Mr. President, Send Some Reinforcements to Kansas City

Our Murder Rate is An Incredible 10 TIMES Higher Than NYC's

In summer 2026 Kansas City, Missouri, will be hosting a series of six quarterfinal matches in the FIFA World Cup, the world’s most watched sporting event. In researching the city’s readiness to serve as host, I ran some crime numbers. They are not, to say the least, encouraging.

In the first half of 2025, Kansas City had 87 homicides—or 17 for every 100,000 people. In that same period, New York City had 146 homicides—1.7 for every 100,000 people. I doubt city fathers will warn visitors that they are TEN TIMES more likely to be murdered here than in New York City.

The underlying cause, of course, is the collapse of the family in black communities everywhere. As candidate Barack Obama told a Father’s Day audience in 2008, “children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.” In response, baby daddy extraordinaire Jesse Jackson threatened “to cut his nuts out,” and `a chastened Obama fled to the safety of “systemic racism.”

Mayor Quinton Lucas

Afraid to tell the truth, leaders black and white seek out comforting lies. In the many years I have lived in Kansas City I have not seen a single honest explanation as to why our murder rate is so outrageous. Our ambitious mayor, Quinton Lucas, insists it is the permissive gun laws of the two states that surround the city, Missouri and Kansas.

But in 2023, the last time I ran the numbers, Kansas City’s 500,000 people committed 182 homicides while the 200,000 people of neighboring Overland Park, Kansas, committed just one. I am confident there are more guns in Overland Park, but its residents are 73 times less likely to be killed by one.

There is an unfortunate truth to the observation that got vice presidential candidate Spiro Agnew into hot water in 1968, “if you’ve seen one ghetto area, you’ve seen them all.” Kansas City’s “ghetto” consists largely of single family homes and uncrowded neighborhoods, but the ghetto give-away, I explained once to a disbelieving foreign visitor, are the bars on the windows. The residents aren’t afraid of the cops or the MAGA monsters of Jussie Smollett’s imagination. They are afraid of their neighbors.

They have cause to be. According to AI, “Missouri has had the highest Black homicide rate in the U.S. for seven years in a row, with Black residents killed at more than twice the national rate.” The explanation for Missouri’s uniquely unhappy status can be traced back to August 9, 2014, when Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed “gentle giant” Michael Brown in Ferguson, a crappy St. Louis suburb.

The fact that the shooting was justified mattered little to the media or the media-addled black community. Outrage was the order of the day, and most of that outrage was turned on the police. Knowing they could be fired—as Wilson was—or prosecuted for doing the right thing made law enforcement even more apprehensive than usual. To a noticeable degree, they backed off active policing, and the thugs filled the void.

The “Ferguson effect” bled across the state. In Kansas City, after the Brown shooting the homicide rate jumped from an unusually low five a month to more than ten a month. The surge continued into 2015 and spiked again after Minneapolis. In 2014, Kansas City had 82 homicides. In the last five years, the city has averaged 166 homicides, and the city is only 1/3 black.

As long as the the killing remains intramural, the media choose not to notice. Only when murder crosses racial lines does the long term lethality of a woke media and a subversive justice system become obvious. In February 2023, two black gangs got into a gunfight at a crowded rally celebrating a Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory. Local talk show host Lisa Lopez Galvan was killed and 25 others injured in the crossfire.

Scores more were injured in the stampede away from the shooting

True to form, the media refrained from mentioning the race of the shooters or their victims. Only one of the shooters has been sentenced so far. "You made some bad choices, but that doesn't make you a bad person,” a judge told an unnamed 15-year-old shooter upon his being sentenced to a state facility for youths. Yes, bad boy, must do better.

Justice grinds slow in these cases. In 2016, after threatening “to kill all white people,” Fredrick Demond Scott killed six of them. At least three were walking their dogs when shot from behind. Despite their knowledge of Scott’s racist threat, Kansas City police “did not know if the shootings were racially motivated.” Woke Jackson County prosecutor Jean Peters Baker “saw no clear motive.” And the FBI, like the media, took no interest at all. Hate crime? What hate crime? Incredibly, Scott has not yet come to trial, and the story never made national news.

In 2022, Baker chose not to bring charges against an unnamed woman who had shot and killed Kansas City fireman Anthony Santi. As it happened, her beau, Ja’Von Taylor, started a ruckus at a convenience store. Taylor should never have been free to roam. Months earlier, he pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery and was given probation.

When Santi intervened to help the female clerk, Taylor retreated to his SUV and pulled a gun. Santi wrestled him to the ground, holding him in a headlock until police arrived. In the interim, Taylor managed to hand off the gun to the woman who screamed at Santi to get off and then shot him in the back.

Prosecutor Baker did not even send the case to a grand jury thinking she “could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was acting outside of Missouri's self-defense law.” Race was never mentioned in the reporting on the case. There was no public protest. Being a part of the Democratic establishment that runs the city and county, the firefighters’ union kept its peace.

Eric and Sarah DeValkenaere

Baker threw the proverbial book at KCPD officer Eric DeValkenaere for shooting and killing a black suspect who was pointing a gun at his partner. That same year as the Santi shooting, the Kansas City Star shouted out in a bold headline, "Ex–Kansas City officer sentenced in black man's killing." In December 2024, CNN ran this headline, “Missouri governor commutes sentence of White police officer convicted of fatally shooting Black man.” DeValkenaere, who should never have been charged, had already served two years in prison.

On a Monday radio show, Mayor Quinton Lucas said he was “not worried” that a “grandstanding” President Trump would send troops to Kansas City. “He’s picking cities that are infamous,” said Lucas. “We are special, unique, great.” The station headlined the interview, “KC Mayor Lucas looks to more patrols and better parking lot safety after weekend of murders.”

Sigh!