Carjackings on the rise in Kansas City!!!

Kansas City currently has a mayor who doesn't even rank fighting crime as one of this top five priorities (at last count it was Number 7 on his list), Mayor Funkhouser has never had any kind of experience in community activism or involvement and when he took office last year in the middle of a gang war he failed to mention the topic even once and mostly languished in the background during press conferences on the subject.

One of the consequences of Mayor Funky's incompetence when it comes to crime has been the escalation of carjackings in Kansas City and the spread of the crime throughout the area.

What will typically concern people from throughout the metro area is that this isn't "just" a Black on Black crime anymore that can be relegated to the back pages or uninspired coverage . . . Kansas City suburbs are now awash in carjackings as well where both the perpetrators and victims are white . . .



Which is undoubtedly what facilitates newfound media interest in the story.



And all of this recent information about the growing number of carjackings in this town seems to fly in the face of recent happy news about falling crime in and around Kansas City.

In fact, the stats regarding carjacking around Kansas City as skewed and unrepresentative of the real scope of the problem which is what TKC has contended about most cold and inconclusive crime data:

The difficulty in determining whether the number of carjackings has increased, in part, stems from the way most area police departments track crimes. In general, they don’t separate carjackings from other robberies. But now, officials in some agencies including Kansas City are discussing separating those statistics to better track what they described as a disconcerting trend.

Even worse, a lot of people unfamiliar with this subject don't really understand how commonplace and how dangerous a carjacking can be . . . Put simply, it's not as clean as it looks in the movies:

(Carjackings) occur about 34,000 times a year across the country, according to the most recent federal statistics. Sometimes the robbers attack but don’t succeed in taking the vehicle, but 45 percent of the time they do.

About 24 percent of the time the victim is injured.

So I guess my only advice on the subject is to be careful . . . And don't count on Mayor Funky making crime one of his top priorities since so far he's been busy championing the cause of the Minutemen and playing footsie with Clay Chastain over light rail.