When there’s an emergency in Kansas City’s Oak Park — an area long plagued by gun violence — some residents choose not to contact police, according to the neighborhood association President Pat Clarke.
Instead, he said, they call him.
“A lot of folks feel safer or feel comforted calling me,” he said.
According to Clarke, community members are frustrated with the repeated neighborhood shootings and lack of officers readily available to respond. They also feel more work needs to be done to repair relations between citizens and law enforcement.
In the months following the May 21 fatal shooting at an East Side nightclub that left three dead and another two injured, Clarke said, there’s been a noted need for more officers in Oak Park.
Police records obtained by The Star showed Klymax Lounge owner Mario Williams called police for help 20 minutes before the shooting broke out.
The nightclub owner told The Star he thought the shooting could have been prevented if police responded quicker. Allegedly, a dispatcher said there was a “black out,” meaning no police cars were available to respond until an emergency had already occurred.
“I told the police the guys were here with guns and that our security guard was not going to be able to hold them back… I said we needed help,” Williams said in a previous interview.
Clarke explained other Oak Park residents have shared Williams’ concerns about police response times.
“When you look at this neighborhood, this community, on the weekends. I don’t think they have enough police officers available. Someone needs to put the biggest help wanted sign that you can put out,” he said.
Kansas City officials have grappled with the challenges of recruiting and retaining officers during Board of Police Commissioners meetings. Third District Councilwoman Melissa Robinson believes the issue, in part, stems from police having to cover Kansas City’s large landmass.
“I don’t think we’ve ever gotten up to a level of officers able to meet the demand,” Robinson said.
Staffing records for the department’s East Patrol Bureau, whose jurisdiction includes the Oak Park neighborhood, revealed a dip in employed officers. While on Jan. 1, 2021, there were 154 positions and 151 officers, by 2023 the amount of police serving the division fell to 128, leaving 22 slots open.
Clarke said he does not blame police and recognizes the challenge of covering such a wide swath of area. But, he also said, it’s unacceptable for residents in his neighborhood to be waiting up to 15 or 20 minutes for a police response, which he said some have alleged.
“You got three cops, four cops, five cops already on the crime scene and they’re on the other side of town, and then the one that’s supposed to be available to us is at another crime scene… That’s where we’re at right now,” he said.
“I will say, some communities get a faster response than what I do around here.”
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and other community activists were not immediately available to respond to requests for comment.
‘It’s called relationship building’
Oak Park Neighborhood Association Community Developer, President Pat Clarke and Jackson County Sheriff Darryl Forte met Wednesday to find ways of deterring gun violence.
Only a few hours later they were alerted of another homicide in their neighborhood.
“This is poor conflict resolution skills,” Forte said of the driving force behind the escalating violence.
He explained a need for young residents to find alternatives to violence when coping with distress. He also said the relationship between law enforcement and residents needs to change.
“It’s called relationship building,” Clarke said.
The pair said they were not ready to disclose the programs or solutions that they met to discuss, but they each agreed the burden to repair trust falls on both the officer and individual community members.
According to a prior report by the Star, residents facing record levels of gun violence said law enforcement was there to police them — not to protect them.
Missouri has led the nation in the rate at which Black people are killed in shootings for most of the past decade. In Kansas City, 75% of homicide victims are Black, even though less than 30% of residents are Black, the report said.
The report also showed that the less people saw gun violence in their neighborhoods, the more they trusted police. And the more often people had to call the police, the less they trusted them.
Both Black and white Kansas Citians reported that they knew they had different experiences, the report said.
Research cited in the report by the Giffords Law Center, a nonprofit concerned with gun violence and police safety, explored how disparate treatment by police can increase gun violence in Black communities.
“Inequalities are all interconnected and unfortunately gun violence is both one of the leading markers of inequality and one of the most deadly,” said Ari Freilich, state policy director for the Giffords Center in a previous statement.
When residents did reach out to law enforcement, or police arrived in the wake of another homicide, many found their work unsatisfactory: they cited slow response times, poorly conducted investigations, and lack of communication with families, according to the report.
A late June report by the Star determined community building and establishing trust are critical steps to fix the Kansas City police’s low homicide clearance rate. Police have only cleared one third of the more than 100 metro area homicides reported this year.
In response to the report, Mayor Quinton Lucas listed community trust as a key element of remedying challenges with law enforcement.
“Some of that relates to building more community trust. I think this police chief is working hard to do that. I think that we will continue to try to see ways that we can enhance that long term,” he said.
‘They just didn’t show up in time’
Kansas City police told the Star they responded to a shooting call at 1:25 a.m. on May 21 and arrived at the Klymax Lounge on 4242 Indiana Avenue one minute later.
But club owner Mario Williams disagreed.
Williams said people fleeing the club were “ready to riot” over the delayed response.
“If the people looking to cause trouble see the police... they’re running,” Williams said.
“These guys were able to have at least twenty minutes outside my establishment with guns hanging out of their pocket,” he said.
Records provided by Williams and police showed the club owner called officers at least five times that night.
The first time was a 1:04 a.m phone call in which Williams allegedly hung up after eight seconds, although he told The Star he was disconnected after briefly relaying the situation. The second phone call, also at 1:04 a.m., was answered by a dispatcher in three seconds and led to an almost two minute conversation.
The call picked up by the dispatcher was assigned a priority number of four, meaning there was no immediate danger to human life, according to Sgt. Jacob Becchina, a spokesman for the department. Examples of other priority four calls are burglaries, prowlers, non-injury car crashes and other suspicious activities.
He explained the call’s priority is assigned by the call taker, with priority one calls indicating there is an extreme, known, or potential danger to human life, such as a rape, shooting or armed robbery.
Calls are designated priority two if the potential for danger or injury exists, such as bomb threats or other disturbances. Priority three calls, like welfare checks, are not life threatening. Priority five calls, such as noise disturbances and non-domestic assaults with no injuries present, signify that a delayed response will not detract from the quality of service offered to the person in need.
Williams made two more calls — at 1:26 a.m. and 1:27 a.m. respectively — which were “abandoned.”
The first call disconnected after 29 seconds and the second after 53 seconds of waiting to speak to a dispatcher. Williams alleged each of the calls were disconnected.
“There were bodies all around me,” he said of the time.
About 11 other calls from the lounge were waiting to speak to a dispatcher during the same time frame, according to Capt. Corey Carlisle, a spokesman for the Kansas City police. These calls, he said, prompted the initial dispatched shooting call.
Williams’ final call at 1:29 a.m. was picked up by a dispatcher after over four minutes of waiting in a queue.
At that time, police were already on the scene, Carlisle said.
“People are walking around saying this shooting happened inside our club and that nothing could have been done to stop it. But we called the police to say they were going to be shooting. They just didn’t show up in time,” Williams said.
