Michael Bushnell
Publisher

This week, Kansas City Police Captain Jonas Baughman sat down with Northeast Kansas City Chamber of Commerce President Bobbi Baker-Hughes to discuss updates to the Risk-Based Policing model outlined in a presentation given at the Chamber in July 2019.

Risk-Based Policing, or RTM (Risk Terrain Modeling), assesses environmental factors that contribute to crime, such as features of the landscape overlapping to create unique settings for crime. 

“It’s very much a geographical or environmental piece versus focusing solely on people. We want to do a better job of policing places in order to deter future crime,” said Baughman.

The program, after rolling out in July, has seen a significant reduction in violent crime in the areas originally targeted.

The program has worked so well in Kansas City that the city of Dallas, Texas is implementing the program there. 

Baughman and Baker-Hughes sat down with Scott Friedman of KXAS, the NBC station in Dallas, who traveled to Kansas City to get details on how the RTM program has worked here.

The Dallas program will be implemented as part of a coalition of agencies including the Dallas Police Department, the city and county of Dallas and the Dallas School District, among others that will oversee the multi-faceted program to address Risk Terrain Modeling and how those models relate to child poverty, homelessness, education, transportation, and crime. 

The Dallas program will be rolled out later this year.