The Etiquette of Economic Distress
by Jack Cashill
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At the heart of the budget battle between Kansas City, Missouri’s mischievous City Council and its enigmatic mayor, Mark Funkhouser, is the fate of the Kansas City police. The Council has wanted to cut their budget. The Mayor has hoped to sustain it. City Hall politics favor the Council. I believe logic favors the Mayor, especially after Kansas City’s bloody 2008. |
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Kansas City’s Thinning Blue Line The council’s budget may limit our safety
Last year, 126 unfortunates were murdered in this city of unemployed fountains, a 34 percent increase from the year before. My colleagues on KCPT’s Kansas City Week In Review insist that these numbers derive from a bad economy, the historic default position among the soft media left. The economy, however, does not explain why 128 people
were murdered in Kansas City in 2006, a year in which the unemployment rate hovered in the four percent range and the fountains were flowing.
Nor does the economy account for the preposterous differential between Kansas City and every place else in the metro beside the humbler, if equally homicidal, other Kansas City. Last year, Johnson County had one homicide for every 105,000 residents. Kansas City, MO had one homi-cide for every 3500 residents. Do the math: a Jackson county resident was 30 times more likely to get whacked than one in Johnson County. Not all Kansas Citians are equally
vulnerable. Consider, for instance, the life chances of the 25,000 poor souls who in-habit “zip code 64130,” a hellhole that had 23 murders just last year. Shawnee, KS has about 60,000 people. Although not particularly affluent—its median household income is nearly 20 percent below the Johnson County norm—Shawnee suffered one murder in 2008, and that was its first since 2004. In sum, over the last five years, a resident of Kansas City’s 64130 was roughly 120 times more likely to be slain than a resident of Shawnee. Yikes!
One reason for the murder differential is self-evident. About 40 or so years ago, fatherless boys reached critical mass in just about every central city in America, Kansas City included.
With little extended family, less faith, few fathers and no effort at school to endear the young rapscallions to God, nation, married life, or meaningful civic duty, boys turned to the streets, and those streets turned into jungles. Alas, some of our best citizens refuse to talk about any of this stuff lest they be accused of sounding “right wing.” They revert instead to the tried, true and superficial: jobs, dropout rates, demographic shifts, bad schools, the inevitable racism, and that most reliable of chestnuts, guns.
A much bolder and more intriguing explanation for the upswing in
may-hem is advanced by one Ernest Evans, a political science teacher at Kansas City, Kansas Community College. Evans makes the point that Kansas City’s 2008 homicide rate stayed at 2007 levels everywhere in the city except the East Patrol District. There, the num- bers fully doubled.
Evans noticed a second, related trend. The city’s homicide rate in 2008 tracked with that of 2007 through the first several months of the year,
but in the eight-month period beginning May 1, the city experienced a 60 percent increase in homicides over the same period in 2007. The summer months witnessed a 75 percent increase over the previous summer.
Evans traces the explosion to a specific 2008 event, the April 11 Police Board
hearing regarding the videotaped February 2006 arrest of Ms. Sofia Salva. For those in a coma at the time, police stopped the Sudanese native for attempting to affix a temporary plate. On checking, they learned she had several outstanding city warrants for child abuse, tres- passing and traffic violations, with bonds totaling $4,600. Given Salva’s track record, the two officers, one of them female, ignored her claim that she was bleeding from a possible miscarriage. Her premature baby died the next day shortly after she was released from jail. The city paid Salva $750 thou-sand for her troubles.
As one cop told Evans, “Doc, there is no such thing as a nice takedown—they all look terrible on camera.” No matter. The two cops were offered up to expiate the angry gods of race and resentment. “Five commissioners spent four hours needlessly badgering and humiliating the two officers involved in front of over 100 [visibly angry] members of the KCPD,” Evans wrote later of that April hearing. That treatment, he believes, “destroyed the last remnant of morale
in the KCPD.”
Even before the hearing, Evans ar-gues that “the frenzy of police bashing” by the city’s politicians, journalists and bloggers had already undermined KCPD morale. Demoralized by the sacrificial axing of the two officers, their colleagues had good reason to fear being splayed
on that same PC altar should they ever err or even seem to.
Based on evidence from other cities where the Thought Police had neutered the real ones, Evans anticipated that the KCPD would begin to pull back from policing minority neighborhoods out of a legitimate sense of self-preservation. Just days after the hearing, he wrote in his own diary. “I fear that the violent crime rate in KCMO, already at the boiling point, will explode.” Right he was on both counts.
Regardless of whose explanation best addresses the reason for the murder spike, one solution can inarguably help contain it: a “surge” in well-motivated police. This, of course, costs money,
but then again so does murder.
A few years back, while writing a feature for Ingram’s on what I called the “murder industry,” I tracked a shooting from the moment the call came in to its denouncement at the tail end of the legal-investigative complex. I watched as the call taker switched the intake information to the police dispatcher, who in turn directed patrol officers to the scene. I tagged along to the site with the homicide detective on duty, saw the EMTs cart away the victim—he was not yet dead—and observed the crime scene investigators gather up the evidence.
From the crime scene, the detective and I drove to the hospital where the nurses and doctors were scrambling to save the victim’s life. “Has our boy got a future?” asked the cop. “Yea,” said the hardboiled ER doc, “as an organ donor.”
Subsequently, I visited with the other interdependent subsets in this industry:
the medical examiner, the crime lab technicians, the prosecutors, the public defenders. As I learned, no function in government is handled more thoroughly or more efficiently than the mopping up of a murder. No statistics are more accurately kept.
Although hard to measure, I could see that a single case like this one costs a whole lot of money. The salaries and overhead were just the beginning. This one stupid act—even the shooter didn’t know why he did it—robbed four young men of their most productive years. Three of them would waste away in the pen and the fourth in a long-term care facility, all for a long time, all at public expense.
That much said, there is one costfree move the mayor, the council and the police board can make to cut crime and costs considerably and that can be summarized in the simple axiom: “Support your local police.” And here, we are not even talking budget.
Jack Cashill is Ingram's Executive Editor and has been affiliated with the magazine for 28 years. He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.