A young mother of three shot by her boyfriend in a domestic dispute. A 70-year-old man shot in June who succumbed to his injuries three months later. Two teenage brothers killed while walking home from Ramadan services.

They were among the 244 lives lost in homicides across the Kansas City metro in 2021. Of those, 157 people were killed in Kansas City, Missouri, making 2021 the second deadliest year in the city’s recorded history, following a record 182 killings in 2020.

Mayor Quinton Lucas said he was disappointed “in the unconscionably high number of murders in Kansas City.”

“To me, it ain’t good enough to just say, ‘Well, because we had such a grotesque number last year, it looks all right now.’ Because it’s not right. And if not for 2020, then we’d all be staring at each other right now,” he said. “The bigger question we need to ask is why year, after year, after year, after year this is such a part of almost a predictable conversation in Kansas City. That’s what I want to see us change.”

The high rates of homicides in Kansas City follow a pattern, with a previous record of 155 homicides in 2017 and 151 in 2019. Lucas, who took office in August 2019, set a goal of fewer than 100 homicides.

When the city broke its homicide record in 2020, leaders expressed concern. But little was done this year.

The root causes of gun violence in the city and across Missouri are linked to inadequate housing and food security, among other factors, as well as an increased availability of guns, systemic inequality, a lack of trust in police and domestic violence, according to researchers.

A firearm was used in about 93% of the city’s homicides in 2021, according to police data. And about 90% of homicides in 2020 and 95% in 2019 involved a firearm.

Solutions should go beyond increases in policing to get at root causes. Stakeholders — city leadership, community leaders, prosecutors and police — need to work together, they said.

But when it comes to how to respond and where to invest funding, leaders in Kansas City remain fragmented.

“This year is expected,” said Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker. “When you don’t do violence prevention from the government position, without violence prevention measures in place, you are going to have a higher homicide rate and so this year is predictable.”

The city has taken steps to address housing insecurity over the past year by promising to convert nearly 3,000 vacant lots into affordable housing, distributing nearly $16 million in rental assistance and passing a citywide law that guarantees the right to counsel for people facing evictions.

Boards that include representatives from the city, the prosecutor’s office and the police department meet regularly to discuss their efforts to address gun violence and have conversations, leaders said.

However, a comprehensive and collaborative approach that pulls funding and involves different stakeholders remains elusive.

And violence prevention programs such as the KC No Violence Alliance and Aim4Peace — both of which showed early promising results — have been unfunded or abandoned.

“Some people believe that violence is a problem that cannot be solved, and that the only thing that can make a difference is changing the time it takes for an officer to respond to a call,” Baker said. “But that’s not violence prevention. We didn’t do anything to make it better in 2021.”

A public health approach to gun violence means investing in improving conditions that put people at greater risk: income, housing and food security, schools and living environments — what researchers call the social determinants of health.

A city that wants to address gun violence needs to focus on the community’s overall health, said Rex Archer, director of population and public health at Kansas City University College of Osteopathic Medicine and the former head of the Kansas City Public Health Department.

Prevention can’t be dependent on law enforcement, he said.

“Our systems knock people down and are structured to keep people from rising out of poverty. Those factors, and each of them individually, can have an impact on gun violence,” Archer said. “We need to realize how these levels of stress and inter-generational stress take a toll. Some violence goes back several generations in a family and we need to help interrupt that.”

After Aim4Peace lost city funding in recent years, staff stopped working directly in neighborhoods to mediate conflicts in 2021. Kansas City does not have any other public health oriented violence interruption programs.

“I’m a big Aim4Peace fan, but for some reason, it has fallen into some amount of disfavor in some political quarters in the city,” Lucas said. “Building relationships with people who are engaged in violence, talking to somebody who’s 17, 18, or 19 who is regularly carrying a firearm, either for fear or to be strong and solve disputes, is something we need to be able to do. And we need to have more people who can do it.”

Ensuring that young adults are equipped with the skills necessary to resolve conflicts without violence is important, said Damon Daniel, president of Kansas City based AdHoc Group Against Crime.

“My hope is that City Council really prioritizes violence prevention and really looks at partnering with community organizations that are on the front lines and giving them an opportunity to provide real violence prevention services whether it be mentoring programs, job training programs, mental health services, drug treatment, things like that,” he said. “The various crime prevention models that are out there that have been tried locally over the years, are really underfunded.”

The likelihood that Aim4Peace will receive increased funding from the city will depend on next year’s council budget, Lucas said.

“I can’t answer that for you, I don’t know what the city budget looks like next year,” he said. “Maybe.”

Collaboration among the city’s stakeholders has been difficult because everyone is spearheading their own efforts and conversations have been circular, Lucas said. With each board and department highlighting their own programming and with power in the city divided among different organizations, it’s hard to get collective buy-in.

“We’re ships passing in the night and the status quo of unconscionably high number of murders continues in this city,” he said. “And it’s a disgrace to the people of Kansas City, it’s a disservice to the many victims of violent crime and their families in this city.”

Kansas City is not alone in grappling with gun violence — high rates of firearm homicides and suicides are an issue statewide.

Missouri’s repeal requiring a permit to purchase a handgun in 2007 led to 49 to 68 additional firearm deaths each year in the following decade, researchers at Johns Hopkins found. By 2019, the state’s firearm death rate had risen by 58%, according to a Star analysis of state firearm death figures.

The Missouri General Assembly spent the past 15 years deregulating access to firearms – legalizing permit-less concealed carry, expanding legal safeguards for using deadly force in self-defense and passing the Second Amendment Preservation Act, which establishes that state firearm laws trump federal ones and penalizes local law enforcement $50,000 per infraction if they enforce federal gun laws.

Because Missouri has some of the loosest firearm laws in the nation, the rate of gun homicides in Kansas City is not surprising, said Rep. Patty Lewis, a Democrat who represents Jackson County.

As a registered nurse who worked in an ICU and trauma centers in the metro area, Lewis said she has seen the impact of gun violence in the community.

“It truly breaks my heart every single morning I turn on the local news and you hear of another homicide in our community,” she said. “And it’s just, it’s devastating.”

Lewis has introduced multiple gun related bills ahead of the General Assembly’s January session. Her proposals mandate that only licensed firearm dealers are able to sell guns, enact safe gun storage requirements and introduce a red flag law that would remove guns from people who are deemed a serious safety threat to themselves or others.

All three of the bills were filed last session, but failed to gain traction, she said.

“I’m hoping that I will get a hearing on these,” she said. “I’m hoping that they’ll go through the health and mental health committee because I feel that gun violence is a public health crisis and if it’s assigned to that committee, I’m hopeful that we will get it passed out of committee.”

Over a dozen firearm bills have already been proposed for the 2022 regular session – the bills range from regulatory measures that prohibit people with a history of domestic violence from possessing firearms to laws that would prohibit employers from firing someone for having a gun in their vehicle on the employer’s property.

“We are seeing what we saw last last session: They are once again pushing guns everywhere. They want it to be open for guns on buses, schools and churches,” said Rep. Emily Weber, a Democrat who represents portions of downtown and midtown Kansas City.

“These institutions and places of business and worship, they don’t want that. They’re not calling for this, the Republicans are,” she said.

Weber has introduced a bill that would require gun owners to report lost or stolen firearms to law enforcement. Only 11 states nationwide require that owners report missing firearms.

About 613 guns were stolen from vehicles in Kansas City between Jan. 1 and Nov. 30 this year, according to police data — a 19% increase over last year.

According to a recent study by the Center for American Progress, the 2007 repeal of permitting requirements to buy handguns led to an increase in stolen firearms throughout the state.

Firearms stolen in Missouri have been found at crime scenes or traced to shootings.

In a recent case, a Kansas City man will be sent to federal prison after being convicted in the illegal sales of 15 guns, some of which have been tied to shootings.

“This (law) will help make sure that those stolen firearms are recovered and not put in the wrong hands,” Weber said.

The Kansas City Police Department has internal programs aimed at violence reduction and supports programs with the same goal outside of the department, said Sgt. Jake Becchina, a KCPD spokesman.

The department is developing a Violence Reduction Program, around prevention, intervention and enforcement, he said. And since 2020, the agency has held a weekly shoot review where partners across the city go over intelligence about aggravated assaults and violent crime from the prior week. The process also takes into account the risk of retaliatory action after an incident in order to interrupt the cycle, he said.

However, in the past, the police department has pulled out of collaborative violence reduction efforts. In 2017, Police Chief Rick Smith removed officers from Kansas City No Violence Alliance, or KC NoVA, which garnered national attention after killings dropped to a historic low of 86 in 2014.

And a Star investigation last year found that the continued lack of trust between Kansas Citians and the police department drives gun violence – with community members feeling that officers were in their neighborhoods to police them, not protect them.

Engaging with the community is integral to reducing the level of homicides in the city, Baker said.

“The community cannot only assist, but can also be integral to the solution. They must be a part of the planning to a much greater degree, she said. “We have to build legitimacy with the community. A lot of people think the community has to build legitimacy with the police and prosecutors, but it’s the police and prosecutors who have to build legitimacy with the community.”

For the Rev. Darron Edwards, lead pastor of the United Believers Community Church, a commitment on focused deterrence efforts and a joint statement “made and maintained” between the police department and the community against gun violence are starting points to addressing the city’s high rate of homicides.

“Once the community knows that our entire police department portrays a guardian mentality in every ZIP code they serve, we can have a corporate citywide vision and a more localized, directed strategy in each police division,” Edwards said. “KCPD must portray that community policing is not the job of 12 to 15 community interaction officers citywide, rather every person who puts on that blue uniform is a community police officer with a guardian mentality.”

Edwards believes that violence is preventable and that partnering with faith communities can be one way to help disrupt cycles.

“Faith communities possess the unique space to educate on life skills and conflict resolution at an early age that can also prevent violence. To me, this is where city grants and police foundation funding can be put to good use. Churches remain even when communities change,” he said.

“The solutions are not rocket science.”