An Urban Crime Summit panel last year included U.S. Attorney Tammy Dickinson, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker; NoVA manager Joe McHale; and UMKC criminology professor Andrew Fox.
Recommendations that range from establishing urban gun courts to expanding the Kansas City police commission came out Friday.
The report is the result of the four-day Urban Crime Summit held in September at UMKC and in St. Louis.
The police chiefs and mayors of both cities and Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster were among those on the summit panel. They heard testimony from a range of criminal justice experts.
Kansas City and St. Louis both had over 100 homicides last year, the report notes. Kansas City ranked fifth in the nation in its per capita rate of homicides.
But other cities have found ways to reduce this violence, the report states.
New York City had 2.245 murders in 1991 for a murder rate of 14 per 100,000 people. In 2013, it had 333 murders for a murder rate of less than four per 100,000.
“The lesson to be learned from New York and other cities is that senseless violence can be stopped, if we demand it to be so,” the report states.
The first of its six recommendations is to establish armed offender dockets for violent crimes involving a gun.
The pilot project would produce an annual report and be evaluated by a criminal justice expert.
St. Louis attempted to start such a court last year but state circuit judges there voted it down. The report says the state general assembly should enact legislation establishing armed offender dockets in both St. Louis and Kansas City.
“Research shows there is a direct impact on violent crime when armed offenders are swiftly and appropriately punished,” it states. “Organizing cases in this manner would also bring greater expertise, more personalized interaction and increased accountability needed to affect an individual offender’s violent behavior….”
The other recommendations:
- Pass a state law adding city budget and general services officials to the Kansas City police board. The city police department is the only one nationwide still under state control.
- Law enforcement groups statewide should adopt “proactive, evidence-based policing strategies to determine the best use of police resources, focusing on geographic areas and high-risk individuals.”
- Law enforcement and communities should work together to reduce recidivism with things like reentry courts and employment services. In Jackson County, 29 percent of released offenders reoffend within one year and 41 percent reoffend within two years.
- Establish a salary scale to pay county sheriffs on a par with other law enforcement.
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