 'everybody was looking at it like, 'so you guys gonna pay shooters and sponsor them to buy them guns.' I think that was just ignorance of not really sitting down to do your research.' Once law enforcement and city leadership were educated about the mechanics of the program, they became more receptive to it, Beard said. During a recent event on the Michigan State campus, a handful of fellows, along with the credible messengers, learned about financial responsibility and entrepreneurship through an exercise led by Archie Hudson, a local business owner in Lansing. On the streets, these kids are often treated as — or posture as — adults, but in this setting, as they asked inquisitive questions and answered with 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir,' their age was apparent. Some were just 13 or 14. More importantly, they were comfortable around the credible messengers and other leaders of Advance Peace, the result of a hard-won trust. 'We never involve the police. Every conflict we've had resolved doesn't involve the police,' said DeAndre McFadden, one of the credible messengers, as they're called, who is working for the program. 'They know they can't infiltrate the situation the way we can. So far, the police have respected our space and our work.' Though Advance Peace doesn't share any information with the police, a key reason the organization retains its credibility, the authorities provide Advance Peace with regular shooting data and a list of names of people they believe to be involved in gun violence. 'It's almost like we're running parallel to each other, like we both have the same goal, which is no more violent incidents,' Chief Backus said, noting that the priority of police is enforcement and accountability. 'We have an obligation to represent victims, and if someone is our suspect, we have an obligation to put that person in front of a judge.' Despite the success of recent efforts, distrust between residents and the Police Department persists. That distrust stems from a decade of police shootings in and around Lansing, and a lack of transparency from the department on how the investigations progress, community leaders said. Since 2020, there have been four officer-involved shootings in Lansing, which has a population of roughly 112,000, and all of the cases were deemed 'justifiable.' By comparison, in the 10 years before 2020, there were four. In the most recent case, in December 2023, officers shot and killed Stephen Romero, a Hispanic man, after they were called for a domestic dispute. 'How can we create real positive relations when all of this is consistently going on,' asked Lynn, the local activist. Backus acknowledged that police shootings erode progress, and since they've happened more frequently since 2020, it's been difficult to rebuild trust. 'When they're happening so often in a short time, it doesn't give us time to repair those relationships,' he said, adding that unsolved homicides and people's unwillingness to speak to the police also hurt officers' credibility in the community. 'Ain't nothing changed,' said Beard, the Advance Peace worker, referring to the tense relationship between the community and law enforcement. 'The same way we get looked at as Black men — because one Black man did something, we all did it — that's kind of how we view the police.' One of the fellows with the program said if the police ever tried to talk to him, he'd 'just walk away and not say anything.' Over the last few years, the department has tried to put more emphasis on developing trust in the community by hosting more events, getting in front of active local groups, and being more visible in struggling areas. It has also focused more on firearms access. But the road to strategic cooperation is long. That's why activists, residents, and police agree that Advance Peace is crucial. A recent study of the program revealed some promising data, showing that over 90 percent of the fellows no longer use guns to resolve their conflicts. Yet just as the program is beginning to show its worth, the city is in jeopardy of losing it, as it's funded in large part by community violence interruption grants from the federal government that were terminated in April by the Department of Justice, leaving cities like Lansing scrambling for alternative funding sources. Some groups have joined a lawsuit against the Trump administration to restore the funding. DeVone Boggan, who is originally from Lansing and founded Advance Peace in Oakland, California, in 2010, said the recent funding issues are another example of why local cities and counties need to include funding for community violence intervention work in their fiscal budgets. 'That local infrastructure must budget for CVI practices,' Boggan said. 'That's the only way to sustain the work.'
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Milwaukee violence prevention groups receive $500,000 with goal to reduce gun violence 15%
What's the price tag of reducing Milwaukee gun violence? How about $500,000? That's the amount of funding the Coalition to Advance Public Safety, a group of four Black-led organizations which support violence prevention in cities, gave to five Milwaukee community-based violence prevention efforts. The goal is to reduce gun violence in the city by 15% through the funding. On Friday, representatives from that organization, Milwaukee city leaders and those who lead the organizations which received the money said the funding was critical to reducing gun violence in the city. They juxtaposed the cost to prevent gun violence with what they said was hefty price tags associated with incarcerating those who commit it or with responding to victims and touted the impact it will have. "Peace is what we seek. Peace is what we don't find always," said David Muhammad, deputy director of the county's department of health and human services, at a press conference announcing the funding. "Peace is what we're gathered here to create." Milwaukee has struggled with gun violence since the COVID-19 pandemic, though in recent years it has declined. However, groups like those that received the funding attempt to intervene before it happens or prevent it from occurring in the aftermath. The following groups received funding: Milwaukee Christian Center, which assists with programs like Violence Free Zones, a school violence prevention program, and Advance Peace, which works with those who have committed violence to prevent them from re-committing. Uniting Gardens Home Inc., focused on preventing violence in the Garden Homes neighborhood. WestCare, which focuses on outreach to youth and those struggling with drug abuse, and on crime prevention. Community Task Force, which has been active in responding to youth violence and other crimes, plus in organizing activism efforts. The Asha Project, which provides culturally specific domestic violence services for African American women and others in Milwaukee The Coalition to Advance Public Safety, which provided the funding, also is providing assistance to Project Ujima and 414Life, hospital-based violence prevention programs, said Fatimah Loren Drezier. She is the executive director of The Health Alliance for Violence Intervention, one of the four groups that comprises the coalition. The funding for these groups coming from the philanthropic sectors was important in a time where federal funding is unstable and state funding is lacking, said Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump froze grant funding, scaring nonprofits and state agencies, before revoking the memo on that decision amid court challenges. "Unfortunately, we're seeing those federal cuts," he said. "For our (agencies) to be receiving those funds, it will be a lifeline to many of them and many of them who have been that work without funding." The funding is critical to The Asha Project, said founder and executive director Antonia Drew Norton. She said it will allow the group to remain independent as an organization in its work. "It's new life for us," she said. "It's momentum, its validation. It's recognition on the national level of the combining of domestic violence and intimate partner work with (community violence) work." The grant will be used to pay for the Community Task Force staff and possibly grow it, said Vaun Mayes, who leads the organization that started in 2014. Mayes recently finished a court case where he avoided jail or probation time for his alleged role in the 2016 Sherman Park riots. That hung over his and the organization's work, where they often wouldn't get funding, bust still be expected to assist, he said. "Now that the situation is over, that can't be used anymore," he said. "I've done the work all through that." The Coalition to Advance Public Safety announced plans to work with organizations in Milwaukee in April 2024. The group received dozens of applications for the grant funding, before ultimately selecting the five, Drezier said. She declined to provide how the $500,000 was divvied among the five organizations. The coalition hosts an online dashboard offering recommendations for Milwaukee community-violence intervention work. In it, they recommend over $33 million be devoted to these efforts to curtail violence and estimate there to be 377 people in the city at the highest risk for violence in the immediate future. The Coalition to Advance Public Safety's funding to the Milwaukee organization is part of a broader effort to reduce violent crime between 10% to 20% across 12 cities in the next five years. It's provided funding in other cities already, including Baltimore, Indianapolis and Atlanta, and began giving out grants in 2023. The group's work also gives continued assistance to organizations and assess effectiveness of programs through data. The organization said its funding of community violence intervention programs has led to crime decreases in those cities. The coalition's funding follows the announcement of other Milwaukee violence prevention work. In October, Milwaukee County announced the Advance Peace program, a three-year program of two cohorts of 40 people between the ages of 14 to 24 who are either causing or have been affected by gun violence. David Clarey is a public safety reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He can be reached at dclarey@ This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Milwaukee violence prevention groups receive grant to fight gun violence
