Want to fight Kansas City’s horrific homicide rate? End the war on drugs
The decades-long practice of over-policing victimless crimes in our nation’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods has made fighting violent crime problematic to impossible. It also created the underlying factors that lead to police brutality. Focused solely on measures of performance, law enforcement agencies flood disadvantaged, primarily Black neighborhoods with proactive enforcement units. Kansas City is no different.
In its 2019 report, the Jackson County Drug Task Force bragged of record drug seizures with a street value more than $30 million. The Kansas City Police Department deploys its division of vice and narcotics officers into the urban core, and the federal government leads a multi-jurisdictional drug enforcement task force. They all proactively operate in the same blighted neighborhoods, bragging in the media of their robust hauls of drugs, money and weapons. Missing from their reports is a corresponding measure of effectiveness — a reduction of violent crime. It is missing because it is a false narrative. Proactive enforcement of victimless crime is counterproductive. It undermines trust between members of law enforcement and the communities they have sworn to protect and serve. Kansas City police must regain trust in the community, lest they risk losing credibility and viability.
Although there is little proportional disparity between the number of white and Black sellers or users of illicit drugs, police arrest and judges imprison Black people for drug offenses at a rate five times higher than white people. This has a profound effect in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, literally creating thousands upon thousands of fatherless households. After nearly 50 years of the war on drugs and more than $1 trillion spent, the use, smuggling and availability of illicit drugs has not substantially changed in this country. Yet the government continues to spend more than $3.3 billion every year to incarcerate drug offenders. Locally, law enforcement spends millions fighting this losing war.
The drug crisis is a public health emergency. It should not be a special focus area of the criminal justice system. Over-enforcement of drug offenses serves to perpetuate the “us versus them” divide between police and the community they serve, eroding trust. This lack of trust is evident in the city’s blighted neighborhoods. Failing to control gun violence in the urban core, officers struggle to find witnesses willing to provide information following shootings. Friends and family of the victims know the perpetrators and take matters into their own hands, applying their own retribution. Violence goes unabated, and the police are seemingly helpless to stop it as 2020 is on track to be yet another record year for gun violence in Kansas City.
Homicide clearance rates are a key indicator of community trust in the police. The Kansas City Police Department’s homicide clearance rate last year was 55%, and in this deadly year, even with the federal assistance of Operation LeGend, it remains the same.
San Diego, California, changed its focus several years ago from proactive enforcement to community-oriented/community partnership policing. According to a recent study, police clear the vast majority of the city’s homicides and have lowered the per capita violent crime rate — great measures of effectiveness. In 2018, the FBI named San Diego as America’s safest among 30 major cities in the United States.
The concept of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, or CPTED, is another proven solution. Essentially, this approach reinforces a community’s demarcation between public and private property. It enhances visibility in shared spaces such as streets and sidewalks while emphasizing the rights and responsibilities of property owners. When properly implemented, peer-reviewed studies show it can reduce violent crime by up to 84%. Elimination of blighted vacant properties in conjunction with CPTED projects would transform Kansas City’s disadvantaged neighborhoods. The urban core is ripe for these types of developments, but they require funding and upkeep.
While enhancing sentencing guidelines and surging investigators into the city are great election year sound bites, they have a temporary, negligible effect on violent crime at best. Real solutions require a holistic community approach and a reallocation of resources. Law enforcement must initiate this change, but it requires the entire city to be on board to realize lasting success. Kansas City has an opportunity to transform its blighted communities and become a model for the nation — but first, it must end its fruitless war on drugs.
Joel Maxwell is a law enforcement professional with more than 24 years of experience in the field. He lives in St. Robert, Missouri.
This story was originally published August 26, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Want to fight Kansas City’s horrific homicide rate? End the war on drugs."