President Trump and top Justice Department officials, including acting attorney General Matt Whitaker and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, spoke in Kansas City on Friday, but the political drama over who will succeed Whitaker overshadowed the purpose of the conference: rebranding a $50 million federal program called Project Safe Neighborhoods. It’s intended to narrowly focus on the most violent criminals. It’s a concept of policing that’s long been embraced in Kansas City with mixed results, reports the local digital magazine Flatland. Kansas City ranks among the nation’s most violent metro areas. More than 700 law enforcement officers attended the Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) conference.
PSN was launched nearly two decades ago, but it wasn’t a priority under the Obama administration and its status slipped. For the Kansas City region, Project Safe Neighborhoods 2.0 could help fund a new strike force in 2019 of combined local law enforcement and federal agents. At the conference, police and prosecutors talked about how guns and the drug trade are linked. The newly created Midwest Crime Gun Intelligence Center, which feeds into the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, could be a game-changer for detectives. The Kansas City No Violence Alliance, a local crime prevention program, will shift its focus to sharpen its ability to drive down street violence. “End of the day, we are judged on the numbers,” Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said of the area’s high violent crime rate. “We own it.” Law enforcement is proficient at tracking murders, arrests, prosecutions and shootings, said criminologist Ken Novak of the University of Missouri-Kansas City. What’s difficult is making meaningful assessments of whether community anticrime work is actually improving safety. Speakers at the conference stressed that growing the prison population is not the goal. Police cannot arrest their way to lower crime rates, they said.