2023 was Kansas City’s deadliest year, with 185 homicides. Data aggregated from FBI statistics show that, in the same year, the city faced a rate of nearly 1,500 violent crimes per 100,000 residents.
“There’s a statistic that follows the homicide rate, right?” said Dr. Seth Fallik, the chair and associate professor at University of Missouri-Kansas City’s department of criminal justice and criminology department.
“The reality is… that was a community member that was lost. And that qualitative effort to understand that is lost sometimes in a numeric value.”
Dr. Marijana Kotlaja, a senior associate at Justice System Partners, emphasized that understanding the conditions that make crime more likely to occur means we can create solutions that target those conditions.
“It’s not necessarily bad people living in certain areas, because we know that the same locations are going to stay crime hotspots, even if residents are moving in and out,” Kotlaja said.
To find out what exactly those conditions are, Kotlaja and a team of researchers talked to residents in several Kansas City neighborhoods.
One of the team’s objectives is to find the local areas with the least social cohesion, in order to develop targeted interventions.
“We know that if there is high social cohesion, there’s actually going to be lower crime in that area,” regardless of income level, Kotlaja said.
These grassroots efforts, along with city initiatives like focused deterrence, which Fallik studies the success of, could make a sustained impact in reducing the city’s violent crime rates.
Kotlaja expects that the results of the study will be published in October.
- Dr. Seth Fallik, chair & associate professor, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, University of Missouri-Kansas City
- Dr. Marijana Kotlaja, senior associate, Justice System Partners
