Since Tuesday, the Kansas City metro area has been under a stay-at-home order requiring residents to remain inside their homes unless they’re engaged in activities “essential to the health and safety” of themselves, family members or friends.
With most of the city staying put unless they need groceries, hardware or the like—you can’t even outfit your home office at Nebraska Furniture Mart anymore—many have wondered what’s going on with the city’s crime rate.
A lot of people have wondered about this—to the extent that the city’s police decided to make a statement about it via Twitter.
We continue to get questions about how our calls for service are being impacted. Here’s the last seven days compared to the same time period last year for Priority 1 and 2 calls: pic.twitter.com/KHcw9hI7NQ
— Kansas City Police (@kcpolice) March 25, 2020
Priority one calls are the more serious calls, while priority two are of lesser urgency.
A second percent drop in more serious calls to the police is “anecdotally” significant, though the police cautioned that they would have to dig a little deeper—perhaps looking at conditions like weather, major events in town and the like—to present a better analysis.
Still, it seems like good news: There is, at the very least, not a crime wave underway during this pandemic.
