Police, activists work to curb violence after Downtown Detroit shootout
DETROIT (FOX 2) - Numerous shots were fired during a shootout Saturday night in Downtown Detroit.
"There were people running down the streets, and we had to lock the doors to keep everybody in and not let anybody from the outside in," said Dominique Bommarito, a bartender at Jacoby's.
Detroit Police Chief James White said officers heard gunshots and immediately responded to the shootout near Congress and Brush. They took cover when shots were fired at them. Then, White said an officer shot one of the suspects. After, two additional suspects shot each other. All three suspects went to a hospital with non life-threatening injuries.
Bommarito said that while the violence tends to happen on the first warm days of the year, it creates a problem for businesses in the area, like Jacoby's.
"Especially I mean on Saturday night, and if it's slow you have to block the streets off and then everybody doesn't want to come this way even more because they see the police lights and ‘what’s going on over there? I don’t wanna walk that way," she said.
White said police are looking into the violence as they work to stop it.
"We recognize a number of things this year that are a little different than last year – the participants are a little bit younger, a lot of kids are down here unsupervised so we’re going to be looking at that. We're going to be also looking at deploying our officers a little bit more strategically," he said. "We're going to double down our efforts to ensure that our community is safe. We launched a plan last year; we’re going to be looking at that plan again this year and making some adjustments"
Activists are also getting involved.
"We have to be able to come down and have a good time without putting ourselves, anybody, in harm's way, so we are going to be promoting more activists," Pastor Maurice Hardwick said. "We're going to be here like we were last year. And t made a difference when we were down here interacting, letting people know we’re here to have fun."