A city-wide sweep has rounded up nearly two dozen people with criminal offenses. Advocates hope it will help curb rising violence in the city.
On Monday morning, KCPD detectives Stacey Taylor and Ernie Baskerville with the fugitive apprehension unit weren’t rounding up their usual suspects.
“The people we're looking for aren't necessarily people who have done a violent crime, but they may be one or twice removed from a person that has,” Taylor said.
It's an initiative led by the Kansas City No Violence Alliance, better known as KC NoVA.
“The idea is to let them know we know they're associated with people and one way is to look for them when they have warrants,” Taylor said.
It was a two-day sweep to get more than 100 wanted people off the streets. But as one hits those streets, you realize it's easier said than done.
“They live somewhere — but they don't have their own home, they don't have a car, they don't have a phone or at least it's not one that we know of and they don't have a job,” Taylor said.
Kansas City's 82 homicides so far this year drew emotion at Tuesday’s Board of Police Commissioners meeting.
“I've been to too many funerals where everybody talks about what a good guy he was--he'd take his shirt off his back, he helped everybody, he smiled all the time, that's the person who is deceased who participated way too often in the kind of activity that caused his death,” Alvin Brooks, a member of the Board of Police Commissioners, said.
This recent sweep resulted in 34 arrests.
KC NoVA leaders said before the sweep they reached out to the men and women targeted and offered help to get out of the criminal lifestyle but refused it.
“Sometimes people are afraid to come away from their life of crime or just that lifestyle in general. Every time people ask you to do something different there's a little fear behind it,” Andre Carson, a KC NoVA client advocate, said.
And for the 34 people caught in this sweep, they’ll still have access to social services to turn their lives around, if they wish to do so.
This is now KC NoVA’s third sweep since the program began in 2013.
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Andres Gutierrez can be reached at andres.gutierrez@kshb.com
