Why KC murders, domestic violence are up, even now: ‘I don’t like being disrespected’
In late February, when prisons were still letting visitors in, I sat in on a couple of discussion groups at the Topeka Correctional Facility — the Kansas women’s prison.
If I were Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly — and I know, I know, she has not asked for my advice — that’s the first place I’d look at emptying as coronavirus spreads through prisons across the country. Because so many of those inmates really are there because of the men in their lives.
There’s the one who stood by while the husband who had abused her for years killed his son. She can’t forgive herself, so didn’t take the plea deal and doesn’t really want to get out. There’s the one who killed her rapist when she was 19 and got 50 to life. Then there’s the one whose partner threatened to kill her and her daughter if she didn’t join him in raping her daughter. Innocent? No. Yet victims all the same, in a way our system never seems to recognize.
One of the inmates I’m still thinking about, though, is someone who got into trouble all by herself, and over the world’s dumbest beef, not that there are any smart ones.
She was pumping gas when this woman she’d had problems with before came up and started mouthing off. This went on until she took out her knife — a tiny, near-useless little thing, she said — and cut the other woman. Whose death, in her telling, anyway, surprised both of them.
Every day since then, she said, she’s thought about all the damage she caused, and all the people besides that mouthy dead woman she robbed of something precious. Every day, she’s wished she could take it back. But then, she said, she couldn’t let anyone disrespect her like that, now could she?
That was never going to happen, she said, maybe showing off for the others. But also, I thought, just telling the truth that she couldn’t guarantee that even if she did have that moment back, she wouldn’t do the same thing all over again.
We know that’s why our homicide rate is up, even with Kansas City shut down, or maybe especially with the city shut down. There are just too many young people especially who for a lot of different reasons haven’t learned how much less painful it is to walk away from disrespect than to spend the rest of your life wishing you had.
Domestic violence calls in Kansas City are also up during this shutdown, 22% so far, to the surprise of no one who works with survivors. So I thought I’d call a couple of the offenders I met some months back — men who’d been found guilty of domestic violence in the Kansas City Municipal Court. They were meeting weekly then, as part of a court-ordered program, to learn healthier ways to deal with frustration.
And had they learned anything that would keep them out of trouble in the future? Some of the things they said reminded me of that inmate who killed a woman “by accident” at the gas station.
The first man I reached did not say much of anything that I’d bet on being true. He’s only on probation, he said, because he didn’t know any better than to plead guilty. He didn’t know the woman who had called the cops on him wasn’t going to show up to testify or he never would have done that. And was he guilty? She hit him first, he said, “and I hit her back.”
Behind all of these murders and domestic violence calls, he said, is the stubborn reality that “people don’t know how to let it go instead of retaliating.” That I do believe.
The other man I called said he, too, had been in domestic violence court for no good reason, because the mother of his three children had called the cops on him and lied when they got there. Not once, but week after week.
Again and again, nothing happened to him, he said. Instead, the officers who responded explained to his girlfriend that his name was on the lease, so she couldn’t kick him out. Let’s hope that’s not what happened.
But then one night, he said, he got pulled over on a traffic stop “with that same woman in the car with me.” They ran his plates, and that’s how he found out there was a warrant out for his arrest on domestic violence charges.
The root of the problem in so many relationships now, said the man, who’s 30, is that this generation of young mothers is “lost.” How so? “The tone of voice she’d use when we’re having a disagreement. There’s no way you should be talking in a high-pitched tone like that. Me being a man, I don’t like being disrespected.”
There was that word again.
He joined a gang at age 12, he said, had been found guilty of aggravated assault at 17 and served six years for crimes he did commit. He never once hit a woman though, he insisted. So why again did he plead guilty? “I didn’t want witnesses coming in, and then I’m sitting in jail for years. I will own up to verbally abusing her when that lid erupted.”
The most important thing he’s figured out since then, he said, is not to get involved with the wrong person. “One sign of being aggressive, and I’m gone.”
As for what he makes of the shutdown spike in women reporting violence at home, “it’s that DV cases are overrated. All you have to do is call 911 and boom.”
Spend a day in domestic violence court, and you’ll see that there are usually quite a few 911 calls behind every “boom.”
But the insane number of homicides in Kansas City — 47 already this year — probably did happen, just as he says, because too many still “feel like it’s cowardly to shake hands and leave it. They want that last lick, and they want it to count.” Right up until they wish more than anything that it hadn’t.
