Feds kick off crime-fighting effort in Kansas City by disrespecting local leaders

With homicides in Kansas City so far this year up an intolerable 40% from last year’s already inexcusably high number, Kansas City does need help from Missouri Gov. Mike Parson. But what sending more than 100 federal agents in will accomplish we’re not sure.

This Department of Justice operation is named after LeGend Taliferro, the 4-year-old who was shot and killed while sleeping in his own bed here last month. But the way this whole thing was announced — with no heads-up to either Mayor Quinton Lucas, who read the news on Twitter, or to our congressional delegation — was an inept and disrespectful start to a dubious project.

Since federal agents handle few murders, we don’t even know what particular expertise they bring to the work of clearing old homicide cases.

But mostly, calling in the feds seems beside the point.

This spike in violent crime did not materialize out of nowhere. According to a study by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy & Research, in the six years after Missouri’s Republican majority in Jefferson City did away with the highly effective law that had made gun owners get a background check in person at a local sheriff’s office in 2007, gun homicides in our state went up 16%, even as the national rate went down 11%.

In 2014, lawmakers lowered the age at which you could legally carry a gun to 19, and in 2016, they relaxed our gun laws even further, making it legal to carry a loaded weapon, openly or concealed, virtually anywhere, without any permit. That final unshackling took effect in 2017. As of 2018, Missouri had the second-highest murder rate in the country, after Louisiana.

Another factor has been Kansas City Police Chief Rick Smith’s decision, shortly after he became chief in 2017, to end a program of “focused deterrence” that was showing signs of working. It was supposed to be replaced with something — a new and improved No Violence Alliance — but that something hasn’t happened yet, and even Lucas, who serves on the board of police commissioners, says he has no idea what the replacement is supposed to be, or when it’s supposed to materialize.

Five years ago, then-Mayor Sly James called gun violence here “slow motion mass murder” enabled by lawmakers. And it’s highly likely to keep on getting worse until the state acknowledges that you can’t solve a gun problem with more guns or stiffer penalties for gun crimes. If that worked, we’d be all set by now. Missouri has the seventh-highest incarceration rate in the country.

Republicans, including Parson, never tire of the phrase “one size does not fit all.” That was his No. 1 reason for doing so little to contain COVID-19. But gun laws that might make at least a little more sense in rural areas — and with rural suicide on the rise, we question even that — have been imposed on Kansas City, St. Louis and Springfield, which not incidentally have among the highest murder rates in the country. If localities can handle everything better than the state and the state can handle everything better than the feds, why is the federal government being called in to help the state-run police department we already have no control over?