Kansas City has grappled with shootings long before Super Bowl
Across the country, Americans were shocked and horrified by the images Wednesday from Kansas City, Missouri, after shots were fired into a crowd of jubilant paradegoers celebrating the city's Super Bowl win.
To people intimately aware of the entrenched violence in Kansas City, the shooting was painfully familiar.
There were 182 people killed in Kansas City last year, according to police data, surpassing a previous high in 2020. With a population of just over 500,000, Kansas City has one of the highest murder rates in the nation.
Rosilyn Temple, who founded the Kansas City chapter of Mothers in Charge after her son Antonio was killed in 2011, was at the scene of two separate shootings Tuesday, the night before the Super Bowl celebration.
“It will get some big attention,” Temple said about the shooting at the rally. But after a year with record homicides in the city, she said, “it was just a matter of time” before there was a shooting that resulted in a large number of injuries or deaths.
City officials and community leaders have fought for years to reduce gun violence.
Many of the homicides driving Kansas City's record highs stem from arguments or other disputes, whether within families, groups of acquaintances or rival gangs, according to city officials and those involved in violence prevention efforts.
Missouri has some of the least restrictive gun ownership laws in the country, and acquiring a handgun or rifle is not a difficult task. No permit is necessary for those 19 and older to carry a concealed handgun.
Police in Kansas City have offered few details about the circumstances surrounding the shooting at the celebration, which left one woman dead and at least 22 people injured.
But on Thursday, the city's police chief, Stacey Graves, said the shooting probably stemmed from an argument and was not being considered an act of terrorism.
A couple who were at the rally said they witnessed the terrifying scene: As they prepared to leave the rally, an altercation broke out near them, and two men began firing at each other, said Kourtney and Jesse King, who live in Independence, Missouri, and attended the parade with their children.
On Friday, two people, both under 18, remained in police custody. Authorities said they had charged the two with resisting arrest and “gun-related” offenses.
Annie Struby, a lawyer and advocate for domestic violence victims in Kansas City, said she had spent the day of the parade holding her breath, worrying that something might happen there.
When she heard news of the shooting, she immediately wondered if it was tied to a conflict that began well before the parade, between people who knew each other.
“It's so incredibly easy for almost anybody to get a firearm,” Struby said. “It allows for such an immediate escalation of an incident.”
After a sharp rise during the pandemic, murder rates fell in most cities in the United States in 2023, according to FBI data. Most violent and property crimes are also down.
But Kansas City remains a stubborn outlier. Among 20 U.S. cities with the highest number of homicides in 2022, Kansas City was just one of four, along with Dallas, Washington, and Memphis, Tennessee, that had an increase in killings last year.
“Violence in Kansas City is not new,” said Damon Daniel, the president of the AdHoc Group Against Crime, which provides counseling services to people affected by violence as well as employment readiness training.
Daniel, who closely monitors police data on homicides, has counted several homicides in the city just since last weekend.
“We are at one of those points where, for many of us, it feels like it is getting worse before it is getting better,” he said.
But he added that efforts to increase collaboration among law enforcement, nonprofit organizations and city agencies were beginning to bear fruit.
“We didn't get here overnight, and it won't go away overnight,” he said.
Mike Parson, the Republican governor of Missouri and a former sheriff, was at the back of the stage, in front of Union Station, when shots were fired.
Speaking on the radio Thursday morning, Parson acknowledged Kansas City's issues with violence but said that other cities were “worse by far.”