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Kansas City is hoping to curb violence in the urban core through a new initiative, KC No Violence Alliance (KC NoVA).
Kansas City officials explained the initiative, which uses “focused deterrence” to combat violent crime, during a May 15 press conference.
“We’re not going to sit back and allow violence to overtake our city,” Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said. “This is a project where we’re going to be strategizing. We are going to use all the resources we have on that very limited number of folks that cause violent crime in our city.”
To jump-start the program, the Greater Kansas City Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) awarded a $74,000 grant to the Metropolitan Crime Commission and the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) Foundation. UMKC will receive $30,000 and the remainder will be used to hire a project manager to oversee KC NoVA. Through its department of criminology, UMKC will conduct research and intelligence analysis. Interviews with community members and police officers will aid UMKC in creating a “social networking analysis” that will identify the most chronic violent offenders and their associates. The Kansas City Police Department will then use the data to target the most chronic offenders and the neighborhoods in which the most crimes are being committed.
KCPD Chief Darryl Forté said Kansas City has modeled its program after similar initiatives in cities across the U.S., like Minneapolis, Minn., and Boston, Mass., which have seen significant drops in violent crime. According to a study published by the Campbell Collaboration, Boston witnessed a 63 percent reduction in youth homicides and Lowell, Mass., saw a 44 percent reduction in gun assaults since implementing a focused deterrence model. Peters Baker said she expects to see a noticeable reduction in crime in Kansas City by next summer.
The focused deterrence model zeros in on the most chronic violent offenders and their associates and includes a social services component. Forté said that could range from education assistance to helping an individual find a place to live. Other examples include anger management and job training, among others, Peters Baker said.
“We know we can’t arrest our way out of this; we can’t prosecute our way out of this,” she said. “For those who are the most violent offenders, yeah, it’s going to be punitive. But, for the majority of people, it won’t be. That’s not a strategy that works. The strategy is to help link them to services and to help them find another way out.”
It’s a strategy that will take collaboration and the extent of that collaboration is something that Peters Baker has never seen in her 15-year history as an assistant prosecutor, she said. Those partnering to implement the initiative include the KCPD, City of Kansas City, Jackson County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Metropolitan Crime Commission, UMKC and the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole.
Forté stressed the need for the program by saying that over the past 42 years in Kansas City, there have only been nine years with less than 100 homicides.
“It’s not a secret to anybody that pays attention to the statistics that we rank too high per capita for murder,” Kansas City Mayor Sly James added.
Forté said he’s confident the program will be successful and that the program will be adapted as needed.
“We want something that’s sustainable and we really feel like this is a sustainable strategy,” Forté said.
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