On Saturday, Norton Heights Community of Christ church in Kansas City held a prayer vigil for the 137 homicide individuals murdered in Kansas City so far this year.
The church also posted 137 highly visible crosses in its Northeast neighborhood to honor the dead and call attention to the ongoing carnage in Kansas City.
“The future must bear hope, there must be a better way and hopefully next year there will be fewer,” Pastor Peter Judd told fox4kc.
With three weeks left in the year, Kansas City has already passed last year’s extraordinary totals and racked up the highest body count since 1993.
Tony Botello of Tony’s Kansas City unspins the statistics. “This has been a historically bloody year in Kansas City,” Tony writes, “whilst City Hall has been mostly focused on Mayor Sly’s development agenda.”
“Police are fighting for their budget,” Tony continues, “the Citizen Task Force turned out to be a joke, and worst of all neither law enforcement nor City Hall has released a plan to confront the rise in KC murder!”
In a useful service, the Kansas City Star listed the names last week of all the homicide victims in the metropolitan area. There were 53 homicides in all of the metro excluding Kansas City, Missouri, and 34 of those were in Kansas City, Kansas.
Five of those murders were in Johnson County. That represents one murder for every 117,000 people. In Kansas City, Missouri, there has been one murder for every 3500 people.
This means that a person in Kansas City was 33 times more likely to be killed than a person in Johnson County, a county in which legal gun ownership is almost assuredly higher than it is in Kansas City, Missouri.
Although the crime problem is dramatically more serious in Kansas City than in Johnson County, the Star paid more attention to one politically useful murder in Olathe than, quite possibly, to all the murders in Kansas City combined.
The politicization of homicide by the city’s media and political class is one very good reason why people are dying in record numbers.