I have written about Hot Spot Policing on this blog before,
and I wanted to share with you the impact it has had in the two-plus years
we’ve been doing it. At the beginning of this year, we nearly doubled the
amount of personnel who work in hot spots, which are the small areas of the
city where the most violent crime occurs. Every officer, detective and sergeant
on this department not in an under-cover position now works six nights a year
in a “hot spot.” Essentially, this means there is an extra squad of officers in
East, Central and Metro Patrol divisions during their busiest nights every week.
In the first half of this year, hot spot personnel worked 7,216 hours. That’s 7,216
hours of additional police service in a six-month period for the residents of
our city who are most affected by violent crime, and all of that came from our
existing resources.
In 2012, 50 percent of all the city’s homicides occurred in
two of our four hot spots. For years, all four areas disproportionately
contributed to the number of murders in our city. As of this writing, two of
the four hot spots have had zero homicides
this year. That is remarkable, and it speaks to the hard work of our officers,
as well as the hard work of the community. Overall, Kansas City is down by 24
homicides compared to this date last year.
In the first half of 2012, Hot Spot officers made an
impressive amount of positive contacts with residents. Some played football
with children, and others helped the victim of a domestic violence stabbing. Some
assisted with juvenile issues on the Country Club Plaza and some arrested a man
with a fully loaded handgun on drug possession charges right before he walked
into a store. Two homicide detectives arrested a robbery suspect. In February,
A sergeant attended one of our weekly intelligence-sharing meetings and learned
about a robbery pattern along Main Street. That same day, two officers from our
Research and Development Division were working hot spots and responded to a
robbery call at Pancho’s at 3540 Main. They learned the suspect had likely gone
to the 3700 block of Warwick. They waited outside in the cold and snow for an
hour until they saw the suspect come out the back door of an apartment
building, and he was apprehended. Further investigation found he was the person
responsible for the other Main Street robberies.
I greatly appreciate the work our officers, detectives and
sergeants are doing in hot spots, as well as the community response to their
work. Let’s keep working together so that there someday may be no crime hot
spots at all in Kansas City.
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