Against backdrop of Kansas City’s deadliest homicide year, leaders reflect on violence

Against the backdrop of Kansas City’s deadliest homicide year on record, community leaders were told Thursday that turning back a troubling trend of violence trend would require investment.

In a panel discussion addressing the impact of violence on Black Kansas City, hosted by the Urban League of Greater Kansas City, Dion Sankar, the chief deputy prosecutor in the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office, emphasized to the hundreds in attendance the importance of investments in “the front end” — jobs, health care, education and other public services. When prosecutors are involved in a matter, “...It’s too late,” he said. “When you have people that have opportunities, they aren’t taking criminal risks.”

“I want to be clear, as a prosecutor, I think anyone who acts violently should be held accountable,” he said. “But I also want to be clear that to ask the criminal justice system and prosecutors and police to fix the root causes of violence or to turn to that system to do it, you’re asking the wrong question of us. ...What we’re responsible for is to respond to it.”

There were 185 people killed in Kansas City in 2023, a figure that includes fatal police shootings, according to data maintained by The Star. The Kansas City Police Department has recorded an upward trend in homicides over the last five years, with the city breaking the homicide record in 2020 and again in 2023. Nearly 90% of the homicides recorded during that period involved the use of a firearm, according to police data.

Sankar told the audience that the causes of violence in communities are well known and flow from problems like racial segregation and discrimination, economic disadvantages, social injustice and the lack of a political voice.

“When you combine those things, in the clearest of ways, you’re going to see violence,” Sankar said. “The research shows that, not just in Black communities, but in white communities as well where you see extreme poverty. That’s been the clear response overall, all the time.”

Melesa Johnson, the director of public safety for Kansas City, who is also a candidate seeking to be elected Jackson County prosecutor later this year, pointed to the examples of targeted violence reduction programs in Baltimore, Chicago and San Francisco and noted that work is happening in Kansas City as well, through initiatives like Aim4Peace and Lyrik’s Institution.

“We have organizations here locally that are doing that work, grossly underfunded, but are doing that work,” she said.

Grassroots service providers she’s spoken to face high bars to clear for funding and reporting. They need more opportunities and more trust, she said.

“What I hear them saying is they need someone to trust them,” she said. “They need somebody to trust that they know exactly what they are doing because of their proximity to violence, to the community, to the vulnerable, to those most impacted.”

Gwen Grant, the president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City, who served as the moderator for the discussion, told attendees she hoped to see people investing in new ways, with organizations that have street credibility and the ability to make change.

“That means taking some risks with some people that you don’t know,” she said. “That means funding differently – I’m saying this to the foundation people, the chamber people, the folks with the money that can invest in this: You’ve gotta have a different mindset.”

Elliott Currie, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author who has written about violence in Black communities in his 2020 book “A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America,” told attendees increasingly he sees the ground violence grow out of abandonment. He pointed to Jackson, Mississippi, a city with a population that is 82% Black and where residents have been left without access to safe drinking water and homicide numbers have been high.

“Marginalization is not just something that happens,” Currie said. “Some folks made decisions not to invest anything in that city’s water system. They made investments, they made a decision not to make investments in things like job creation and job training programs for (Jackson residents).”

“If we don’t want to have to keep reacting to that violence and potential violence,” he said, “we have to do that kind of public investment, which we have shied away from doing again and again.”