KANSAS CITY, Mo. — On most days, social worker Lindsay Moran is embedded with a Kansas City, Missouri, police officer responding to calls.
Her mission is to support families in their time of need. Sometimes taking care of basic needs.
"When trauma happens, people stop remembering to eat and drink and do those basic things because the brain is protecting you from what's going on," Moran told 41 Action News.
Even explaining that violence to children.
"We've got kids that are growing up in these violent communities, that they're forced to know those things, and they're forced to interact with and learn those things earlier than their brain functioning can conceptualizing," Moran said.
But she doesn't do it alone.
There is now one social worker at each KCPD patrol station for officers to turn to.
"I think that we have been a big asset to them," Tamara McIntosh, a KCPD social worker at South Patrol, said, "because they've, they're able to actually do their jobs, and know that what they couldn't complete, somebody else came to know that they actually were able to help a family."
The number of cases the social workers deal with varies, on some days altogether it can be as high as 40 to 50, which is why community partnerships like with AdHoc Group Against Crime are so important.
"We have a program where we repair houses that have been shot up and several of those houses we subsequently found out that were shot up by 14-year-olds," Brandon Mims, director of crisis intervention for AdHoc Group Against Crime, said Tuesday. "And so one of the things is that we realized is that the average age of a shooter in Kansas City has drastically lowered. You're talking about middle schoolers."
Again, that's where McIntosh and Moran step in.
"They don't understand that their actions have consequences and that, you know, the fighting and the social media and the constant arguing over things that make no sense can cause somebody to lose their life," McIntosh said.
And it's where accountability from the community comes in.
"If they know who's doing these things, or they have information on those things, we want people to know that they can come forward and talk," Moran said.