South Kansas City Biz Suffered Homeless Hotel Crime Spike

Right now we wanted to feature POWERFUL citizen journalism and a glimpse at the very real cost endured in the aftermath of politically charged debate.

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South Kansas City Homeless Hotel Testimony

My son's small business is getting pummeled with crime and mischief in the wake of whatever this is we're in the midst of. He's located in SKC near Hickman Mills Dr. and Longview. Mostly burglaries and petty mischief, but it's costing him and me a ridiculous amount of time and stress sorting it out and getting creative with solutions to keep thieves out of his lot. He spent $15K repairing damage from attempted burglaries to customer vehicles, not including July 2021 incidents. We've been perplexed for some time as we've never seen panhandling, homelessness, addiction and drug paraphernalia, burglaries, vandalism etc. roaming our streets at all hours. This generally is a pretty safe area.

South Patrol has recently told us on multiple occasions the Best Host off Longview is our/their biggest problem. I naively assumed this was because they offered weekly rentals and were rundown. It was only very recently, through some research and digging, we discovered some contributing factors. The hotel I mentioned is apparently one of the 12 the city put people up in. All this time, we had no idea this was occuring nearby, even though we were reading about the program! South Patrol confirmed it and the personnel at the front desk told us 40 rooms were paid for by the city.

The front desk also confirmed a very clumsy thief, who broke into my son's lot and tried to steal a truck Friday 7/16 @ 5am was staying in one of those rooms. They even gave him the room number!

Today two of these "homeless" people (one who robbed my son's business last year, and has yet to be charged, so far as we can tell) broke into a home next to his business. The police responded in 20-25 minutes. On arrival they assessed and discussed, then told my son, even though at least two perps were in the house, they had decided not to enter because they didn't want to get into a "shootout" for something that would only amount to a trespassing charge. Then.....they left! I called the South Patrol desk Lt. who could not explain the police response. The officers did return, but the man that was robbed by son had fled. They attempted to arrest the other male after he unknowingly crawled back out of the home's broken window while they were standing there. He appeared to be very high. Unfortunately they were unable to arrest guy #2 because the elderly property owner arrived and would not agree to press charges as he was "afraid of retaliation" from the guy #2 who, according to my son, was being very belligerent at the time and was a very big guy.

Full disclosure, my son did find a very brave lady copy named Officer Woods, who worked to bust up a nearby homeless camp my son's perp had fled into Friday and entered another building to root out another perp, over the weekend.

Long and short, I've tallied 13 break-ins since last April, but my son says it's more. One midday robbery and a crap ton of wasted mental energy and trips to run off these folks. This is up from NONE the year before. We are a neighborhood in crisis and it seems the city council has DUMPED it all over us!!

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