More Deadly Silence

A couple of weeks ago, the Strip noticed something funny — not funny ha ha but funny peculiar — when it got one of its regular e-mails from Capt. Rich Lockhart, the spokesman for the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department. Bein' a member of this town's media, the Strip gets all the public statements sent out by the cop shop. The subject line of this one: "Homicide #71."

By the time this issue of the Pitch went to press, we were up to 75. And that's still a lot of dead people. Weirdly, though, city leaders don't seem that upset about it.

At this time last year, Jackson County Prosecutor Mike Sanders was putting up signs all over the city proclaiming that "The Silence Is Killing Us." Activist and comic-book illustrator Alonzo Washington was launching a "start snitching" campaign with Ron Hunt. And after the city's 96th homicide, Mayor Pro-Tem Alvin Brooks introduced a resolution to convene a commission of police, prosecutors, and psychology and sociology experts to address the city's homicide rate. The City Council unanimously approved the resolution (Councilman Troy Nash said he hoped the result wouldn't just be an "academic exercise"), and the commission went to work.

One October later, the shotgun death of Devin McDonald, murder victim No. 71, at 72nd Street and Paseo, barely registered as a blip on the news. Where are the candlelight vigils?

"That's the problem with our community," activist Ron McMillan tells the Strip. "We don't stick to nothing. It's all right for us to march, or be emotional for a minute, but that don't do nothing. You have to put pressure on your council people and push for implementation of what's in the [crime commission] report. You don't just take the report and start chewing it up like dog food."

At the October 2 meeting of the Black Agenda Group, which assembles weekly to address problems in the community, McMillan scorched a roomful of 50 people, at the Rev. Wallace Hartsfield's church at 23rd Street and Linwood, for failing to pick up a free copy from City Hall.

"It was an indescribable fiasco," McMillan says. "They're supposed to be an advocacy group.... I told them I was disappointed. I wanted an endorsement of the process. That's the way they do things in a political society — you find a group that best supports the evidence, and then we move forward and try to handle the problem."

This procrastinating porterhouse hadn't read the report, either, so it finally checked www.cityclerk.kcmo.org and downloaded a copy. The Strip was feeling guilty enough that it was prepared to stay up until it had finished all 160 pages.

But after page 50, the report's analysis ends. Its startling revelations? That crime is linked to a host of problems that plague Kansas City's east side neighborhoods — problems such as poverty, returning parolees, unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, absentee landlords, gang activity and school dropouts.

Christ, people, the Strip could have reported that for free, too.

The next 100 pages were all appendices — a lengthy list of Kansas City agencies and nonprofits and detailed biographies of each of the 29 crime commissioners (including Sanders, McMillan, Anita Russell of the NAACP and Gwen Grant of the Urban League), as well as the commission's staff and consultants.

How silly of us — we thought the report on violent crime was going to be about crime.

Or that, in addition to all those bios of the commission members, it would include one or two bios of the victims of last year's killing spree.

"You mean like a little paragraph on each [murder] and what happened?" asks commission Chairwoman Stacey Daniels-Young when grilled by this confrontational cutlet. (Daniels-Young is the president and CEO of the Black Healthcare Coalition.)

Young explains that there isn't much specific information regarding each murder victim — besides his or her age and race and the crime location — because most victims' families didn't want to share more information than that.

"For, oh, golly, maybe half of them, we didn't have things as basic as high school education, you know, whether they had a high school education, whether they worked or not," Young says. "So one recommendation was that a thorough kind of research project be done that would interview family members and really try to fill in some of the data, because there was a big set of holes, really. For whatever reason, people just didn't talk much about their loved ones."

Basically, the commission's report recommended that a real report be written someday. Guess that's the best that can be expected when the mayor and the City Council demand a report but set aside zero funds for it. Young says one commissioner complained because there wasn't even any money to provide the group with coffee.