DDN – According to the most recent figures given by the Detroit Police Department on Friday afternoon, violent crime in the city of Detroit will drop significantly again in 2024.
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, Interim Police Chief Todd Bettison, and a large crowd assembled to announce the figures.
According to the Detroit Police Department, homicides fell 19% in 2024, to 203, from 252 in 2023. Duggan stated that when he was Wayne County Prosecutor in 2002, he remembers celebrating when the homicide rate dropped below 400.
“In Detroit, we’re seeing something extraordinary,” Duggan told the crowd. “We have not seen reductions of this nature before.” Nonfatal gunshots in the city fell 25%, from 804 in 2023 to 606 in 2024, while carjackings fell 15%, from 167 to 142.
“The change in this community in just a few years has been very special,” Duggan told me.
“We have to do it again in 2025,” Bettison explained.
Overall, overall violent offenses fell more than 7% from 2023, while property offenses fell 3%. Burglaries, larcenies, and car thefts are all examples of property crimes.
“These are not numbers. “These are real people, mostly young people from our community,” Duggan stated. However, Duggan stated that more work remains to be done, citing Boston’s performance with only 24 homicides in 2024.
He also discussed crime on freeways, referring to them as “zones of danger,” and how people have relocated from the streets, where cameras are present, to the freeways. He said they plan to install 450 freeway cameras and license plate readers before the end of the year.
Bettison and Duggan both emphasized the need of community violence intervention teams and relationships with other agencies in metro Detroit, such as sheriff’s offices and the United States Attorney’s Office.
The One Detroit alliance focuses on the regions with the highest rates of gun crime. Since 2022, the initiative has resulted in over 6,200 gun recoveries, 4,753 casings put into the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network, 600 search warrants served, and more.
“Detroit is now a national model for how to reduce violent crime,” U.S. Attorney Dawn Isom stated at the press conference.
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