While the City of Kansas City spends millions trying to sell its citizens on a new airport terminal and a pointless streetcar extension, its citizens, including a Brookside attorney, are being murdered at a near record rate.
Tom Pickert, an attorney for the firm Fowler Pickert Eisenmenger LLC in Kansas City, was shot while sitting on his front porch Wednesday morning in the pleasant middle class Brookside neighborhood south of the Country Club Plaza, specifically in the 200 block of W. 66th Terrace. In the parlance of the hit TV show “The Wire,” this Brookside murder will attract attention because Pickert, unlike murdered gang members or drug dealers, was a “taxpayer.” His wife is a physician. He had just walked his two sons to school before he was killed.
On Twitter, Pickert was described as “a great father, husband, lawyer, and more, to many” and as “a great father and husband, a tireless attorney, and a caring friend.” He was also one of the top rated medical malpractice attorneys in Kansas City. Police are on the lookout for a white 1997 Chevrolet van with a Missouri license plate, 6FA 453.
The two other homicides in that 24-hour sequence took place on Kansas City’s northeast side. Both victims were men. No other details are currently available. The three killings push Kansas City’s 2017 homicide total up to 119. At this time last year, Kansas City recorded 98 homicides on the way to 130 for the year. In 2014, the city recorded only 79 homicides. At the current pace, the city will record a near record 146 homicides in 2017, an 85 percent increase in just three years.
“I think that the situation is clear,” political scientist Ernest Evans has told the Sentinel. “Clinton and her allies in the media and the Democratic Party and the liberal-left seized on the Ferguson tragedy of August 9, 2014 to create a wedge issue that they hoped would energize the black vote for her in 2016. What this cynical, self-serving exploitation of the Ferguson and related tragedies did was set off a crime disaster in virtually every black neighborhood in America.”
For all of their talk of inclusivity and diversity, the local media pay real attention to homicide only when it spills over into neighborhoods like Brookside–that is, neighborhoods where “taxpayers” live.