As Kansas City readies for World Cup, clergy, community leaders call for accountability
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Mass shooting on Troost Avenue injured nine people during an unlicensed club party.
- Leaders noted nonfatal shootings were up and summers often see upticks.
- Organizations expanded trauma services and opened a Center for Healing and Justice.
Kansas City is entering one of its most visible weeks in years as World Cup festivities begin. Still, for community leaders, the weekend offered a reminder of the challenges that will last long after the crowds leave.
A mass shooting at 79th Street and Troost Avenue that left nine people injured, a fatal shooting of two men at a Westport convenience store and disorderly teenagers at the annual Downtown Days street festival in Lee’s Summit were three incidents that kept law enforcement busy over the weekend.
“Every community deserves safety, victims deserve justice,” said Darron Edwards, lead pastor of United Believers Community Church in south Kansas City. “We’re going to continue to have these kinds of outcomes until we put stronger legislation there.”
The mass shooting on Troost Avenue allegedly took place at an unlicensed club party, according to Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas in a post on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter. Police Department officials said there was no update to the investigation that they could share as of Monday afternoon.
Rep. Tiffany Price, a Democrat who represents the area in the Missouri House, said she was unaware of the unlicensed nightclub where the shooting had occurred. However, a location just a few doors down has hosted after-hours parties in the past.
“The questions come down to what it is listed as, what is it registered as, and what makes people think that they can have parties there,” Price said.
Price said she has heard that the nine individuals who were injured aren’t cooperating, and worries the incident could spiral with retaliations and reprisals.
“I’m just trying to figure out where it even stems from and what’s gonna come from it,” she said. “It’s gonna be more violence because of it? And then that just says that the cycle doesn’t stop.”
Support programs preparing for increased need this summer
This weekend’s violence reinforced what Edwards said he has seen as a lasting imbalance in how Kansas City approaches public safety. He argued that directing more resources towards schools, faith communities and neighborhood organizations that can work with young people before conflict escalates is still a gap that needs to be addressed.
“We can’t talk, we can’t resolve a disagreement and we go straight to violence,” Edwards said.
For Damon Daniel, president and CEO of the Ad Hoc Group Against Crime, a violence prevention and victim support organization in Kansas City, the violence over the past weekend underscored why they are expanding services to respond to the trauma after such events.
Daniel said the organization has increased collaboration with local hospitals, public health organizations and violence intervention programs while preparing for the busier summer season.
Daniel said that the organization just opened the Center for Healing and Justice, which aims to connect victims with healthcare services and long-term support after leaving the hospital.
“If you look at trends, this is certainly the time of year where a lot more folks are outside, a lot more youth are out of school and there’s just a lot more people out doing things,” he said. “This is certainly something we’ve seen in the past and it does seem to follow the trends. There tends to be an uptick in shootings.”
Daniel said that more kids being out of school is what could be seen in videos from the Lee’s Summit Downtown Days festival, where multiple interactions between groups of young people and law enforcement took place. Two juveniles were detained at the festival and criminal charges could be filed, law enforcement said Sunday. One was found with a 3-D printed “ghost gun.”
“You can’t hold the officials who put that together responsible for taking care of someone else’s child,” Daniel said. “It’s an environment that should be family-oriented and yet you have a lot of kids who are unsupervised, who cause a lot of ruckus.”
Preventing conflict before it turns violent
Raquel McCommon, executive director for the Center for Conflict Resolution, said the organization has seen a dip in participation in recent months for conflict skills trainings.
McCommon attributed the dip to financial pressures in the economy. The Center for Conflict Resolution is a nonprofit that focuses on conflict de-escalation training and restorative justice education.
“Gas prices go up, funding for different things, especially around professional development education in the State of Missouri, has been cut,” McCommon said. “So our typical audience has had less money to spend.”
But there have been increases in virtual trainings, including a recent session with KC Blueprint, a coalition focused on reducing violence in the city, which focused on cross-cultural awareness for international visitors for the World Cup.
She said her organization is aimed at giving people tools to prevent conflicts from escalating.
“One person learning a skill … can ripple effect into someone else choosing not to respond with violence,” McCommon said. “What we know from our work in the community is that the majority of conflict that results in violence comes from an argument.”
State and local lawmakers consider solutions
Kansas City Council Member Andrea Bough said she’s heard from constituents requesting that the city prevent unlicensed clubs from operating. The city could use its codes on liquor licenses and nuisance violations to shut down unlicensed venues before they become an issue.
“If the police are aware of reports at this property, making sure that we all work together and share information to stop incidents before they happen, that is key,” Bough said.
Sen. Barbara Washington, a Kansas City Democrat, said that to address instances of violence like what occurred over the weekend, the state must improve community policing and do more to address the root causes of violent crime.
“With better community and police relationships, the community will let the police know that these things are going on so that the police can be proactive rather than reactive,” Washington said.
The availability of guns is also an ongoing concern for Missouri Democrats. Missouri has some of the nation’s least restrictive gun laws, including permitless concealed carry and no limits on ammunition capacity.
“It’s just another tragedy over the weekend with the mass shooting, and we have far too many shootings in this country,” Sen. Patty Lewis, a Kansas City Democrat, said. “I’m very disappointed with the lack of addressing it from the state level, from the super majority party.”
This year, lawmakers proposed laws to allow cities to create their own gun ordinances, but they failed. An effort by Democrats to prohibit children in urban areas from the right to openly carry firearms also failed to pass.
“The other states did carve outs and didn’t have it as open as we did,” said Rep. Emily Weber, a Kansas City Democrat who’s running for city council. “We would love to see gun laws that protect people. A lot of us have sponsored them, and of course, they go nowhere each session.”
Community accountability takes center stage
John Ham, executive director of KC Mothers in Charge, a Kansas City nonprofit that supports victims of violence and advocates for crime prevention, said that the violence over the weekend should not be viewed as an isolated incident, even as Kansas City’s homicide numbers remain below last year’s pace.
Police Department officials said in May that homicide numbers were down year over year, but nonfatal shootings were up during that same time frame.
Ham argued that addressing violence will require broader community involvement.
“This is a community problem much more than it is a law enforcement problem,” he said. “The police department is doing their job, the prosecutor’s office is doing their job, but we’ve reached this point within the community where we have decided that some level of violence and some level of gun violence in particular is acceptable, and that’s a scary place for a community to be.”
As Kansas City prepares to welcome visitors from around the world for World Cup events, Ham said preventing further violence will require more than a response from police or elected officials.
“There are parents who need to keep track of where their kids are. There are community members who hear things and see things on social media that they need to report to law enforcement,” Ham said. “It’s going to take the community holding itself accountable to make sure that we get through, particularly the next six weeks, in a way that is different than what we saw this weekend.”
