TKC EXCLUSIVE!!! One more Kansas City anti-crime program that doesn't work!!!

There's an e-mail circulating right now among politicos and reporters in this town making some pretty serious allegations against a local anti-crime program.

The Drug Abatement Response Team (DART) is an initiative aimed at battling drug houses and blight. Here's a description:

DART is a team comprised of representatives from the utility companies, Jackson County Prosecutor's Office, Fire Marshal's Office, Division of Family Services, Kansas City Police Department and Neighborhood Preservation Division.

All DART initial inspections result from warrants served by the Street Narcotics Unit on drug houses. After the warrant is served, DART is notified and then inspects the property. Most of the time, the residents of these properties allow DART personnel to conduct thorough interior and exterior inspections of the properties on the first inspections. During this inspection, if violations exist that render the property unfit for human habitation, the property is posted and ordered vacated.

DART sends the Police Department a report daily listing all posted DART properties. The police monitor these properties and arrest individuals in the structures if they do not have active work access permits or if it is between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

In theory, this sounds like a worthwhile endeavor but according to a very passionate e-mail that might soon show up as a local news story . . . The way Kansas City is operating the program leaves a lot to be desired.

Check it:

I recently purchased a home in a troubled area of Northeast KCMO and I began rehabilitating it. When I purchased it, I had a title search performed and it came back showing there were no liens on the property. I then began the work of remodeling the property, including painting the outside, planting a lot of flowers around the perimeter of the building, picking up broken glass and trying to stay on top of the trash situation. I also started working with children in the neighborhood, creating art and teaching them how to paint and landscape. After a few weeks of working on the property and working with the children in my area I was confronted by an officer from the prosecuting attorney's office and told that I could not be on the premises, that I was subject to arrest and prosecution. I was told that I could go to jail.

Now, I planned on working as hard as I could to fix up my house, and I was excited about this, even though there are abandoned buildings all around me, even though there is a huge pile of trash across the street, and even though I have seen prostitutes and drug dealers on the streets. My belief was that if I put the right energy into the area, by making it beautiful, it would be a deterrent against drug dealers. But now I am told that since narcotics were once sold from my house (by a FORMER OWNER!!!!), I have to list all of the people who might come to my property, that I in fact lose all privacy rights and that I do not, in fact, own my property in the ordinary sense, that I am in fact suspected of drug crimes.

To quote Erika Wirken from The Daily Record: "These functions of the DART unit serve to displace drug dealers and penalize the property owners that allow drug activity to continue in and around their land. The DART unit has and will continue to utilize such legal actions as nuisance, forfeiture and expedited evictions to address the drug activity in Jackson County, Missouri."

To quote from a press release from Gov. Matt Blunt's office: "DART provides law enforcement officers that identify and shut down drug house and street level narcotics operations. DART members act on tips from Jackson County residents about illegal narcotics activity in their municipality, and force drug producers to pass housing and fire codes, many times immediately shutting down their operations."

Let me tell you, so long as I was around, the activity of drug dealers went down. I saw the impact my presence was having, and I was the one who was keeping drugs out of my neighborhood, by installing large new windows where I could keep an eye on the activity and by installing large outdoor floodlights to keep the area bright.

Now all I can do is drive by my property at night. I have already had a window broken out, and also had the passenger window on my truck smashed out (I left it there in the hopes of deterring people from damaging my property). Someone also threw a rock into the large floodlight that is on the South side of my property. No one in DART is helping me keep drug dealers out of my area, and now I cannot help stop it either.

To make matters worse, these people now know I cannot be in my own building, as the bright florescent sticker DART places on my building ADVERTISES THAT I CANNOT BE THERE. So I have to leave all my tools unprotected and my neighborhood unwatched as the felons DART is supposed to stop now come and vandalize my property.

Please do something to allow people who only want to come into the neighborhood to restore it to have access to their property - to not have bright stickers that make the house a target. I WAS NOT THE DRUG DEALER. I MOVED FROM IOWA TO START A LIFE HERE AND NOW I AM BEING ACCUSED OF CRIMINAL ACTIVITY.

To me, this program sounds a lot like an attempt to enact the "broken windows theory" but failing at a very basic level.

Whether it's DART

OR New Tools

Or so many other half measures to fight crime in what Mayor Funky would describe as a "holistic approach" the evidence seems to indicate that fighting crime in a roundabout way by concentrating mostly on blight doesn't seem to be working.

Instead, a far more effective strategy than allegedly hassling people who want to invest in a neighborhood might be to simply keep a long unfulfilled promise to Kansas City Taxpayers and put the additional cops that were promised on the street.