Kansas City was on track Tuesday to have a nearly 20% decline in homicides in 2024, although the number of nonfatal shootings rose significantly.
The city posted 185 homicides in 2023, which was the deadliest in city history. So far this year, there have been 147.
But gun violence remains prevalent in the city, with the number of nonfatal shootings on the rise. As of Monday, the number of what police define as “bullet-to-skin victims” increased nearly 12% to 571, versus 511 from the same time last year, according to KCPD.
Mayor Quinton Lucas attributed the drop in homicides to the work of community groups who focus on deterring crime by interrupting the cycle of violence, specifically reaching out to those who may be seeking retaliation. An “infrastructure” of such groups is being built in the city, Lucas said, including a new focused deterrence program called SAVE KC.
“So much of the pain that we see in our communities is often related to the fact that there are people who may not trust the justice system to address the issues that they have faced in the past,” Lucas said. “We are making sure that we do do that, that we handle that.”
Melesa Johnson, who was Lucas’s director of public safety until she was elected Jackson County Prosecutor in November, said the decline is also because the city allocated funds for the families affected by violence, providing temporary and permanent relocation “to give them more room to grieve and, frankly, a little bit more room to cooperate.”
Johnson also pointed to the many agencies funded by Jackson County’s Community Backed Anti-Crime Tax, known as COMBAT. Many of those agencies offer services to victims’ families, she said.
“It is extremely important to treat the entire family affected by violence so that we can interrupt and intervene before the son of a homicide victim thereafter becomes a victim or a suspect years later,” Johnson said.
Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves called the decline “encouraging” and gave credit to police detectives who solve crime; those who have saved lives on crime scenes, like the Kansas City Fire Department, “through immediate medical intervention;” the new focused deterrence program; the addition of four crime analysts for each of the homicide squads; and more collaboration with the prosecutor’s office.
“Today, the last day of 2024, we will end the year at the lowest number of homicides in the past six years,” she said.
Graves said she has created a third assault squad in hopes of combatting the rising number of nonfatal shootings, and “to identify and charge trigger-pullers faster, to remove those who cause harm in our communities.”
From 2018 to 2022, Jackson County’s rate of violence was four times higher than the national average, according to COMBAT.
