Kansas City police fail to solve most crimes. It’s one reason some want more city control

Glenn E. Rice
·9 min read

Civil rights leaders and community activists in Kansas City have pointed to rising violent crime and low arrest rates as one reason they support a plan to give local officials authority over part of the police department budget.

The Kansas City Police Department has not been effective in recent years at lowering the rate of homicides, which hit a record in 2020, several leaders pointed out at a May 25 news conference at City Hall.

In fact, as police department data shows, the KCPD solved only about half of last year’s homicides. And clearance rates for other serious crimes were even worse: 20% of rapes, 7% of burglaries and 16% of robberies.

Those poor outcomes are one reason, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas has said, he proposed the recent budget measure seeking more accountability for the police department.

“I swore an oath to the people of Kansas City not to have great friendships all of the time, not to make sure that we are always smiling at each other. But to make sure that we can stop the high and the increasing number of homicides in this city. To make sure that we can have more accountability to all of them,” Lucas said.

“But right now I think it is important that we are standing up and making sure that our community is safer and it is as safe as it can be for once and for all.”

The new city ordinance, passed by the City Council May 20 by a vote of 9-4, cut this year’s Kansas City Police Department budget back to 20% of the general fund, the minimum required by Missouri law. The savings, which come to $42.3 million, would be reallocated to a newly devised “Community Services and Prevention Fund.”

The plan calls for Kansas City Manager Brian Platt and the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners to negotiate on how to spend that money. The $42.3 million is about 18% of the KCPD’s $239 million budget.

Lucas cast the move as a creative way for the city to get the police department’s attention. Unlike most other police departments, the KCPD is not controlled by the city. It is governed by the five-member board of commissioners appointed by the governor, though the mayor always has a seat.

Because of that, there is little the city can do to compel better service from its police department, even though city taxpayers foot the bill.

“How can we sit by and do nothing?” the Rev. Vernon P. Howard, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Kansas City, said earlier this week.

“Some change in policy and budget and the change at the top of the KCPD must happen in order for there be a diminishing of the bloodshed in the streets of Kansas City, Missouri.”

The problem of gun violence has been especially stubborn in Kansas City, even in recent decades when violent crime has declined nationally.

The city set a record last year with 182 homicides, according to data maintained by The Star, which includes police shootings.

Of the 176 homicides officially counted by police in 2020, 93 were cleared, according to the department’s statistics. That is 53%.

Kansas City police officially calculate their homicide clearance rate by including cases solved from previous years. That method provides a higher clearance rate of 66% for 2020.

Homicide clearance rates fluctuate nationally, but the average according to the FBI is about 60%, said Ken Novak, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Denver police reported 95 homicides in 2020 with a clearance rate of 74%.

Nathan Garrett, a member of the Kansas City police board, defended the department’s performance.

“Our officers do an excellent job within the resource limitations we have and most prosecutors you speak with in Jackson, Clay and Platte would say the same thing,” Garrett said.

“The stats (clearance rates) are extremely difficult to interpret and rely on, but something we continue to evaluate and seek to improve.”

Unsolved cases, low trust

Solving crimes is important for encouraging cooperation between police and the public, Novak said.

Research across the country has shown that a lack of trust in police is a driver of gun violence. Novak described a vicious circle, with unsolved crimes eroding trust, and a lack of trust making it harder to solve crimes.

“When shootings go unsolved, citizens become cynical in the justice system, particularly police and prosecutors,” Novak said.

“This discourages cooperation with investigations. Noncooperation by witnesses and victims makes it difficult to clear crimes, which leads to more cynicism,” he said.

When people feel the police cannot protect them and cooperation gets them nowhere, they are more likely to take matters into their own hands and retaliate against known perpetrators.

“This leads to more violence. The whole cycle becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Novak said.

In Kansas City, as across the country, Black residents suffer the most from these outcomes.

Clearance rates nationally for Black homicide victims have declined in recent years while those for white, Asian, and Native Americans have improved, said Enzo Yaksic, director of the Murder Accountability Project, which tracks homicides across the U.S.

It is now easier to get away with murder in some cities than it has been at many other points in time over the past 20 years. Black homicide victims are the least likely of any racial group to see a resolution when they are murdered, Yaksic wrote in an email.

“The strained relationship between the community and police in many states has made it more difficult to resolve homicides through clearance,” he said. “Given the lack of trust in police today, detectives often find themselves relying on rare lucky breaks to resolve homicides”

Clearance rates

In the neighborhood alongside Interstate 70, between Truman Road and Van Brunt Boulevard, many residents do not have confidence in the police department’s ability to solve crimes, said Rachel Riley, president of the East 23rd Street PAC neighborhood association.

The area recorded 23 shootings in 2020 — more than any other neighborhood in the city.

“The crime rate is outrageous and something has to be done,” Riley said. “It’s not just the police department that needs to be in collaboration when it comes to addressing crime. It needs to be the city, the residents, as a whole.”

Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker has said that while Kansas City police struggle to solve homicides, law enforcement elsewhere in the county solves almost all of theirs.

And the problem extends to the much larger number of shootings that result in injury but not death.

The number of shootings in Kansas City has been steadily increasing since 2014, Baker said. So far this year, there have been 186, according to police data.

Prosecutors have estimated that in recent years Kansas City police have solved 20% or fewer of those shootings.

Sgt. Jake Becchina a police department spokesman, said the KCPD does not calculate a clearance rate for nonfatal shootings. They are included among the 6,170 aggravated assaults reported in 2020.

Police solved 1,354 of those, or 22%, according to KCPD data.

The overall clearance rates are not included in the police department’s 2020 annual report.

Baker said more needed to be done to tackle the problem. Nonfatal shootings, she said, are “clues to your next homicide.”

And they represent, in many cases, serious injury and trauma.

“If you have a low clearance rate, and then by extension, a low prosecution rate, it is a de-legitimizing event,” Baker said. “Because a harm, a grand harm has happened in your community and it wasn’t met.

“That hurts us when we can’t give people answers and give them some measure of justice. And the way the community views that is, the system doesn’t work.”

Police response

The police board on Friday voted 4-1 to file a lawsuit against Mayor Quinton Lucas and the City Council, challenging the budget ordinance.

Lucas, one of the five police commissioners, voted against the decision and defended the city’s action outside the meeting.

“In my life we have had more than 4,000 murders in our city,” Lucas said Friday. “That’s bigger than any high school, all classes in Kansas City, in this region, in Missouri and in Kansas. These are all lives lost. Despite that the board of police commissioners has met twice this week, quickly going into non-public, closed sessions and have not spent a minute talking about violent crime in our community and how we can make our neighborhoods safer.”

The City Council also added $3 million to the police budget to fund a police academy class.

Four years ago, the police department withdrew its support from the Kansas City No Violence Alliance, a collaboration between county, state and federal law enforcement.

Known as KC NoVA, the program used “focused deterrence” — targeting violent people and their associates and offering them a choice: change your behavior or go to jail. In exchange, they would get help finding jobs, getting an education and other assistance.

KC NoVA had been credited with reducing homicides, which reached a historic low of 81 in 2014.

Once it was gone, critics say, the police department never found a serious strategy to replace it.

In 2020, the police department said it was doubling the number of detectives assigned to investigate nonfatal shootings, moving another 12 into the effort. Two homicide detectives also were added to each of the four squads last year.

Each homicide squad is staffed with eight detectives, police said.

The department started a new weekly review of all shootings, fatal and nonfatal, last year. Modeled in part on a Milwaukee police practice, the review is meant to include department leaders and members of other agencies, including federal law enforcement.

But still, gun violence reached record levels in 2020.

During the summer, a federal effort called Operation LeGend brought 200 federal agents and investigators to Kansas City to stop gun violence. The effort was named after LeGend Taliferro, a 4-year-old who was killed while sleeping in his bedroom last summer.

But the federal agents with Operation LeGend left Kansas City eight months ago, and Kansas City has recorded 61 homicides so far this year.

Kansas City police report they have cleared 19 of those: 31%.

The Star’s Humera Lodhi contributed to this report.

Recommended Stories

  • U.S. deputy secretary of state visits Cambodia amid worsening rights record

    U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman arrived in Cambodia on Tuesday for the second leg of a regional tour, making her the most senior U.S. official to visit China's closest ally in Southeast Asia in almost a decade. The deputy secretary of state's trip comes amid an ongoing crackdown on opposition figures and against rights activists for speaking up about issues such as illegal logging. Sherman, who is scheduled to meet Prime Minister Hun Sen, civil society groups and journalists, has faced calls from rights groups for her to bring up human rights and the country's record on media freedom during her time in the country.

  • Will Mayim Bialik be ‘Jeopardy!’ host? Meet the ‘Big Bang’ star with neuroscience degree

    She called hosting “Jeopardy!” one of the most iconic things she will do in her career.

  • ‘A beautiful journey’: Blair Underwood, Desiree DaCosta reveal split after 27 years of marriage

    Blair Underwood and Desiree DaCosta are ending their lengthy marriage. The couple announced their split in a joint Instagram statement shared Sunday.

  • NATO restricts HQ access for Belarus officials

    The NATO military alliance is restricting access to its headquarters for a group of Belarus officials in the wake of Minsk’s decision to divert a Ryanair passenger plane to arrest a dissident journalist earlier this month. “We have decided to restrict the access of Belarusian personnel to the NATO headquarters based on our assessment of security measures at the headquarters,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters Monday.

  • Nationals suffer three-game sweep in about 24 hours vs. Brewers

    It was not a fun weekend for the Nationals.

  • The NBA’s alignment with Rwanda’s repressive leader was headscratching

    The league, as ever, projects lofty goals. But joining itself with a president who has been accused of human rights abuses was not a good look Basketball Africa League was a hit with fans but left ethical questions for the NBA. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images Last month, just two days after releasing his sixth studio album, J. Cole made his professional basketball debut in the NBA’s Basketball Africa League (BAL). The Grammy Award winner, regarded as one of the most influential rappers of his generation, played for the Rwanda Patriots Basketball Club, where he scored three points, secured several rebounds and a pair of assists en route to his team’s 83-60 win against Nigeria’s Rivers Hoopers. The match-up, which also happened to be the first-ever BAL game, was broadcast on national television in the United States and was met with widespread attention from international media outlets. The tournament’s inaugural season consisted of 12 teams from 12 African countries, including Rwanda, Algeria, Senegal, Mali, Cameroon, and Egypt. However, the league has also drawn criticism for its decision to host its debut season in Rwanda, as well as the league’s growing relationship with Rwandan president Paul Kagame. Dating back to 1994 when he was first appointed to political office, Kagame has been accused of widespread human rights atrocities. The alleged abuses include forced disappearances, assassinations of political opponents, torture and state-imposed censorship. His regime helped launch two wars in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, which led to the deaths of more than five million people. Despite his violent history and repressive actions, Kagame is viewed by many in his country as a national hero and a global darling for commanding the rebel force that ended the Rwandan genocide in 1994. In the aftermath of the genocide, Kagame gained influence before being elected president in 2000 and has remained in power ever since. A 2014 Human Rights Watch report documented at least 10 cases involving attacks or threats against his critics outside Rwanda since the late 1990s, all of which were tied to Kagame or his party. Most recently, Paul Rusesabagina, who was played by Don Cheadle in the movie Hotel Rwanda, was forcibly taken from Dubai to Rwanda and accused of being a terrorist. Rusesabagina has since maintained his innocence. According to Howard French, author of the forthcoming book, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, Rusesabagina’s detention bears very strong parallels to the recent forced landing of an airplane by Belarus in order to arrest an opposition journalist. The difference lies in the west’s response to each incident. “The west has expressed outrage toward Belarus and its leader, Lukashenko, but has said little about Rwanda’s behavior, and has not criticized Kagame over this at all, as far as I can tell,” French told the Guardian. “I think that western media has a very poor record of reporting on Rwanda. Too often, reporters give short shrift to understanding the country’s complicated history, and they are too ready to take the state’s narrative about its successes at face value. Because Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, is such a smoothly ordered place, reporters feel comfortable there, and by the same token, don’t feel comfortable looking very deeply into anything potentially critical.” As criticism of Kagame’s regime mounted in the late 2000s, especially following the HRW report, Kagame attempted to further his image as a magnanimous leader by attaching his name to sports. In 2002, Kagame began sponsoring the Council for East and Central Africa Football Associations football tournament, which was then renamed the Kagame Interclub Cup. He turned to basketball in 2018 when he helped Masai Ujiri, president of the Toronto Raptors, and NBA commissioner Adam Silver open the Giants of Africa camp in Kigali. The following year, Kagame made an appearance at the Oracle Arena to watch a playoff game between the Golden State Warriors and the Houston Rockets. Kagame was given the tickets by the NBA and arrived with a sizeable entourage. Silver later called Kagame and his family “very knowledgeable NBA fans” and thanked the leader for his support. Given Kagame’s ties to several key figures within the NBA, it comes as little surprise that he was able to angle for the rights to host the debut BAL season in Kigali. Naturally, he wasted little time securing a photo-op with J. Cole. The NBA’s decision to allow operations in Kagame’s Rwanda was met with staunch criticism, including from Rusesabagina’s wife, Taciana, who urged Silver to “reconsider your choice to host the BAL games in Rwanda.” The Guardian also obtained a letter from the Human Rights Foundation addressed to Silver, which called on him cut ties with the dictator. “Like other dictators, Kagame is seeking to exploit the prestige of your brand to distract from his dreadful history of crimes and ongoing brutal repression. Given your stated values, we believe that you have the responsibility not to be in league with Kagame and his government,” read the letter signed by Thor Halvorssen, CEO of the Human Rights Foundation. “Basketball fans in Rwanda, Africa, and across the world look to the NBA for leadership and inspiration. We urge you to deny the Kagame regime the opportunity to use your global influence to whitewash its warmongering, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and illegal plunder of natural resources.” Through his association with the NBA and its efforts in Africa, Kagame joins a long list of dictators and authoritarian leaders who manipulate sports in an attempt to whitewash their reputations abroad, as well as to further their political agendas – a process known as sportswashing. Considering that the NBA has promoted itself as a sports league that values social justice and human rights, its decision to partner with Kagame and his regime is both tone-deaf and hypocritical. When asked for comment, NBA Africa CEO Victor Williams avoided any specific remarks on Kagame but stated that the BAL is part of the league’s apolitical effort to further basketball in Africa. “The two-week tournament is taking place at a single site in Kigali, Rwanda in a bubble environment similar to other NBA, WNBA and NBA G League events conducted during the pandemic. Future BAL seasons will be played in a more traditional format in cities and countries across the continent,” Williams told the Guardian. “The BAL is part of the NBA’s broader efforts to grow basketball in Africa, use sports as an economic growth engine across the continent and provide a platform to improve the health and wellness of one of the world’s youngest and fastest-growing populations.” The NBA’s goals, as ever, remain lofty. Fans will hope the BAL’s second season is played under less controversial circumstances.

  • King’s College apologises for email with Prince Philip photo after staff outraged over duke’s ‘history of racism’

    University apologises for ‘causing harm’ and says picture was not to commemorate him

  • West Africa leaders suspend Mali from region bloc over coup

    West African leaders suspended Mali from their regional bloc Sunday over what they said amounted to a coup last week, Ghana’s foreign minister said after an emergency meeting to address the political crisis in Mali. The bloc, the Economic Community of West African States, “is worried about the security implications for West Africa because of the continued insecurity brought about by the political upheavals in that country,” Foreign Minister Shirley Attorkor Botchwey said. At the end of their summit, the heads of state of the ECOWAS member nations demanded that Malian authorities immediately release former transitional President Bah N’Daw and Prime Minister Moctar Ouane, who are being kept under house arrest.

  • Tensions soar in Nigeria on Biafra Remembrance Day

    Tensions ran high on Sunday in southeastern Nigeria as the former separatist region commemorated the more than one million people who died in the Biafra war and famine of the late 1960s.

  • Braxton Miller and Troy Smith team up for Champaign County youth football camp

    Former Ohio State quarterbacks Braxton Miller and Troy Smith are teaming up to hold a three-day youth football camp in July.

  • Wisconsin football’s all-time leaders in passing touchdowns

    I will continue to look at some of the all-time great Wisconsin quarterbacks in this article by finding Wisconsin's all-time leaders in p...

  • Demi Lovato Opens Up About Coming Out as Nonbinary: ‘I’ve Never Been Happier'

    "I thought, ‘What are the ways that the patriarchy has been holding me back?’”

  • Why waiters give Black customers poor service

    Some people argue the poor service is because of a stereotype that Black people tip less. PavelVinnik/iStock via Getty ImagesThe Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. The big idea When Black diners get poorer service from wait staff and bartenders than white customers, it’s more likely because of racial bias than the well-documented fact that they tip less, according to a new survey I recently published. To reach that conclusion, my colleague Gerald Nowak and I recruited over 700 mostly white full-service restaurant servers and bartenders to review a hypothetical dining scenario that randomly involved either white or Black customers. We then asked them to predict the tip that the table would leave, the likelihood that the table would exhibit undesirable dining behaviors and the quality of service they would likely provide the table. We also asked participants to fill out a survey to learn how frequently they observed anti-Black expressions of bias in their workplaces and to elicit if they harbored their own prejudices toward African Americans. Servers who either held prejudices toward African Americans, worked in a restaurant where racist remarks were frequently heard or both were significantly more likely to predict that the table with Black customers would not only tip them less but also display uncivil, demanding and dishonest behaviors. As a result, these servers also reported that they would give worse service to the Black table relative to the white one. We found no evidence of racially disparate treatment except when one of those two conditions was present: server prejudice or racist workplace words and behaviors. Why it matters The link between bias and actual discrimination is widely assumed – but rarely documented – to be responsible for the mistreatment that Black Americans continue to experience while engaging in a host of routine activities. Besides providing new evidence of this connection, our results also have important practical implications. Because surveys show that Black customers are less familiar than white people with the 15%-20% tipping norm, they do tend to tip less. Servers are thus thought to be economically motivated to give preferential service to white customers who they believe are more likely to reward their efforts. In response, some have suggested that voluntary tipping be abolished or steps be taken to eliminate the Black-white tipping difference by increasing Black customers’ familiarity with tipping norms. However, we did not find evidence of stereotyping and service discrimination in the absence of anti-Black bias, which suggests the solution to this problem is in addressing racial prejudices in the restaurant industry. What still isn’t known A drawback of our study is that we asked servers how they would think and behave under hypothetical, controlled and experimentally manipulated conditions. We can’t know for sure how this process would unfold when servers wait on actual white and Black customers. Doing so would be very challenging. And because our participants weren’t randomly selected, our ability to know how well they reflect the attitudes and workplaces of all servers and bartenders nationwide is limited. Nonetheless, prior research has documented a relationship between what people say they would do under hypothetical conditions and what they actually do when confronted with similar situations, which gives us some confidence in the real-world application of our results. What’s next Right now, we’re examining racial discrimination on the other side of the table by studying restaurant customers’ tendency to discriminate against Black servers by tipping them less than white ones. By administering a survey experiment to over 2,000 restaurant customers across the nation, our ongoing research project aims to further document this form of consumer racial discrimination. [Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Zachary Brewster, Wayne State University. Read more:Racial discrimination ages Black Americans faster, according to a 25-year-long study of familiesHow anti-black bias in white men hurts black men’s healthCan we unlearn social biases while we sleep? Zachary Brewster does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

  • Analyst sees Ja’Marr Chase as wrong choice for the Bengals

    Not everyone agrees with Chase to the Bengals.

  • Conley now villain of former team; 76ers on verge of sweep

    Memphis Grizzlies fans cheered Mike Conley earlier this year when he finally earned All-Star recognition in his 14th season. “Sometimes you live long enough to become the villain, and I’ve become that for I guess the Memphis Grizzlies now," Conley said. Conley is trying to lead the top-seeded Utah Jazz to the NBA Finals, which eluded him during a seven-year playoff run in Memphis.

  • 18th century graveyard found at former Caribbean plantation

    An 18th century burial ground has been discovered at a former sugar plantation on the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Eustatius, officials said Monday, and archaeologists said it likely contains the remains of slaves and could provide a trove of information on the lives as enslaved people. Government officials said 48 skeletons had been found at the site so far, most of them males, but also some females and infants. Alexandre Hinton, the director of the St. Eustatius Center for Archaeological Research, said many more remains were expected to lie in the graves at the former Golden Rock Plantation.

  • Browns defense ranked best in AFC by CBS Sports

    From terrible to great, that is the hope for the Cleveland Browns defense and CBS Sports agrees ranking them best in the AFC.

  • Doc Rivers told Sixers sharpshooter Seth Curry to be more aggressive

    Philadelphia 76ers coach Doc Rivers told Seth Curry to be much more aggressive on the offensive end.

  • Teradata (NYSE:TDC) Seems To Use Debt Rather Sparingly

    The external fund manager backed by Berkshire Hathaway's Charlie Munger, Li Lu, makes no bones about it when he says...

  • Biden wants to make moving to the US from abroad easier and cheaper by revamping the immigration system, according to a new report

    Biden plans to overhaul the immigration system to make it easier for refugees, asylum-seekers, and skilled workers to move to the US, The Times said.