Google "FOP Brad Lemon Tow Lot Scandal" To Understand KCPD Refusing To Do Its Job

kansascity  |  Soon after he became Kansas City’s police chief in 2017, Rick Smith pulled officers away from a strategy credited with reducing homicides.

The effort, called the Kansas City No Violence Alliance, or KC NoVA, garnered national attention after killings dropped to a historic low of 86 in 2014, the fewest in Kansas City in more than four decades.

Under NoVA, law enforcement agencies used “focused deterrence” — targeting violent people and their associates and offering them a choice: change your behavior or go to jail. In exchange, they would get help finding jobs, getting an education and other assistance.

But when homicides increased again by the end of 2015, authorities went back to their separate agencies and “started chasing the bloodstain,” Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said.

By 2019, the strategy was effectively abandoned.

Now, an assessment obtained by The Star offers candid insight into why: Despite the effort’s early success, the Kansas City Police Department had grown weary of the strategy and began to step away, angering other participants who wanted the program to continue.

“Instead of really steering into the problem and retooling ourselves at that moment, we kind of threw in the towel,” Baker, one of the chief architects of KC NoVA, said in December. “We kind of gave up.”

Some key figures who were part of KC NoVA’s launch were reassigned or moved on. Its effectiveness was questioned as killings rose in 2016. Significant elements of the strategy were dismantled over time.

Since then, murders have continued to increase. In 2019, the city nearly hit an all-time record.

Other cities that stuck with and adjusted their focused deterrence strategies over time eventually prevented homicides by targeting a small group of chronic offenders vulnerable to sanctions, supporters of the approach say.

Kansas City police instead announced last summer they were partnering with federal authorities on a program that has been around since 2001 and was retooled in recent years under then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. It focuses on targeting the most violent individuals, but not their associates.

That shift, Kansas City police said, was endorsed in an assessment conducted by the National Public Safety Partnership.

“Today, we are focusing the limited resources of the KCPD to the individuals who are ‘trigger pullers,’” the department said, noting it is constantly evaluating what works and what needs to change. “We don’t rule out any potential solution and will consider all options in order to reduce violent crime.”