Jackson County prosecutor touts push against property crime, violent offenders
Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson said she hears every day from community members and business owners grappling with property crime issues like stolen vehicles and shattered storefront windows. She hears too about the effects of violent crime rippling out into neighborhoods.
“You don’t just wake up one day and decide that you’re going to go on a rampant robbery spree or steal a ring of cars,” she said. “That type of behavior builds up. When you are looking at the repeat offenders in our community, they didn’t get there overnight.”
“Once they have reached that level of criminality,” she said, “they typically reoffend, reoffend and reoffend again.”
Johnson announced Monday an expansion of a team in her office, the Crime Strategies Unit, targeting those areas of “high-impact” property crime and violent offenders.
The team will handle the property crime docket, allowing prosecutors to connect the dots between incidents and recognize serial offenders, she said. The unit will also handle probation violation and bond hearings for “high-impact” offenders and cases connected with SAVE KC, the focused deterrence program, and make a push to get connected at the street level by working with community groups and neighborhood associations to learn more about crime trends.
“We’ve seen a smaller number of repeat offenders cause the majority of harm in our community and their impact often falls through the cracks of our criminal justice system,” Johnson said. “They fall through the cracks not because we don’t care, sometimes repeat offenders have cases prosecuted by different prosecutors or in different jurisdictions and no one has a way of seeing the full scope of their criminal behavior.”
At launch, the unit will have a dedicated staff of three prosecutors and two data analysts. Law student interns will also chip in work. Johnson said she envisions the group’s workload will continue to grow and hopes to add additional staff.
“When I campaigned for this position, I promised a more strategic approach to prosecution, and today we begin to deliver on that promise,” she said.
Ben Cox, one of the prosecutors assigned to the unit, said the team will work a variety of crimes, from gang violence and murders to misdemeanors that are committed by high-impact offenders, defined as those who have committed two or more felonies or three or more other offenses against a single person, business or community.
“Class A felonies obviously impact our community, but also lower-level crimes when done by repeat offenders to the same people can have significant impact too,” he said.
“Our unit is going to deal with all kinds of crimes like that.”
Community members have raised concerns about business break-ins and property crime issues in recent months, as a string of small businesses have dealt with break-ins and burglaries.
In one of the high profile crime incidents last year, Brookside chef Shaun Brady was fatally shot during a confrontation with a group of teens outside his restaurant.
Kansas City recorded its deadliest year on record in 2023, with 185 homicides that year, according to data tracked by The Star. The number of homicides dropped last year in Kansas City to 147.
So far this year, Kansas City has recorded 26 killings, just ahead of the 25 homicides that had been tallied at this point in the year in 2023.
