Kansas City crime: Is this year’s homicide rate a fluke or a sign of change? | Opinion

As we reach the end of 2024, Kansas Citians can take some solace in a reduced homicide rate. This is welcome. While leaders may want to celebrate the result, it is not clear anyone knows why it happened.

Homicides may continue to decrease, or 2024 may be an aberration in a yearslong trend upward.

We want to believe leaders have a plan for addressing crime and are executing it. But doing so requires placing hope over experience.

Put Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves in the hope column. At an October panel discussion on the Kansas City PBS documentary, “A Tale of Three Cities: The Search for a KC Crime Fix,” she suggested it was divisive to dismiss new efforts to address crime just because all previous efforts failed.

That new effort is called KC United for Public Safety, or KCUPS. The Kansas City Star referred to it as being made up of “community groups, businesses, elected officials and law enforcement.”

How this would be different from previous groups such as KC Nova, Violence Free Kansas City Committee, the Kansas City Metropolitan Crime Commission, Citizens Task Force on Violence and the millions spent by Jackson County’s COMBAT is not yet clear.

KCUPS has had meetings, published a pamphlet and held a press conference. That’s as real as any prior anti-crime effort in Kansas City.

A goal for the new effort is “dropping the number of homicides in the city to below 100 annually.” Mayor Quinton Lucas said at the KCUPS press conference, “We will never accept and tolerate any amount of violent crime in our community.” His record suggests the opposite.

As a mayoral candidate in 2019, Lucas promised the same reduction in homicides. Not only did he fail in that goal, but his tenure has been marked by the highest homicide rates in history.

Lucas casts blame everywhere, complaining about City Hall not controlling the police department and the state’s gun laws. Yet those were in place when he took office.

The latest plan seems to require spending more money. The head of KCUPS told FOX4KC that it would take billions of dollars to reduce gun violence. Taxpayers are already spending millions on anti-crime efforts through COMBAT. Is that program working? No one knows, because COMBAT doesn’t measure its own effectiveness.

Panelists at Union Station held up KC Nova as an example of successful past efforts. Yet the U.S. Department of Justice reported in 2018 the program exhibited “no statistically significant impact” on homicides, group-member-involved homicides or aggravated assaults two years after implementation.

How will KCUPS succeed where KC Nova failed? Its pamphlet is vague.

The KCUPS report speaks of addressing “root causes” of crime. When U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr visited Kansas City in August 2020 to discuss Operation LeGend, he said of such efforts: “None of this money spent, none of the educational efforts, none of the vocational efforts or recreational activities can bear fruit in an atmosphere where there is blood flowing on the street.”

Good intentions cannot succeed until violent offenders are dealt with. Barr offered: “The system falls apart in the prosecution and trial and sentencing stage and what’s happening in the country these days is we’re going back to some of the practices we followed in the ‘60s and ‘70s where there is revolving door justice and people are not being held.”

Crime in Kansas City will not abate until two things are true: First, the cost of crime must be borne chiefly by offenders instead of law-abiding taxpayers. Punishment must be swift and sure. Violent offenders must be removed from the streets.

Second, we must hold elected leaders accountable. All these committees and commissions and task forces distribute and diffuse responsibility. It is difficult to keep up with the reports and the papers and the press releases — and I suspect that is by design.

Am I being divisive? Perhaps. But we’ve buried too many dead to tolerate any more Kansas City nice.