Kansas City Gun Experiment

The Kansas City Gun Experiment is based on the hypothesis that gun seizures and gun crime are inversely related. In other words, as gun seizures increase, gun crime decreases. To test this hypothesis the Kansas City (Mo.) Police Department directed extra patrol attention on gun crime "hot spots" in a target beat for 29 weeks during 1992-93 (July 7 to Jan. 27). The officers involved in the experiment worked overtime to concentrate solely on gun detection through proactive patrol and were not required to respond to calls for service. Specific techniques employed by officers to find guns varied and included Terry v. Ohio safety frisks associated with car stops for traffic violations. The strategy was designed to identify illegal weapon owners and to serve high-risk youths.

The goal of this program was to reduce gun crime in Kansas City.

The University of Maryland implemented a pretest-posttest, quasi-experimental design to evaluate the strategy. The major findings from the evaluation include
- Gun seizures by police in the target area increased by more than 65 percent.
- Gun crimes declined in the target area by 49 percent.
- Neither gun crimes nor guns seized changed significantly in the comparison beat.
- There was no measurable displacement of gun crimes in surrounding beats.
- Homicides showed a statistically significant reduction in the targeted area but not in the comparison area.
- Only gun crimes were affected by the directed patrols, with no changes in the number of calls for service or in the total number of violent or nonviolent crime reports.
- Crimes involving firearms gradually increased again for 5 months upon program completion, but after the program resumed in July 1993, gun crimes declined in the target area while they rose in the comparison area.