How did homicides plummet in 2 Miami-Dade ZIP codes? The answer offers a lesson | Opinion

When two ZIP codes in Miami-Dade pop up in the news, too often it’s a story involving gun violence. Historically, 33147 and 33142, covering Liberty City, Allapattah and parts of Little Haiti, have had some of the county’s highest homicide rates.

But a recent report indicates these neighborhoods may offer a model for addressing gun violence. And it’s not by sending in the National Guard, as President Trump is doing in other American cities.

The solution, based on the report’s findings, involves smart, targeted law enforcement and violence-prevention community organizations funded by local and federal tax dollars. This isn’t necessarily a novel concept, but it’s one that’s fallen out of the national discussion these days, when “law-and-order” tends to mean widespread arrests and a zero-tolerance approach.

The report released last month by Scaling Safety, a community-based public safety initiative, shows a dramatic drop in firearm-related homicides in both ZIP codes, based on data from the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s office.

Compared to 2020, homicides in ZIP code 33147 dropped from 31 to five in 2024 — pushing it from first to the 10th most lethal ZIP code in Miami-Dade. In 33142, homicides plummeted from 20 to eight over the same period. The study also concluded that homicides didn’t simply migrate to other neighborhoods — firearm-related homicides across Miami-Dade dropped 42% from 2020 to 2024, in line with a national trend. The report didn’t look at other types of crime.

“There were a lot of good guys in this story that brought the homicide rate down. That included the police, and that includes the community,” Subhash Kateel, director of advocacy at Scaling Safety, told the Herald Editorial Board.

Specifically, the report mentions efforts by the Miami Police Department and the Miami-Dade County Police Department (now the county Sheriff’s Office) to identify individuals with a history of violence, remove over 3,000 illegal guns off the streets and create “micro-hotspot policing initiatives.”

Miami Police Chief Manuel Morales told the Herald Editorial Board that, in the past, law enforcement’s approach was to “throw the kitchen sink” at problems. Police would deploy a lot of resources to a neighborhood, sometimes making it feel like a military outpost. That “no tolerance” approach caught people for big offenses but also small ones, such as loitering, and, in the end, it alienated the community, Morales said.

Today, the Miami Police Department focuses on the “small fraction of individuals” involved in crimes, using undercover units and investigative work to build criminal cases against them, Morales said.

That’s one part of the equation.

Scaling Safety also found a statistical correlation between the drop in homicides and the presence in those ZIP codes of violence-intervention organizations funded by the American Rescue Plan Act, the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package signed by then-President Joe Biden in 2021. Tellingly, homicides increased in places that did not have such organizations, though researchers did not establish a cause-and-effect relationship between these two factors.

The report highlights the work of nonprofit Circle of Brotherhood in Liberty City. The organization’s “peacemakers” — men who live and are well known in the neighborhood — de-escalate conflicts and territorial disputes before violence happens. When a shooting takes place, they also approach the victims’ family and friends to try to prevent retaliatory violence. According to Scaling Safety, Circle of Brotherhood facilitated 324 conflict mediations and 46 violence interruption sessions from May to October 2024.

In 2018, the organization got its first share of county funding following a quadruple shooting near the Liberty Square housing complex. Then, starting in 2020, it received grants from the federal government and the city of Miami that allowed Circle of Brotherhood to be “fully operational,” Executive Director Lyle Muhammad told the Editorial Board.

With Trump’s push to cut federal spending, however, the Department of Justice in April rescinded $600,000 that was part of a grant to the nonprofit, one of 365 community-based organizations nationwide losing funding from the DOJ, which told the groups they no longer aligned with agency priorities. Circle of Brotherhoods is now trying to raise money to make up for that loss.

Muhammad said his goal is to expand the Circle of Brotherhood’s programs across the county but warned that “when politics gets in the way, lives are lost.”

If this latest report proves anything, it is that addressing gun violence requires a delicate balance between policing and solutions from within a community. Let’s hope we extend this model rather than curtail it.