Detroit is a very different place depending on who you are, what your income is, and where you live.
While affluent neighborhoods are thriving and more middle-class ones are seeing increased investment, large swaths of the city remain excluded from the “comeback story.” In those neighborhoods, it’s not large corporations or wealthy transplanted suburbanites having their Detroit adventure who are keeping the community going, it’s dedicated people who care deeply about the place they live and the people around them.
Dujuan “Zo” Kennedy is one such person. As a young man, he got caught up in violence in the Cody Rouge neighborhood. He eventually did a 14-year stint in prison for manslaughter and drug charges. Rather than resigning himself to the vagaries of prison life, he resolved to reinvent himself as a person who community members could look up to for positive reasons. He found older men who could mentor him, participated in cognitive behavioral therapy for several years, learning to reframe his thoughts and experience, and studied psychology on his own.
When he returned home to Detroit’s Cody Rouge neighborhood, he began a path toward creating a safer community. He volunteered with
FORCE Detroit, a community organization that works toward a freer and safer Detroit, for two years before joining its team as the public health and safety director.
FORCE Detroit is one of six organizations participating in the city of Detroit's violence prevention initiative, ShotStopper, that received funding to address the causes of violence in neighborhoods using community-based approaches. FORCE Detroit is credited with reducing violent crime by 52 percent in Cody Rouge from August to October of 2024, far ahead of the 35 percent reduction for parts of the city that are not in ShotStopper crime reduction zones.
The key to FORCE'S success is in its approach, Kennedy says. He’s part of the community where he works, and he always has been. He understands the pressures the young people in his neighborhood are under and the joys and sorrows of their lives, and that helps him connect with them where they are.
“We leverage our relationships and lived experience along with best practices in this field to really address, respond and intervene in conflicts and disrespect for real,” he says.
Those relationships help his team to identify conflicts brewing before they flare into violence, or the potential for violence, Kennedy says. Sometimes community members reach out to them to alert them to a problem, and they also monitor social media for escalating hostilities or threats.
Because of his deep roots and relationships in the neighborhood, Kennedy is also cognizant of longstanding bad blood between different groups and is able to address any issues that come up. The various factions trust him to be a peacemaker, rather than on one side or another.
“It doesn’t take a long time to build trust with people when you've been building it your whole life,” he says. “We understand the mindset because we have the mindset -- we are, quote-unquote, a credible messenger.”
FORCE Detroit’s approach is based on community safety versus policing. While policing involves patrolling a community and enforcing laws, a community safety mindset maintains that the people within a community who know its needs best should be the ones to address issues and reduce crime.
Kennedy doesn’t have a hostile relationship with the police, but he does see a difference in their role versus that of him and his colleagues. “Police monitor, respond and address crime,” he says. “It’s not a crime to disrespect somebody. It’s not a crime to call someone out. Who is going to be more aware of conflict? People living in it or the entity that tries to observe it? They’re not going to see it all the time.”
Kennedy believes there are several societal problems contributing to young people seeing violence as a solution. People who could uplift the community and be positive influences have been stripped away because of violence or incarceration. Music and media promote a dark vision of domination and violence, and poverty draws people to engage in things like selling drugs.
There’s also a huge disparity in how resources are allocated versus the actual costs of violence. FORCE Detroit estimates that each nonfatal shooting costs the local, county and state government $1.1 million and a fatal shooting costs $1.6 million, but the organizations working with the city to reduce violence as part of ShotStoppers each received a $175,000 grant for their work.
Reaching children while they are young is an important aspect of stopping violence, he says. “We should be teaching children about empathy from kindergarten on up. They have to figure out how to resolve conflicts as quickly as you learn to do a math problem, because addition isn’t going to kill you,” Kennedy says.
To that end, his team takes multiple approaches with the young people in the neighborhood who are at risk of slipping into a negative situation. It ranges from cognitive behavioral therapy and meditation techniques, to entrepreneurial training like designing and printing T-shirts to sell. They’ll even take kids to a nice restaurant so they can see an aspect of life they might not otherwise have access to.
“We look to make the movement of healing attractive, in the same way people make hurting attractive,” Kennedy says. “We want to make it pop culture, just like violence is.”
Resilient Neighborhoods is a reporting and engagement series examining how Detroit residents and community development organizations work together to strengthen local neighborhoods. It's made possible with funding from The Kresge Foundation.