City Success Stories: Flint, Michigan?

Firearm violence in Flint is declining & on track to match pre-pandemic lows

The trajectory of firearm violence in Flint, Michigan illustrates the pitfalls of drawing inferences from a few datapoints, especially when comparing gun violence trends across time and place.

For instance, there were 6% more gun murders in Flint in 2023 over 2022, and the city’s 2023 Firearm Homicide Rate (FHR) was 39 per 100,000. This makes Flint THE 9TH MOST DANGEROUS SMALL CITY IN THE UNITED STATES, behind places like Youngstown, Ohio and Pensacola, Florida.

But the slight uptick in murders and the city’s higher-than-average FHR obscures an objectively positive trend: there are fewer shootings in Flint today than there were during the pandemic years, and the city is on pace to match or beat its gun violence rate in 2018.

The visualization below illustrates this. Use the interactive link to see the annual counts of shooting fatalities and injuries.

Flint’s struggles with gun violence pre-dated and were exacerbated by the pandemic, and the city remains notoriously violent compared to most communities with populations ≈100,000.

But something is working in Flint.

Does Mayor Sheldon Neeley deserve the lion’s share of credit? Neeley assumed office in 2019. In 2021, shootings spiked 22% and the mayor declared a state of emergency in the city. Since then, homicides have decreased by 40%, according to a press release from the mayor’s office dated April 12, 2024.

Mayor Neeley attributes this to various initiatives supported by American Rescue Plan Acts funds, plus a $1.5 million grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance for Community Based Violence Intervention and Prevention. These include the creation of a cold case unit in the Flint Police Department, a witness protection program, more overtime pay for officers, and expanding operations of the city’s intelligence center, which was established in 2017 to “analyze crime trends in the city and assist administrators to best allocate existing resources with the police ranks.”

Naturally, politicians are slow to accept responsibility for rising crime crimes and quick to claim credit for their reversal. But city leadership and law enforcement in Flint deserve credit for creating a plan to reduce firearm violence and seeming to successfully implement it.

Flint/Genesee County’s new witness protection program is a prime example of a common sense intervention. It was created after a witness for the prosecution in a 2021 homicide case was found murdered in May of 2022, a few months shy of the trial. The program, which is unique among cities of Flint’s size, provides funding for travel, lodging, and other protection for key state witnesses.

Should other cities create witness protection programs like Flint’s? It’s too soon to tell if the program implementation will be effective or whether its promise will live up to the hype, but it’s something new and something needed. More of this, please!

If you live in/near Flint or are familiar with the community, please drop a line in the comments. Specifically, I’d love to know - does the city feel safer today than it did in 2021? How about 2018?