Detroiters Working Together to Help Youth Succeed

The top priority of Mayor Dave Bing's administration is public safety. A key strength of that agenda is a focus on reducing youth violence and, perhaps more importantly, ensuring youth have a path out of violence toward a high quality of life through education, jobs, and careers. Our Youth Violence Prevention plan will help youth find that path.

Over the past ten months, the Mayor's office has brought together community leaders, youth, nonprofit organizations, advocacy groups, representatives of the juvenile justice system, and city agencies to craft a multi-faceted strategy to significantly reduce youth violence. This plan launches a critical next step, a community-based planning process with residents, community leaders, and service providers in two pilot areas. Working with the community takes time. It will be time well spent. When the community owns the strategy and fully brings all of its assets to bear, the plan will be much more likely to have the significant impact we all seek.

This plan is built upon a set of priorities defined by stakeholders and a planning framework from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The stakeholder-identified priority focus areas were adult involvement, education, employment, and law enforcement. The DOJ framework encompasses a continuum of strategies: prevention, intervention, enforcement, and re-entry. Our strategy also has a distinct focus on building opportunities for youth. We believe that unless youth have real opportunities that lead to careers, it will be much more difficult to convince them to stay in school, avoid violence and gangs, and commit to creating a more productive life.

Our strategy development has been guided by a set of principles that emerged from the deliberations of the steering committee. The overarching theme of these strategies is that more enforcement and more young men in prison will not solve our challenges around violence, rebuild our neighborhoods, or help restore the greatness of Detroit.

In addition to the pilot area strategy, the plan also includes a systemic reform strategy which focuses on the Detroit Police Department (DPD), a policy agenda, and an anti-gang strategy which will complement work in the pilot areas.

Strategic Principles

  • Change the culture to embrace non-violent conflict resolution.
  • Really understand the realities youth face.
  • Prevention strategies are always the first choice.
  • Prevention strategies focused on helping youth carve career paths are a priority.
  • Schools that work, students attending school.
  • Community empowerment, empowered adults and youth working together to change the conditions of their neighborhoods
  • Address the challenge of crews and gangs.

Preventing Youth Violence in Pilot Areas

Our efforts to build specific strategies for each of our pilot areas will be anchored in our strategic principle of empowered communities through creating Community Safety Teams comprised of neighborhood leaders, service providers, and key city agencies including DPD, and others who will take responsibility for guiding work in their community and building integrated strategies. In addition to the rich array of assets already on the ground, key prevention strategies will include the following:

Widespread Use of Restorative Practices

The first approach will be to increase the use of restorative practices to build a culture of respect, inclusion and accountability among youth in the targeted communities.

Operation Safe Passages: Alternatives to Suspensions and Expulsions

Operation Safe Passages is a new effort led by the Detroit Police Department with other law enforcement and community partners to create in-school alternatives to suspensions and expulsions.

Intervention strategies are built from evidence-based best practices:

Renew Operation Cease Fire

Some youth violence is part of a vicious circle of revenge and retribution that leads to increasingly serious violence. The violence "interrupters" of the Operation Cease Fire strategy will be an effective tool to eliminate this vicious circle, especially as it relates to violent acts between crews and gangs.

Restore the Community Prosecutor Program

The Wayne County community prosecutor's program was widely recognized to resolve neighborhood issues that often cannot be addressed in a traditional prosecutorial format. We are seeking funding to restore this program in our pilot areas.

Use Offender Forums

After adequate research and training, we plan to deploy several offender forums and evaluate their effectiveness as a tool for our city.

Existing initiatives, including the Comprehensive Violence Reduction Program, the Comprehensive Anti-Gang Initiative, and the Michigan Prisoner Reentry Initiative, provide the foundation for our enforcement and reentry strategies. We expect that as Community Safety Teams develop unique strategies for their neighborhoods, further enforcement and reentry efforts will be developed.

Helping Youth See a Positive Future

Too many youth do not see a future for themselves that includes a productive life and gainful employment. Detroit's high unemployment rate often means that youth do not have adults in their lives who are fully employed. Also, the lure of street life is powerful, and often lucrative. Finally, returning offenders often have even bleaker job opportunities because fewer businesses hire those with a criminal record. All of these reasons make it essential to better link prevention, intervention, and reentry strategies for youth to the employment pipeline and opportunities to build their skills of entrepreneurship. Our ultimate goal is to re-construct summer and year-round youth employment systems to ensure all youth have access to job and career opportunities.

Foundations for Success

We are also initiating an aggressive marketing campaign, with an emphasis on the use of social media, which fosters the increased use of nonviolent approaches to conflict resolution, connects youth with programs and services, and raises awareness around youth violence prevention.

Expand Access to Resources and Services

Detroit is large city, many service locations and schools have been closed, and public transportation is inadequate. In order to ensure youth are connected with appropriate services and resources, it is essential to attend to issues of access. We will look to partner with entities that will provide transportation to after-school activities and/or employment at little or no cost. In addition, we will explore using Detroit Public Schools as Neighborhood City Halls a couple of days a week to bring resources back to the community.

Expand Steering Committee

Our Steering Committee has identified the need to add stronger representation from the business community and stakeholders from our pilot areas as priority.

The strength of our initiative lies in this very diverse array of efforts focused on youth and our collective commitment to ensure that our youngest Detroiters succeed. Moving forward, this plan will assist us in increasing alignment and collaboration across these efforts – driven by data – both in our pilot areas and for the city as a whole. While these planning steps are critically important, we anchor our work in a belief that youth need encouragement to do the right thing, they must receive attention for doing the right thing, and when they do not, we must provide support to help them to make better choices.