More Deadly Silence

A couple of weeks ago, the Strip noticed something funny — not funny ha ha but funny peculiar — when it got one of its regular e-mails from Capt. Rich Lockhart, the spokesman for the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department. Bein’ a member of this town’s media, the Strip gets all the public statements sent out by the cop shop. The subject line of this one: “Homicide #71.”

That’s a lot of murders, the Strip thought. Sure, it’s not as many as last year, when the body count ended up at 127. This year, Lockhart told the Strip, he expects the grim total to come in at around 90. This time last year, we’d already hit 95.

By the time this issue of the Pitch went to press, we were up to 75. And that’s still a lot of dead people. Weirdly, though, city leaders don’t seem that upset about it.

At this time last year, Jackson County Prosecutor Mike Sanders was putting up signs all over the city proclaiming that “The Silence Is Killing Us.” Activist and comic-book illustrator Alonzo Washington was launching a “start snitching” campaign with Ron Hunt. And after the city’s 96th homicide, Mayor Pro-Tem Alvin Brooks introduced a resolution to convene a commission of police, prosecutors, and psychology and sociology experts to address the city’s homicide rate. The City Council unanimously approved the resolution (Councilman Troy Nash said he hoped the result wouldn’t just be an “academic exercise”), and the commission went to work.

One October later, the shotgun death of Devin McDonald, murder victim No. 71, at 72nd Street and Paseo, barely registered as a blip on the news. Where are the candlelight vigils?

“That’s the problem with our community,” activist Ron McMillan tells the Strip. “We don’t stick to nothing. It’s all right for us to march, or be emotional for a minute, but that don’t do nothing. You have to put pressure on your council people and push for implementation of what’s in the [crime commission] report. You don’t just take the report and start chewing it up like dog food.”

At the October 2 meeting of the Black Agenda Group, which assembles weekly to address problems in the community, McMillan scorched a roomful of 50 people, at the Rev. Wallace Hartsfield‘s church at 23rd Street and Linwood, for failing to pick up a free copy from City Hall.

“It was an indescribable fiasco,” McMillan says. “They’re supposed to be an advocacy group…. I told them I was disappointed. I wanted an endorsement of the process. That’s the way they do things in a political society — you find a group that best supports the evidence, and then we move forward and try to handle the problem.”

This procrastinating porterhouse hadn’t read the report, either, so it finally checked www.cityclerk.kcmo.org and downloaded a copy. The Strip was feeling guilty enough that it was prepared to stay up until it had finished all 160 pages.

But after page 50, the report’s analysis ends. Its startling revelations? That crime is linked to a host of problems that plague Kansas City’s east side neighborhoods — problems such as poverty, returning parolees, unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, absentee landlords, gang activity and school dropouts.

Christ, people, the Strip could have reported that for free, too.

The next 100 pages were all appendices — a lengthy list of Kansas City agencies and nonprofits and detailed biographies of each of the 29 crime commissioners (including Sanders, McMillan, Anita Russell of the NAACP and Gwen Grant of the Urban League), as well as the commission’s staff and consultants.

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How silly of us — we thought the report on violent crime was going to be about crime.

Or that, in addition to all those bios of the commission members, it would include one or two bios of the victims of last year’s killing spree.

“You mean like a little paragraph on each [murder] and what happened?” asks commission Chairwoman Stacey Daniels-Young when grilled by this confrontational cutlet. (Daniels-Young is the president and CEO of the Black Healthcare Coalition.)

Young explains that there isn’t much specific information regarding each murder victim — besides his or her age and race and the crime location — because most victims’ families didn’t want to share more information than that.

“For, oh, golly, maybe half of them, we didn’t have things as basic as high school education, you know, whether they had a high school education, whether they worked or not,” Young says. “So one recommendation was that a thorough kind of research project be done that would interview family members and really try to fill in some of the data, because there was a big set of holes, really. For whatever reason, people just didn’t talk much about their loved ones.”

Basically, the commission’s report recommended that a real report be written someday. Guess that’s the best that can be expected when the mayor and the City Council demand a report but set aside zero funds for it. Young says one commissioner complained because there wasn’t even any money to provide the group with coffee.

The commission’s report makes about 20 other recommendations, including active attempts at conflict resolution and mediation in neighborhoods; truancy prevention programs; and something called a Youth District, which the commission compares with the KC Live entertainment district planned for downtown. (In this version, though, young people would actually feel safe and welcome. Seems that, like us, the crime commissioners can already imagine Live security guards hassling young people for wearing backward hats and baggy pants.)

Young presented the report to the City Council back on June 30. Since then, while we’ve waited for the City Council to implement any of those recommendations, 37 people have been killed.

“I’ve been convening some of the committees, and we will be probably — within the next week or two — coming up with some timelines on each of the recommendations,” Mayor Pro-Tem Brooks says. “I don’t plan for it to die on the vine or collect dust or turn yellow on somebody’s bookcase.”

Brooks left his anti-crime agency, MoveUp, at the first of this year, when he declared his candidacy for mayor. Since then, it’s been all quiet on the candlelight-vigil front, probably because MoveUp is preoccupied with moving out of its leaky-ceiling spot at 33rd Street and Troost and into 3013 East Ninth Street.

But not everybody is so quiet.

On September 29, a handful of fed-up folks marched from Ninth Street and Harrison to City Hall to voice their displeasure, chanting “No more killing.”

Joyce Riley, organizer of the 23rd Street PAC, which plans nonviolent marches, was there, looking fierce in an orange T-shirt. “The Crime Commission is almost a joke,” she said. “I read the report. It’s the same as always — a lot of talk. That’s all it’s been for 20 years, a lot of talking. I’m tired of them talking. They had to soothe the public with something. They have the arena, and we have a Katrina.”

Until recently, activist Washington had also been conspicuously quiet, apparently conserving his energy for his MySpace page. (A caption under one of Washington’s pictures on the site reads: “Bringing sexy back to activism.”)

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But last Thursday, Washington’s crime-fighting efforts made news again in The Kansas City Star. Writer John Shultz credited Washington’s MySpace page (www.myspace.com/alonzo_wash ington) with collecting tips that led to the arrest of Rodney E. Carter, who is now charged in the slaying death of Jeffrey Dunham, the first homicide victim of 2005 (Bryan Noonan’s “Shots in the Dark,” February 17, 2005).

Shultz’s story followed one he’d written on Carter’s charges the day before that made no mention of Washington. In response to that story, Washington posted a furious blog entry on his MySpace page, calling Shultz racist for leaving out the fact that a black man had helped in the arrest of the accused killer, who is black.

If this piece of protein had been in Shultz’s position, it would have been pissed at being called racist for failing to heap praise on Washington. Since when are the sources of tips identified in crime stories? Couldn’t that be a little bit dangerous?

In the blog entry, which has since been removed, Washington said he would call Shultz’s editor, and he invited others to do the same. He posted Shultz’s work-phone number and e-mail address. The next day, Shultz’s love letter to Washington ran on page 2 of the Local section, under the headline “Tip from Web led to arrest.”

Meanwhile, Washington spoke — mostly about himself — at a prayer vigil last Wednesday evening in front of the Empire Room at 31st Street and Oak, where Dunham was shot.

“Just so everybody here knows,” Washington said, “last year, when the Precious Doe case was cracked, I prayed and asked that other cases be cracked…. And all this year, I’ve been trying to get tips to come in to the police, Kansas and Missouri. I’ll just be honest, there’s a lot of people out there who don’t like me very much, but I’m trying to do something right.”

At the vigil, which was attended by Major Anthony Ells and Dunham’s two cousins and an aunt, Washington complained about being criticized. During her prayer, Washington’s wife compared her husband to a figure a teensy bit more famous: “Even Jesus Christ suffered criticism when he walked on this Earth. He did not go unblemished as far as people attacking him or naysayers saying negative things, so we should expect those things, Father God, especially when we’re trying to do something that is right.”

More humble sentiments were expressed the night before, at a lonely little vigil held for Shanta Marie Rhodes, a 15-year-old girl who was choked to death by another teenager in 2001 — another bad year for violence.

Two of Shanta’s small cousins batted at each other with the limp sleeves of their puffy coats as a circle of people formed in front of the home of Robert and Bonnie Muse, near 70th Street and Agnes. The sun was going down as McMillan — who had volunteered to lead the vigil without MoveUp — led the prayer. A few people spoke about Shanta’s smile, her positive energy, her friendliness.

Bonnie Muse spoke up. It was the anniversary of her daughter’s death and also her own birthday.

“My birthday wish is that he rot behind bars,” she said of her daughter’s killer, who may soon be out on parole from his 15-year sentence. “He never did say he was sorry.” She hugged a grandchild closer to her.

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“How is it that you can get in a car accident and you’ll be on the news for two days, but in the ghetto — that’s what they call our section, the ghetto — you can get shot like this guy on 72nd and Paseo and it’s not hardly on the news at all?” Robert Muse wondered aloud after the vigil was over.

Lockhart notes that this year’s homicide rate decrease of 19 percent is significant. “When crime is down, when homicides are down, it’s not nearly as sensational,” he says. “When things are up, there’s the appearance that something’s wrong…. The normal course of things is what we’re seeing this year. Normal meaning historical, I guess. One homicide’s too many for us. I don’t want to paint the picture that we’re happy with a certain number of homicides.”

No, nobody’s happy with a certain number of homicides. They’re just quiet. Deadly quiet. — As told to Nadia Pflaum