Community Improvement Districts talk about solutions to wave of property crimes in KC

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (KCTV) - Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and Police Chief Stacey Graves hosted a roundtable with Community Improvement Districts.

Groups like Waldo, Troost, Downtown/River Market, and Independence Avenue shared their thoughts on the wave of property crime that has plagued the area.

The collective CIDs asked for training from KD to better prepare reports for officers to use in crimes and discussed creating a network that they can access to track bad actors that may be targeting different neighborhoods on different nights of the week.

Meetings like the one that took place today used to regularly happen in front of previous City Managers. CID Independence Avenue Manager Bobbi Baker-Hughes would like to see those meetings return with Brian Platt.

“I absolutely would love them to come back into play – I think the results that we got from those meetings helped take some of the silo away,” Baker-Hughes said. “By meeting in the City Manager’s office with the directors of departments, they’re able to get a firsthand look at what the problems are, and they’re able to lay solutions in place.”

CIDs are funded by sales tax in the neighborhood they represent, and on Independence Avenue, Downtown, and the River Market you may have noticed the people wearing black and yellow jackets that walk around the area.

Those individuals clean up trash, track crime, and sometimes even help out with homeless outreach, by connecting people with resources.

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Downtown and River Market CID Executive Director Sean O’Byrne outlined how the yellow and black jackets help police.

“We have over 70 ambassadors out on the street in both Downtown and River Market,” O’Byrne said. “If they’re looking for somebody and they have a photograph of somebody – chances are we can find that somebody.”

Some CIDs also manage a network of license plate readers – and they discussed ways they want to collaborate with police to the city council on the use of those devices.

“What I saw today is people talking about collaborating; on sharing camera images, talking about regular suspects, working closely with KD, working with city hall and code enforcement. You will continue to see us working together to make sure that every property crime gets the investigation it merits, hopefully, it has the prevention up front that it merits and that there are real consequences for any offender – whether it’s a tres, a burglary, a violent crime, a non-fatal shooting, an assault."

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