The Kansas City Police Department now has a new tool to help fight crime and pinpoint some of the city’s most dangerous criminals.
And it’s all thanks to a $700,000 grant.
“It’s using science to fight crime. It’s a different way of doing the same thing we have been doing for a long time,” said Captain Ryan Mills of the Kansas City Police Department.
It’s called a micro hotspot. The department’s East Patrol Division will soon be setting one up in the Historic Northeast in hopes of pinpointing the area’s most violent criminals.
How it works
The goal of the micro hotspot is to identify the area’s most dangerous criminals as well as their associates.
The department will be utilizing police reports, among other things, to create a social network analysis in order to pinpoint the interactions of the area’s most violent criminals.
Photo courtesy KCPD
Each dot represents a person involved in criminal activity. Each line represents a relationship or connection to another person.
“It can show me who knows who, who is related to who. It gives me a way to look at those relationships and identify them on paper so then I know who is in the middle of all of that. Typically, the people in the middle of it are those that probably have the biggest chance of being involved in violent crime,” said Mills.
Officers will then focus their efforts on these individuals - either arresting them on outstanding warrants or providing them with social services.
“We need to find the right people and put them in jail for the right things or offer them the right services because jail time doesn’t always work,” said Mills. “We have a new tool to use new information and new research to show us who those right people are to put in jail; that can make the biggest difference in the community.
Program details
The program is slated to last at least three years.
The first micro hotspot will be installed near the intersection of St. John and Topping Avenue. This area has been a troubled spot for the city. According to crime reports, a website KCPD uses to record crime, in the past three weeks there have been 118 crimes reported in this neighborhood.
Mills said the goal is to focus on this one part of the city and eventually create micro hotspots in other troubled areas.
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Ariel Rothfield can be reached at Ariel.Rothfield@KSHB.com.
