On September 19, 2024, Kansas City PBS aired a 30-minute documentary on urban crime and efforts to address it. The program compares Kansas City, Missouri with neighboring Kansas City, Kansas and Omaha, Nebraska, similar cities that have been working successfully to address their own challenges with violent crime.
How does Missouri’s City of Fountains compare?
Better Cities Project co-founder Patrick Tuohey, who has called Kansas City home for 19 years, was interviewed for the special, available online here.
BCP has issued four papers regarding police reform:
- Reforming Qualified Immunity
- Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform
- Reforming Federal Task Forces
- Collective Bargaining Transparency
Tuohey has also written about the issues of crime and policing in a number of his columns for The Kansas City Star:
- Fighting Kansas City’s crime rate means more police officers, not lesser penalties (2/15/24)
- Knee-jerk calls to get rid of guns won’t work. If the right compromises, will the left? (3/8/24)
- Not prosecuting nonviolent drug offenses hasn’t cut down Kansas City’s homicide rate (4/28/24)
- Don’t make Kansas City’s policing ideological. Here’s how to establish 2-way trust (5/10/24)
- Blight leads to violent crime. Why doesn’t Kansas City solve both problems at once? (5/23/24)
- Jackson County deserves to know whether COMBAT really works to fight drug abuse (7/19/24)
- Quinton Lucas has nobody but himself to blame for Kansas City police funding failure (8/29/24)
- Kansas City leaders discuss public safety, but lack of clarity raises concerns (9/19/24)