“Police Chief James White Discusses Dramatic Drop in Homicides on American Black Journal: Turning the Tide on Violent Crime in Detroit”

Accident – Death – Obituary News : Coming up on “American Black Journal” is the City of Detroit, turning the tide on violent crime. Police chief James White is here for a wide-ranging conversation on last year’s crime stats. We’re going to talk about what led to this dramatic drop in homicides in the city and what work still remains. You absolutely don’t wanna miss today’s show. “American Black Journal” starts right now.

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Welcome to “American Black Journal.” I’m your host, Stephen Henderson. As the new year gets underway, there is some really encouraging news coming from police departments across the nation. Many cities saw a drop in violent crime and homicides during 2023. That was the case here in Detroit as well. The city recorded 252 homicides, and that is the lowest number in 57 years. Non-fatal shootings were also down nearly 16%, and carjackings fell more than 33%. I spoke with police chief James White about these latest crime stats, what contributed to the drop, and where we go from here.

So you and I have talked a lot over the years since you’ve been chief and, in fact, before about the ways in which we need to reduce violent crime in the city of Detroit and, in particular, deal with homicides in the city. And I don’t know another way to describe it, you got really good news at the end of 2023. The number of homicides that year was down, and not just down a little, I mean down significantly, year over year. Let’s start with you telling me why you think that happened and what some of the strategies were that you guys were employing last year that may have something to do with this.

You know, we’re certainly not celebrating. I mean, we had 252 homicides this year, and that’s 252 too many, but that is down from 309 a year prior. And so we’re happy to see that our 12-point plan is working. We’re happy to see that our layered approach to crime fighting is working, which involves addressing a number of things. Number one, the things that drive violent crime in our community, those social issues, those socioeconomic issues, our partnerships with the federal government, our state and local partnerships with the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department, Dwayne County Executive’s Office, the US Attorney, Dawn Ison, has just been an amazing partner in helping us drive down violent crime with the One Detroit initiative, the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, looking at ways of efficiently prosecuting cases, the backlog issues at 36 district as well as the district court. So a lot of things have happened that have helped with this process. I say it often, but it is worth repeating. Having a mayor who is a former prosecutor helps when you’re talking about crime solutions and budgeting and police. And certainly, when you look at the fact that we have raises for our officers and able to put more officers on the street with an average of a $10,000 raise for each officer, that’s very, very impactful. Cops on dots is what we call it. We look at where we have upticks in crime and we put those officers in those uptick areas, using our data-driven enforcement.

Yeah, so I want to talk about a number of the things that you mentioned there in a little more in-depth, and let’s start with the focus on the larger context of crime, the things that drive violent crime in our community. What are the things that the police department can do about those things? A lot of those things aren’t about policing necessarily, but what things are you employing that you think are actually having an effect?

Yeah, that’s a great question because, in large part, police are reactive, right? I mean, we get called when the crime happens, so what we try to do is address those issues before the crime happens. One big one is mental health. Our mental health COVID response unit has been amazing. We’re going to be adding to that with some help of some state dollars from the governor’s office here pretty soon. And our neighborhood police officers, those two entities, I think have the greatest impact on preventative crime than any entity that we have because they’re on the ground, they’re interacting with our community. They’re talking to our community. And I’m speaking specifically to the NPOs, and those handles are, for those who don’t know, that’s our neighborhood police officers. Those are the people, before crime happens, can get out and address the issues that happen for quality of life to people who are committing problems in the neighborhood proactively. And then they can do some proactive patrol techniques that we’ve deployed. They can bring in other officers such as traffic enforcement. Like if there’s drag racing or a drifting problem in a particular area, an NPO can go out and say, okay, you know, we need more officers in this area. And they can coordinate that with their commander and their captain. But then when you look at our mental health code response, you know, we know that mental health is a crisis in our community. We know that a lot of our violent crime is driven by mental health issues. We know that a number of our domestic violence victims are dealing with someone who is in some form of mental health crisis. And so there’s a lot of proactive work that goes into that. We also have a program that we’re excited about that’s coming out of the mayor’s office and being led by our deputy mayor, retired first assistant chief in the police department, Ty Benison. And he’s working with our CVI, and that’s our Community Violence Program, where these are civilians that are going out, and they’re working in areas that we’ve identified as being historically high in violent crime. And they’re on the ground doing a number of proactive measures to ensure that the community is supported, that the neighborhood matters, and that they got the resources available to them to hopefully disrupt crime before it happens.

Yeah, yeah. That CVI program is something that the mayor really kind of doubled down on recently and said that, look, we’re going to put a lot more emphasis on that. We’ve always had community groups in Detroit that were focused on reducing crime, and it’s always been a big part of the kind of criminal justice picture. What do you hope happens as a result of these new initiatives that’s not already, I guess, taking place? How does what the mayor says he wants to do change the involvement of civilian groups?

Yeah, you know, I think that we can learn a lot from what we’re seeing. The early returns are extraordinarily promising, in some areas a little bit surprising that they’ve had some early impact. We’re going to learn a lot more over the next year, right, because we know the reward for good work is more work. When we look at our numbers in 2023, you know, in order to sustain it, you’re going to have to do some innovative things, right? And, you know, we want to surpass the numbers of ’23, and ’23 was an incredible year for us with regards to our programs and our processes. And to go into ’24 and say that we’re less than we were in ’23, whew, that’s going to be a heavy lift. So what’s exciting for us is to see that the CVI has a chance of bringing something new to the table that we can learn from. Six groups are out there, a couple of them have emerged from the pack, so to speak, as leaders in their area. But again, I don’t want to mischaracterize it as a success just yet because it’s so early, but what I’m excited about is we can look at what they’re doing and if it is sustainable and then adopted across the landscape of our city and other areas, even beyond the moments of CVI, but adopting the programs that they are implementing and seeing if it has the same type of impact in other areas, whew, I think we really might have something..