Experience 4 restaurants in the Crossorads district of Kansas City, progressive diner style on Tuesday, April 10. 2012!
KCPT Night on the Town – Crossroads District
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Kansas City Week in Review
Kansas City Week in Review is your local source and connection to the newmakers and newsanalysts in our community.
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Kick It Up A Notch: Sporting KC’s Kei Kamara
A year ago, most of us were still trying to wrap our heads around the terms “Sporting Kansas City” and “LiveStrong Sporting Park.” They were unfamiliar, and some would say even bizarre phrases, describing our re-named professional soccer team and its, then, still un-built new stadium.
All the changes seem to have worked. Rave reviews poured in for the new venue in KCK. The team made the playoffs. Attendance went up 84 percent. Merchandise sales went up 475 percent. And team TV ratings went up more than 100 percent. How’s that for a turnaround?
This week, we’re joined by one of the team’s top star’s and biggest goal scorers, Kei Kamara.
Here is a look a look at his journey from Sierra Leone to Kansas City and his return to play for Africa’s national team:
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Aim4Peace: The KC Interrupters
To interrupt violence in Kansas City, Aim4Peace believes that you must have your doctorate in “Streetology.” This means that with training and a research-based approach, the best people to intervene and prevent violent crime are those who were once the perpetrators.
This method of violence prevention is profiled in the Frontline documentary The Interrupters, which aired on KCPT on February 14, 2012. The film follows the courageous work of the CeaseFire violence prevention project, which treats the violence plaguing some of Chicago’s roughest neighborhoods like an infectious disease. The Interrupters illustrates that much like a major health epidemic, shootings and retaliatory violence can spread through a community infectiously.
In many US cities, violence is considered a major public health issue for urban areas where homicide is a leading cause of death and portions of the population even expect that they will die as a result of violent crime.
CeaseFire uses the following three-pronged approach, which is akin to public health methods of controlling diseases:
- Identification & detection
- Interruption, Intervention, & risk reduction
- Changing behavior and norms
Using this public health approach, CeaseFire has effectively been able to reduce the number of homicides and shootings in several of Chicago’s roughest neighborhoods. Kansas City’s Aim4Peace, which was founded in 2008, uses the CeaseFire model and focuses its efforts on the approximately 30 square-mile area of the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department’s East Patrol. For the past 20 years the East Patrol has had the highest number of violent crimes, drive-by shootings and homicides in the city. Currently Aim4Peace has five mediators, who work directly to interrupt violence. Last November, Aim4Peace lost one of their own when, according to an article in the Kansas City Star, Aim4Peace mediator Terrance Jackson was gunned down while working.
Aside from Chicago and Kansas City, the only other city with a violence prevention group using the CeaseFire approach is Safe Streets project in Baltimore.
Learn more about Aim4Peace, volunteer opportunities and sign a commitment to peace on their website.
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- Aim4Peace mediator Jamal Shakur at a street corner preparing to pass out Aim4Peace brochures and giveaway items.
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- Violence Prevention Supervisor Rashid Junaid reviews a map of one of the “zones” Aim4Peace targets for violence prevention.
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- Violence Prevention Supervisor Rashid Junaid and two Street Intervention Workers Salahuddin- Abdul-Waali and Terrance Jackson head out of the Aim4Peace offices to get ready to go work in the “dirty thirties” neighborhood area. Jackson was killed in November 2011 while on duty.
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- Aim4Peace mediator Terrance Jackson near a police crime scene area. Jackson was killed in November of 2011 while on duty.
