SITE OVERVIEW ♦ FLINT | MICHIGAN
Target Area: North Flint • Population: 12,538
Fiscal Agent: Hamilton Community Health Network
Research Partner: The University of Michigan School of Public Health, Michigan State University School of Criminal Justice and Wayne State University Center for Urban Studies
Crime Concerns: Violent and property crime
BCJI Funding Year: 2017 Planning and Implementation
Neighborhood Profile
Flint has ranked as one of America's most dangerous cities for several years, and the crime rates in North Flint are the highest in the city for violent and property crime. Yet many crimes go unreported due to factors from a distrust of the police to a lack of available police officers (budget cuts reduced the Flint Police Department from more than 250 officers to 100). In a 2015 survey of North Flint residents, 70 percent reported they were very concerned about crime and 26 percent said they had witnessed a crime in the neighborhood in the last year.
With a dramatic decrease in auto industry-related jobs, Flint has one of the highest rates of unemployment in the country at 24 percent (27 percent for North Flint), and more than 40 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty level (43 percent in North Flint). Less than 60 percent of high school students in the Flint Community Schools graduate, and the northernmost neighborhoods have high concentration of infant mortality, substandard housing and blight, and isolation from economic and recreational opportunities.
North Flint does have community capacity. In addition to two neighborhood associations, residents have organized dozens of block clubs and participated in record numbers in two formal planning processes, the Imagine Flint Master Plan and the Building Neighborhood Capacity Program. Residents and other community stakeholders created the North Flint Revitalization Initiative, and because the community has made safety its top priority, in 2016 the Ruth Mott Foundation funded a $1.08 million Community Crime Strategy initiative for additional law enforcement and community resources.
Planning Process
Building on the success of Flint’s Building Neighborhood Capacity Program (BNCP), the North Flint Revitalization Initiative’s goals are to reduce and prevent crime, engage residents to participate in community safety, and increase educational and economic opportunities, especially for youth. The planned programs will focus on three identified hot spots:
The commercial corridor on Pierson Road: To create thriving businesses along the corridor, the team anticipates working with existing business owners, particularly convenience stores and gas stations, to reduce and prevent criminal activity in and around their business. Objectives include encouraging entrepreneurship and local ownership, eliminating blight with CPTED practices and encouraging access to healthy food and wellness opportunities.
The Brownell Holmes neighborhood: To significantly reduce the current levels of aggravated assaults and burglaries, residents should know each other and trust law enforcement. Issues to be addressed include young people as early as age 10 associating in gangs, crimes committed by citizens returning from incarceration and specific rental houses with problems from shootings to nuisances. Evidence-based strategies could include collaborating with schools and parents, connecting youth to after-school programs and other opportunities, connecting returning citizens to supports for housing and employment, and working with landlords.
Apartment complexes in the northeast corner of the target area: Shootings, illegal weapons and drug offenses are commonplace at these sites, and the team will use a range of evidence-based strategies, including problem solving using the SARA model, after-school mentoring, strength-based and restorative diversion programs, re-entry, building neighborhood collective efficacy, coordinated and targeted law enforcement, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED), and services for victims of shootings.
Other Key Partners
Flint Police Department, the Michigan State Police and its task force FANG (narcotics), FBI Safe Streets Task Force, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, Northwestern High School, the Genesee County Parks Department, the Genesee County Sheriff, Crime Stoppers, the County Prosecutors’ office, Neighborhood Service Centers, North Flint Neighborhood Action Council
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