Fighting Kansas City’s crime rate means more police officers, not lesser penalties | Opinion
In 1994, Alex Lepper joined the Kansas City Police Department as part of President Bill Clinton’s Community Oriented Police Services program, which aimed to put 100,000 new police officers on streets nationwide. Researchers debate the effectiveness of COPS, but crime did go down in the mid-1990s.
It certainly went down in Kansas City.
“My partner and I were assigned to the area between 48th and 59th streets and Paseo to Prospect,” said Lepper. “We walked our beat and got to know the residents. People began to trust us and confide in us what they knew about area crime and criminals.”
Folks in the neighborhood referred to Lepper and his partner as Beavis and Butt-Head, a reference to the popular TV show at the time. Lepper’s superiors blanched at the nickname, but he knew it was a term of affection.
The homicide rate in the 1990s peaked at 152 and 153 in 1992 and 1993 respectively. It dropped to 142 in 1994, and continued to decline in the next three years before jumping to 133 in 1998. In his 1995 State of the Union remarks, President Clinton cited Kansas City as a success. The KCPD chief was seated in the gallery:
“Chief Stephen Bishop is the police chief of Kansas City. He’s been a national leader — stand up, Steve. He’s been a national leader in using more police in community policing, and he’s worked with AmeriCorps to do it. And the crime rate in Kansas City has gone down as a result of what he did.”
This should be a reminder that despite burying 182 homicide victims in 2024, there is hope: Lepper’s experience in the ’90s is worth considering.
In his paper Keeping the Peace, Jon Guze of the North Carolina-based John Locke Foundation provides a thorough history of policing and policing policy in the late 20th century. Guze details how high crime rates devastated poor and Black communities in the late 1970s and early ’80s, but that the “lock ‘em up” overcorrection to crime often made matters worse. Failing to address the crime wave of the moment, he fears, will be another disaster for Black and poor people.
Guze points out that research consistently shows policing reduce crime in communities, with most estimates showing investments in police reduce crime more than increasing incarceration or sentence severity. He advocates for hiring more officers, paying them more, giving them high-quality training and placing them in the communities that needed them most — just like Kansas City did in 1994.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas seems to be on board. The courts and the Missouri legislature balked at his now-dead proposal to reallocate portions of the policing budget to community service — defunding the police by another name. Lucas’ new idea: a budget proposal to raise police salaries across the board, including a 30% increase for new hires.
If the budget is approved by the City Council, it will be the Board of Police Commissioners who actually make decisions about police pay. (The KCPD is governed independently of City Hall, and that is a good thing.)
Lepper retired from the KCPD as a police detective in 2022. He’s not alone. We’re losing many police officers to retirements and resignations, and low recruitment is failing to replace them. And Kansas City never achieved the 1,500 police officers recommended in the 1968 Mayor’s Commission on Civil Disorder. In 2022, the KCPD reported 1,142 uniformed officers, the numbers dropping each year since 2019. Today there are 1,089.
Lucas may have been slow to come around, but we should be grateful he did. We need to get back to the intensive community policing that Guze recommended and that Kansas City once knew.
Patrick Tuohey is co-founder of Better Cities Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on municipal policy solutions, and a senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to Missouri state policy work.
