Investigating Every Fentanyl Overdose Linked To Decrease In Violent Crime, Kansas PD Stats Show
Karl Oakman remembers how crack cocaine was policed decades ago, and he refuses to allow the missteps that still echo to be repeated with the latest drug epidemic. “We understood early that we’re going to do fentanyl the right way, where we did crack the wrong way,” said Oakman, who was with the Kansas City Police Department in the 1990s during the height of the crack cocaine crisis and since June 2021 has been the Kansas City, Kansas, police chief. With crack, he told The Star, “It was ‘Put everyone in jail. You’re in possession, you’re using it, we don’t care, you’re going to jail.’” Today, it’s fentanyl that has flooded the streets, killing more than 850 people in the nine-county Kansas City area since 2018, The Star found. And fighting the drug “the right way” — sending a police and prosecution team to the scene of every overdose death, focusing on the dealers and suppliers and “using the users” to get to them — has prompted results KCK police weren’t necessarily expecting. The chief’s initiative officially launched in January 2022 and since then, police say, violent crime has significantly dropped with some rates being “historical lows.” “We relate a lot of that to the way that we’re attacking fentanyl,” said Oakman, who spoke to The Star at length along with narcotics unit Capt. John Diaz.
Kansas City Star
|