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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