Kansas City Police Department: Driving an 18% decline in violent crime with SAVE KC

KEY IDEAS:

• The Kansas City Police Department (KCPD) partnered with local prosecutors’ offices, social service providers, and other stakeholders to implement a focused deterrence program called SAVE KC in May 2024 to curb violence in Kansas City.
• Between January and September 2025, the city saw an 18% decrease in violent crime year over year.
• Like other focused deterrence programs, SAVE KC relies on complex analyses of large volumes of data stored across siloed systems.
• To make SAVE KC more efficient and effective, KCPD deployed Peregrine to unify disparate information systems, integrate fragmented data, and automate tedious analytical workflows.

“SAVE KC proves that combining accountability with opportunity saves lives. When we offer real paths to housing, employment, and stability alongside strong enforcement, people choose change.”

Quinton Lucas

Mayor, Kansas City

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas City has regrettably faced a well-documented history of challenges with violent crime. For years, certain crimes — particularly gun violence — have afflicted the city’s communities at levels considered unacceptable by local law enforcement, municipal government, and, importantly, the public.

But things are changing in the City of Fountains. The Kansas City Police Department reported that by the end of September 2025, violent crimes had fallen by more than 18% year over year, due in large part to the city’s new SAVE KC initiative. Gun crimes saw a particularly drastic decline from 2024–2025, with victims of non-fatal shootings decreasing by 34%, and incidents involving multiple non-fatal shooting victims decreasing by 46%.

However, SAVE KC relies on complex analyses of large volumes of fragmented data, which initially created challenges for KCPD personnel. The agency onboarded Peregrine earlier this year to integrate its data sources, automate analytical workflows, and build a unified operational picture for all organizations and stakeholders invested in SAVE KC.

Keep reading to learn how KCPD and other SAVE KC coalition members are leveraging data-driven strategies to make Kansas City safer.

💡 WHAT DOES ‘SAVE KC’ STAND FOR? Stand Against Violence Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day.

How does focused deterrence work in Kansas City?

“We can’t arrest our way out of this issue. Our approach is to balance accountability and opportunity to show our clients there are real consequences for violence but also provide immediate access to the resources they need to choose a better path instead.” —Chief Stacey Graves, Kansas City Police Department

Focused deterrence programs address the root causes of criminal behavior through data-informed interventions that include both sanctions and incentives. The model relies on a few pillar strategies:

• Targeted enforcement for the most frequent offenders driving specific crimes
• Community services for the individuals and groups at the highest risk of either offending or becoming victims to crime
• Collaborative partnerships with local public agencies, service providers, and community organizations to drive long-term change

READ MORE → Modernizing Focused Deterrence Programs

Save KC follows the focused deterrence model to address gang- and group-related violence and help high-risk individuals build safer, more stable lives. The program tackles violent crime with a holistic approach:

• Identify Kansas City’s most prolific offenders
• Engage those offenders to understand their unique needs and goals
• Offer support through tailored social services and community resources
• Target those who reoffend with additional enforcement

Johnson said that because many high-risk individuals face complex barriers, support is a crucial pillar of reform.

“They need identification to obtain a job, but need documentation to get an ID, but may need transportation to get that documentation,” said Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson. “Our service providers guide them through each step, removing obstacles, so they can build the successful lives they envision for themselves.”

If SAVE KC’s clients re-offend, however, they face prosecution.

“SAVE KC’s message is clear: Give up crime, accept help, or face the full weight of prosecution,” Johnson said. “As we explain to SAVE KC clients, we care about your future, but violence will never be tolerated.”

Inside SAVE KC: Combining accountability and opportunity

“Rather than being seen as this presence above the community, we want to be the bedrock underneath to support all in our public safety efforts.” —Capt. Jonas Baughman, Kansas City Police Department

The SAVE KC program moves through three key phases:

• Identification. KCPD integrates offense data from multiple sources and analyzes that data to determine which individuals reoffend the most often in various areas of crime, such as group-related homicides and non-fatal shootings. The agency also identifies people who are at high risk of becoming victims to crime.
• Outreach and intervention. City leaders reach out to high-risk individuals and invite them to “call-ins,” where they connect attendees with support services such as career training, assistance obtaining a driver’s license, or anger management. Personnel may also send custom notifications to individuals identified as being involved in or close to violence.
• Service delivery. To quickly deliver services and resources to high-risk individuals, SAVE KC partners with other local coalitions combating violence in Kansas City. The goal is to resolve the root issues driving crime while showing offenders that violence will not be tolerated.

💡 DOES FOCUSED DETERRENCE WORK? When implemented properly, yes. A systematic review of focused deterrence programs conducted in 2012 found that the model has significant positive effects on crime. The review assessed 10 studies, nine of which showed significant declines in at least some types of crime.

Personalized outreach and call-ins

At call-ins, SAVE KC personnel work to understand each client’s specific goals and challenges and respond with tailored social service offerings. If a client agrees to engage in services, personnel move quickly to keep the momentum going.

“SAVE KC seeks to make a more personal connection with the folks in the room at a call-in,” said KCPD Capt. Jonas Baughman. “Instead of merely preaching to them and hoping they eventually accept services, we plan to have services available the same night of the call-in. Rather than being seen as this presence above the community, we want to be the bedrock underneath to support all in our public safety efforts.”

SAVE KC’s call-ins exclude the media and any non-essential personnel, and the invite lists are usually fewer than 20 people. The meetings aim to cultivate a sense of respect and belonging for invitees and community leaders alike. Instead of speakers lecturing attendees from a podium, for example, they might all sit shoulder-to-shoulder at a dinner.

💡 DO CALL-INS WORK? Yes. As of August 2025, 38 individuals had attended SAVE KC call-ins. All 38 chose to engage in services, which included employment opportunities, housing, and relocation services.

‘Flipping the script’ from enforcement to support

Baughman said SAVE KC is a step above Kansas City’s previous focused deterrence program, NOVA (the No Violence Alliance), which ran from 2013–2018. NOVA took a more punitive approach, whereas SAVE KC is more comprehensive and restorative.

“In a sense, we have flipped the script from our prior iteration of focused deterrence,” Baughman said. “We are now more resource-oriented instead of enforcement-oriented, although there is always a balance to strike with the two methods.”

KCPD Chief Stacey Graves said enforcement alone can’t solve violent crime in Kansas City.

“We can’t arrest our way out of this issue,” Graves said. “Our approach is to balance accountability and opportunity to show our clients there are real consequences for violence but also provide immediate access to the resources they need to choose a better path instead.”

Data and technology challenges for SAVE KC

“Prior to Peregrine, our members were frequently frustrated due to administrative data hurdles. By that I mean data was only available through a few outlets, namely analysts and our IT team, depending on the need. This created a constant trying-to-run-with-your-shoes-tied kind of feeling, particularly for officers.” —Capt. Jonas Baughman, Kansas City Police Department

Before carrying out the targeted services and enforcement promised by any focused deterrence program, leaders must first identify which individuals and groups are the majority drivers of crime in their city. This requires stakeholders to:

• Pull criminal histories and other relevant data stored in disparate systems
• Run complex analyses on that data to identify frequent re-offenders for each type of crime
• Coordinate collaboration among law enforcement, community groups, and social services to deliver services and sanctions

The data needed to run a focused deterrence program often lives in multiple disparate systems, making this a complex and taxing process — especially for larger cities.

SAVE KC was no different. The program initially required KCPD personnel to manually piece together prolific re-offender lists using fragmented data stored across siloed sources. The agency later onboarded Peregrine to break down those silos and streamline the overall process. Below we explore the primary challenges KCPD faced in implementing SAVE KC and how Peregrine helped the department resolve those challenges.

Siloed information systems slowed crime and intelligence analysis

To accurately identify the most frequent re-offenders and highest-risk potential victims for various types of crime, KCPD had to consider data from its computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and records management systems (RMS), probation and parole records, ticketing and crash data, and other disparate systems that were not designed to work together. Before Peregrine, the agency lacked an efficient way to bridge the gaps between those platforms. Plus, a recent RMS transition had left years of valuable intelligence siloed in KCPD’s legacy RMS, creating yet another data disconnect.

Manual offender reporting took hours

In the early months of SAVE KC, KCPD personnel had to manually comb through disparate information sources to compile and extract data and insights on prolific offenders.

“Prior to Peregrine, our members were frequently frustrated due to administrative data hurdles,” said Capt. Baughman. “By that I mean data was only available through a few outlets, namely analysts and our IT team, depending on the need. This created a constant trying-to-run-with-your-shoes-tied kind of feeling, particularly for officers. Peregrine has since all but eradicated these roadblocks, replacing them with impactful data and analytics at everyone’s fingertips.”

Generating frequent re-offender reports — a critical component of any focused deterrence program — was a particularly tedious process.

“If I wanted to help run our chronic offender report — the ‘who’s who’ of violent offenders for gun crime and violence in Kansas City — on a good day, it would probably take me four or five hours,” Baughman said. “It is immensely laborious and time-consuming.”

Duplicate person records obscured patterns

Prolific offenders tend to have frequent run-ins with law enforcement. In KCPD’s RMS, it was common for each new run-in to result in a new person record, or “jacket.” When SAVE KC first launched, the RMS housed tens of thousands of duplicate person records — meaning any individual offender’s history could be scattered across many jackets. This fragmentation further hindered KCPD’s ability to generate frequent offender reports.

How Peregrine helped KCPD carry out SAVE KC

In early 2025, KCPD onboarded Peregrine to streamline and enhance its workflows for SAVE KC. Here’s how Peregrine cleared the agency’s data hurdles.

Real-time data integration

Peregrine integrated KCPD’s disparate information sources — including its CAD system, legacy RMS, new RMS, and ticketing and crash data — on one unified platform that updates in real time as new data flows in. Peregrine now harmonizes, transforms, and models all integrated data and automates the creation of dynamic, interactive visualizations.

Automatic person record deduplication

Peregrine applied a proprietary algorithm called Match to automatically merge similar person records across all integrated data sources, creating a clean, comprehensive, organized record for each individual in KCPD’s data ecosystem. Now, Peregrine clearly indicates which person records have been merged, provides the source lineage for all of the data in each jacket, and allows users to make manual edits as needed.

Instant criminal history analysis

Peregrine automated criminal history analyses by pulling the lifetime offense history of every person in KCPD’s system and algorithmically evaluating and categorizing all offenses for each individual. Peregrine then analyzes each offense based on when it happened, whether there was a corresponding arrest, and whether multiple offenses took place in the same case.

Automated reports and scorecards for high-risk individuals

Peregrine automated the important task of identifying the repeat offenders causing the most harm in Kansas City, as well as those who are repeatedly victimized. The platform’s robust and agile querying tools easily reported the number of incidents in which a given person was involved, along with the nature of those incidents and the role the person played in those incidents — for example, whether they were a victim, witness, or suspect.

For example, when KCPD leaders need lists of the city’s most prolific offenders in each crime category, Peregrine can now instantly generate those reports using the most up-to-date crime data available. To provide additional context and create accountability, the report transparently walks through the following details for each frequent offender:

• The individual’s involvement in various types of incidents (e.g., arrest, victim, or witness)
• The type of offense(s) in which an offender was involved
• How Peregrine created and reported outputs for each offender
• How the offender ranks relative to other offenders
• The offender’s field interview history

Measuring impact on violent crime: Save KC’s results

“These results show focused deterrence works, not just by consequences, but by opening doors. We're committed to this approach because it creates lasting safety for our entire community.” —Quinton Lucas, Mayor, Kansas City

The first year and a half of SAVE KC brought real change to Kansas City. The Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office reported the following changes in violence between 2024 and 2025:

• Non-fatal shootings involving KCPD-identified violent group members fell by 62%.
• Incidents involving multiple non-fatal shooting victims fell by 46%.
• Group-related homicides involving KCPD-identified group members fell by 40%.
• The number of victims of non-fatal shootings fell by 34%.
• Non-fatal shooting incidents involving individuals targeted by SAVE KC fell by 23%.

NIBRS data: Violent crime in Kansas City

KCPD reported the following data on violent crimes to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) in 2024 and 2025:

Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said the numbers speak for themselves — SAVE KC is working.

"SAVE KC proves that combining accountability with opportunity saves lives,” Lucas said in a press release. “When we offer real paths to housing, employment, and stability alongside strong enforcement, people choose change. These results show focused deterrence works, not just by consequences, but by opening doors. We're committed to this approach because it creates lasting safety for our entire community."

Build safer communities with data-driven strategies

The most effective public safety strategies require a foundation of reliable data. Peregrine builds that foundation by integrating, cleaning, harmonizing, and transforming data from siloed sources on one accessible, intuitive platform. And the work doesn’t stop there: Peregrine supports end-to-end criminal justice workflows — from identifying a problem and its biggest contributing factors to building and working prosecutable cases — without eating up precious resources.

Lay the foundation for successful focused deterrence in your community. Contact our team to schedule a demo.