For Immediate Release
March 19, 2021
The Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office released today a new webpage – the Jackson County Criminal Case Dashboard – that allows the public to track in a variety of ways every criminal case submitted to the office.
You can check on cases submitted by police agency, type of criminal charge and by year, to name just a few possible searches.
Here's a link to the dashboard, which was developed by the new Crime Strategies Unit (CSU) in the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office. The dashboard can also be found on the prosecutor's website behind the Statistics button at the top.
The dashboard also allows you to check on the number of cases filed by a police agency, how many of those referrals were filed by our office, as well as the outcome or disposition of cases. No identifying information, such as crime location or defendant or victim names, is being made available.
The new data, which will be updated daily, allows a user to compare 2017 data to current 2021 data.
“We need to closely examine our outcomes and we need to know our shortcomings,” said Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker. “Only then, can we work effectively and do a better job."
Across the nation, more prosecutor’s offices are making such information available to the public. But Baker said she believes the Jackson County Criminal Case Dashboard is among the most comprehensive yet released.
“We are embracing accountability,” Baker said. “This dashboard will allow anyone to critique our work. We hope such input can help us achieve better outcomes.”
Here’s some quick facts that may interest:
- In 2020, 86 homicide cases referred by the Kansas City Police Department were filed, compared to 56 in 2018.
- In 2018, 200 robberies from across Jackson County were filed, compared to 297 robbery cases received.
- In 2019, 496 assaults were filed, while 427 assaults were disposed of in 2019, including 14 that went to trial and 337 in which the defendant pleaded guilty.
The mapping function doesn’t allow pinpointing the specific address of the crime, to protect victims. But it gives the general area of the crimes. In order to protect the identity of defendants and victims, the CSU divides Jackson County into uniform hexes. Next, CSU counts the number of charges per hex by category. Hexes are colored based on the number of charges. The points map is not currently available to the public.
For more information, contact:
Michael Mansur
Director of Communication
Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office
Jean Peters Baker, Prosecutor
Work : (816) 881-3812
Mobile: (816) 674-3954
mmansur@jacksongov.org
http://jacksoncountyprosecutor.com