Just in case you think you're safe on your own front porch this weekend, you should check out the sad details of Lance Rutter's homicide in today's Star.
Early Saturday morning, Rutter became KCMO's 65th homicide of the year when two unidentified men came into his yard, held him up and shot him.
A few hours before his death, the 23-year-old finished his shift at Power & Light District's Pizza Bar and came home with his roommate to put some laundry in the machine. While they waited on their porch, the two men jumped the fence of the home at 38th and Baltimore Avenue, pulled guns on them, and demanded their wallets. Police say Rutter either refused, or didn't have his on him. His roommate gave up his own wallet. Before they ran, one of the robbers fired a shot into Rutter. He was dead by the time the police arrived.
No one's been arrested.
The saddest line in the Star's story -- and boy is it a feat to pull that off -- comes from Rutter's mother, Tracy Mueller.
"He was sitting on his own front porch," Mueller said. "You're supposed to be able to do that."
What else can be said?
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Unofrtunately, not enough of us throughout the metro are shocked both at the level and the senselessness of the increasing violence in KCMO.
And it's time to stop assessing blame, and instead emphasize changes in behavior by both the citizens in the communities involved and the elected and appointed officials in KCMO.
Before the police ask for more money and more officers, they should present a plan as to what they intend to do to deploy their CURRENT resources in creative ways to seriously address curbing the violence, and how additional officers would be deployed in new and creative strategies. Let me suggest increasing the number of Community Action Network Centers, substantially increasing the financial support of those operations, and placing much more emphasis on community policing. It's hard to see how doing more of what's being done now will have any different results from the current carnage.
And in the neighborhoods, it's past time for the great majority of residents who are solid citizens who just want to earn a living, raise their families, and be left alone by the local thugs, to band together and stand up and work to change what's accepted as normal in the communities where they live.
Any serious long-term effort take both hands pressing together and it's past time to start.
Neither of these changes will be easy and both will take some moral courage and resolve, but the spiraling and increasingly violent and random crime will only get worse and continue to spread unless larger numbers of the public decide that this is a problem that affects us all and make a commitment to do something about a civic wound that almost daily takes innocent lives and saps the strength of our greater metro community.
We hear alot about twenty-year plans, but any effort needs a first step or it becomes a twenty-year long stick that dangles the carrot in front of us at a constant distance. And there'll always be some new reaon not to start.
Both residents and officials need to take that first step today.
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