The day after popular Kansas City chef Shaun Brady was killed in a shooting outside his Brookside restaurant, Mayor Quinton Lucas called for more to be done to address the city’s violent and property crime.
Lucas, who first expressed his condolences to Brady’s family and other victims, said the city is not where it needs to be when it comes to crime. Another concern — the fact that two teenagers have been arrested in connection with the killing.
“This is not the first, it’s not the second, it’s not the third, probably not the last tragedy this year that will be committed at the hands of young assailants,” Lucas said during a Zoom meeting Thursday afternoon with members of the media. “The fact that these are teenage juvenile suspects who were picked up for this offense, I think should be concerning to each and every one of us.”
When kids this age commit these type of crimes, Lucas said the response needed is more than just enforcement. A multi-faceted approach is needed to address the root cause and prevention, he said.
“We need to understand how a kid that age starts to engage in this type of behavior, why they were not stopped before, how they got firearms and frankly, what we can do to prevent others from engaging in this sort of behavior in the future,” Lucas said.
One of the biggest challenges the city faces with break-ins, burglaries and car thefts is that teenagers are often the ones doing them, he said. It’s important to make sure that those youths do not become repeat offenders.
Melesa Johnson, Lucas’ director of public safety, spoke about the work the city has been doing to provide alternatives to young people, including the mayor’s Night Hoops, Night Nets and Night Kicks programs.
To deal with young people gathering on the Country Club Plaza over the summer, Johnson said she and members of KC Common Good and KC 360 canvassed the area on weekend evenings to engage with the youth.
The new anti-crime initiative SAVE KC, a focused deterrence strategy, held its first “call-in” in May and a lot of the clients the program was focusing on are juveniles, Johnson said.
Addressing crime throughout the city
Lucas said that he met with Kansas City Police Chief Stacy Graves, who said that there’s been more patrols in the Brookside and Waldo area and other areas recently to address the increase in crime.
Lucas mentioned he heard from one person in the Historic Northeast neighborhood of Kansas City, saying the city seems to care about Brookside and Waldo, but wonders what about the other parts of the city that have been asking for intervention.
“We are working to enhance property crimes enforcement throughout the city,” said Lucas, who added that staffing issues shouldn’t be an excuse. “We need to make sure that we’re deploying where we see concerns.”
According to his discussion with KCPD Thursday, police leaders are looking at redeploying officers wherever they can to address the issues, Lucas said. He added that there have been arrests and there will continue to be arrests.
Lucas said residents will see more foot patrol officers in the core of the city and will continue to see more collaboration with the prosecutor’s office and Jackson County juvenile office to “make sure that when there are serious charges, we are actually seeing those serious charges stick.”
The police department and prosecutor’s office are working hard, but the city needs to continue to make clear to the public that property crimes matter and that businesses matter.
Kansas City is not a city that only looks at homicide numbers and doesn’t do other policing work or other enforcement, Lucas said. Still, he acknowledged that the city is obviously not where it needs to be.
“We’ve got too much crime. We got too much property crime,” Lucas said. “I won’t sugarcoat it. We are not where we need to be. But that does not mean there aren’t police officers out working hard; there aren’t prosecutors out working hard.”
