Kansas City Police Chief Announces Plan to Reduce Violent Crime

Kansas City, Missouri, Police Chief Stacey Graves has unveiled a plan to reduce crime.

The plan was unveiled in its entirety mid-March, when Graves posted it on the KCPD website and spoke at two public events describing how police plan to implement its overarching ideas into real-world actions, the Kansas City Star reports.

Throughout Graves’ 2024 plan are traces of an initiative that began in the middle of last year — the Violent Crime Reduction Initiative — which aimed at police and community collaboration, a larger volume of social services and a concept called “focused deterrence” to reduce crime.

Focused deterrence is a crime prevention strategy that targets high-risk offenders, featuring both swift sanctions for offenses and social services and community support to enable change.

The crime plan outlines three main strategies for police to implement: data-informed community engagement (DICE), data-driven deployment and focused deterrence.

“We’re focusing on the offender, the victim and the place,” Graves said at a public safety symposium in March. “We want to make sure that we are focusing on those violent crime drivers in the city... make sure that our efforts are toward those who are most involved in violent crime, but also the peripheral group around some of those offenders that we can offer resources to... and show them a different path.”