‘The system’s broken:’ Westside residents press police after Wednesday night shooting
Residents of Kansas City’s Westside neighborhood questioned why police didn’t do more to stop a gathering of people watching car stunts on Southwest Boulevard before gunfire broke out, killing one woman and injuring another.
Before Wednesday night’s shooting, the Westside Neighborhood Association had invited Kansas City Police Department Captain Scott Simmons as well as representatives from other city departments to a meeting Thursday to discuss concerns about police patrol, road maintenance, short term rentals and homelessness, among other issues.
At the meeting, attendees peppered Simmons with questions about why officers didn’t do more to break up the gathering and how the department planned to prevent similar problems in the future.
“When it comes to our safety, you don’t come through,” one man said, claiming police pay less attention to Westside than other areas, like the Country Club Plaza. The meeting was streamed over Zoom and attendees did not identify themselves before speaking or asking questions.
A series of videos uploaded to Snapchat from the 2600 block of Southwest Boulevard shows spectators cheering as a person waves a flag in the middle of the street and a pickup and a sedan spin in circles, smoke rising from their tires. Dozens, if not hundreds, of people were in the crowd, according to Kansas City police.
Other scenes from the video show more pickups doing burnouts and doughnuts. In one, some people shuffle around near the front of a moving truck and one person dodges the rear of the truck just before it swings around.
Some residents at Thursday’s meeting said this has happened before.
In response to requests Thursday for larger police presence and questions about why police didn’t break up the gathering before it got violent, Simmons encouraged residents to call police and report activity. He said that because of an effort to ensure the department isn’t “over policing,” the department is “reevaluating” how it handles large groups.
“We can’t expect a couple officers to go in and handle two, three, four hundred people,” Simmons said. “We have to allow time for other officers to get there.”
Simmons said the department was blindsided by Wednesday’s event.
Attendees, however, said they had called police to ask for heavier patrol and to report gatherings such as what occurred Wednesday. One man, who did not identify himself, said he’d spoken to an officer around 9 p.m. The officer, he said, told him he couldn’t get backup and drove away from the scene.
“The system’s broken,” he said.
Kansas City Police Department Spokesman Jacob Becchina said Thursday morning that officers arrived on scene around 11 p.m. and found numerous cars leaving the area. They were directed to two shooting victims who were lying on the sidewalk in the 2600 block of Southwest Boulevard. The department, he said, had received at least one 911 call about a large gathering.
In an email Thursday, Becchina said that “if a crime would have been in progress then officers would have been sent there to address it.”
Officers, Becchina said, always call for backup if an active threat or active crime is possible. However, traffic violations or blockages, he said, are lower priority calls that get diverted if there is a crime in progress or higher priority call.
The Star’s Bob Cronkleton, Anna Spoerre and Glenn Rice contributed to this report.
This story was originally published September 17, 2020 at 8:40 PM.
