Editor's note: This story is part of Southwest Michigan's Second Wave's On the Ground Kalamazoo series.

KALAMAZOO, MI – Partnering with community organizations has had a positive impact on the number of shootings and killings so far this year in the City of Kalamazoo, police say.
 
“We’re doing good this year,” says David Boysen, chief of the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety. “There’s a lot of good stuff going on. Our shootings are significantly down from last year.”
 
Al JOnesKDPS Chief David Boysen says community partnerships and strategies his department and other organizations have implemented are helping to keep violent crime low this year.He says the city has unfortunately had seven homicides thus far this year. But Boysen says, “At this time last year we were at 17.”

Six of the seven homicides were shooting deaths. One was a stabbing, Boysen says. The seven killings represent a 59 percent drop in the number of homicides this year.

Year-to-date the city has had 29 shootings.
 
“Assaults with firearms (incidents where someone was threatened with a gun or shot at) are down 26 percent this year from where we were last year, and down 37 percent from where we were two years ago,” the chief says. “So overall, gun violence I think is the most significant reduction we’ve had.”

This year there have been 155 “assault with firearms” incidents. “Last year at this time we were at 196,” he says.
 
Confirmed incidents in which shots were fired are down 52 percent from this time last year. “So it’s significantly down,” he says, “We’re trending in the right direction.”
 
Michael Wilder, left, stands with Esteven Juarez at an August 2024 community gathering. Such events allow GVI outreach workers to talk with young people.Michael Wilder, coordinator of Kalamazoo’s Group Violence Intervention program, says, “We ended last year with 22 homicides and right now (this year) we only have seven. And only six of those are gun (related). One was a stabbing.”
 
So he says, “We are absolutely winning in that field.” But he also says, “The energy on the streets does not feel like violence is down.”
 
Young people still have guns and are having shoot-outs. So GVI will continue to engage the community with cook-outs and other events to spread the message to stop violence. Its outreach team will also continue to offer ways to help potential shooters change their outlook and get on track with educational and job opportunities.
 
Wilder is often called on by Kalamazoo Public Safety to visit young people who are involved in potentially violent groups or who have been identified as those who could soon be involved in a shooting incident. GVI is also working to weaken a long-standing idea in the African-American community that people should never share information with the police.
 
“If you shoot me in the chest,” Wilder offers as an example. “And I wake up in the hospital. I’m alive. In our culture today — and it’s been this way for probably the last eight to 10 years — I cannot tell on you. I cannot tell (the police) that you shot me.”
 
Kalamazoo’s Group Violence Intervention program participated in an August 2024 back-to-school bash at the Family Health Center in Kalamazoo.That is for a person who can identify the shooter but who was not necessarily an enemy or his target. “Without a shadow of a doubt, … they are NOT going to tell the police out of fear of being called a snitch in their community,” he says.
 
A person who considers himself to be a gangster will follow the same no-snitch rule but with a different motivation. He says, “I’m not going to tell the police that you shot me because I’m going to kill you as soon as I get enough energy and get out of this hospital.”
 
Wilder is a former drug dealer who co-founded an intervention program in 2011 to help keep young people out of jail. Called Peace During War, it became a part of  GVI after the city started the program in 2015, based on a model program in New York City. Wilder, who did three stints in prison before turning his life around, was named coordinator in 2017. He is also an educator at Covenant Academy in Kalamazoo.

Not a gang problem, a 'group problem'
 
He says Kalamazoo does not have a gang problem — organized crime with leaders. Wilder says, “Kalamazoo has a group problem. These are not official gangs. They don’t go by codes of conduct. They don’t have leaders. They all are just running around doing their own thing; making it up. So that’s why it’s a little more difficult to pinpoint the pattern of gun violence in the city.
 
He says that while a lot of shootings are done by young men in their late teens, the typical homicide (someone setting out to kill) typically involves a man in his mid-30s.
 
“Sometimes data doesn’t paint the best picture, but it’s what it is,” says Esteven Juarez, Social Services coordinator for GVI and director of the Outreach Initiative at Urban Alliance. “We’re seeing gun violence and the trends of gun violence go down. That’s not just because of what GVI is doing or what the police department is doing but because of a community response.”

It takes a village
 
Juarez says there are organizations that are working hard and are adamant about combating gun violence. Along with GVI and Urban Alliance, they include Pastors on Patrol, Bent Not Broken, BLOCKS Club, HOPE Thru Navigation, Str8 Motivation, ISAAC (Interfaith Strategy for Advocacy & Action in the Community), and The JABS Club (Justice Against Bullying in Schools).
 
“I think we all play a role in fighting gun violence in our city,” Wilder says. “… I would agree that all those organizations collaborate in some way, shape, or form to help (the rate of) Kalamazoo’s gun violence go down.”
 
A lot of the strategies that the community has been implementing over the several years— making one-on-one connections, mentorships, and community events — have really come together, Boysen says. On the law enforcement side, he says public safety is also leveraging technology to close more cases.
 
Urban Alliance is one of several community organizations working to stop gun violence.“We’ve had seven homicides this year and all six of those cases are closed and solved,” he says. “… Our last two homicides were solved immediately with the help of the Fusus camera system. It’s a private-public partnership with security cameras that we use through the Connect Kalamazoo platform.”
 
Fusus is an online platform that allows police to pull together data, including private and business security camera footage.

Boysen says a Sept. 12 incident in which a man was arrested after randomly stabbing people in downtown Kalamazoo and punching another was a rare instance where investigators are still working to learn the attacker’s motivation.

“That was a very rare case where the victims were random,” he says. In most incidents, the attacker knows his or her victims.

The 34-year-old suspect is a Schoolcraft man who faces three counts of assault with intent to commit murder, and one count of aggravated assault.

So when people turn on the news and hear someone has been shot, what should they think?
 
It’s hard to dictate something like, Wilder says, because attacks are so sporadic and so singular. He says, “It would be different if we were a bigger city where there was a lot of gang violence and everybody was moving in ways where you could predict where the next murders were going to come from because different factions are beefing.”
 
But Kalamazoo is not that way.
 
“The public should take away the idea that it is imperative that the police work with these outreach teams,” Wilder says. “… Because of the relationship between Chief Boysen and the team of cops that work with GVI, we have a murder rate that’s down really low. And that’s what the public should know.”

Boysen says, “I think it’s that balance between outreach and enforcement that is what’s working. It’s not just one or the other. … The outreach folks are talking to the enforcement folks and vice-versa. I think that’s what’s really got a handle on our shootings and homicides.”