Firearm-involved crime in Kansas City fell 13% in 2025 — but not evenly

Here's something you don't hear very often about Kansas City: gun crime went down.

In 2025, KCPD logged 8,566 reports involving a firearm — down from 9,862 the year before. That's a 13.1% decline, more than triple the pace of the overall crime drop (which was 4.1%, from 110,029 total reports to 105,503). Murders fell 18.5%. Armed street robberies fell 19.2%. Business robberies dropped by more than a quarter.

These aren't small movements. In a city that's spent years wrestling with its reputation for gun violence, a double-digit decline in firearm-involved incidents is worth paying attention to — even if, as we'll see, the improvement wasn't evenly distributed across the city or across the calendar.

The big picture: a broad retreat in gun violence

The decline wasn't limited to one crime category. Across the board, the offense types most associated with firearms all moved in the same direction — down.

Aggravated assaults (the single largest category of firearm-involved crime) dropped from 7,495 reports to 6,474, a 13.6% decline. Within that, the subset flagged with a firearm fell from 4,775 to 4,128. Murder reports went from 831 to 677. Armed street robberies — the kind that tend to define how safe people feel walking around — fell from 1,771 to 1,431. Business robberies dropped from 1,016 to 754, a 25.8% decline that's particularly notable for the small-business owners who bear the brunt.

The monthly pattern follows a familiar shape: a winter trough, a spring climb, and a summer peak. January and February were the quietest months (602 and 573 reports, respectively). Things escalated through March, hit their highest points in May (879) and July (883), then eased back through the fall. December closed out at 592 — the second-lowest month of the year.

First half versus second half, the split was relatively close: 4,372 firearm reports from January through June, and 4,194 from July through December. But the second-half drop was steeper than the overall numbers suggest. September through December averaged just 625 reports per month, compared to 739 in the March-through-August stretch.

Where firearms show up: the offense breakdown

Not all firearm-involved crime looks the same, and the breakdown matters for understanding what kind of violence Kansas City is actually dealing with.

Nearly half of all firearm reports — 4,128 out of 8,566 — were aggravated assaults. That category alone accounts for more than the next three offense types combined. Armed street robberies were a distant second at 1,153 (with an additional 411 business robberies and 154 residential robberies). Domestic violence aggravated assault with a firearm accounted for 859 reports.

And then there's murder. The 563 murder reports flagged with a firearm represent 83.2% of all 677 murder reports in 2025. Guns remain the dominant instrument of homicide in Kansas City — though even that number fell 22.5% from the 726 firearm-involved murder reports in 2024.

Geography: East Patrol still carries the heaviest burden

The decline in firearm crime was real across most of the city. But the geographic concentration barely budged.

The East Patrol Division logged 2,883 firearm-involved reports in 2025, accounting for 33.7% of the citywide total. That's down from 3,629 in 2024 — a notable 20.6% drop — but EPD's share of the city's firearm problem actually held roughly steady because other divisions also saw declines.

Metro Patrol came in second with 2,254 reports (down from 2,502), followed by Central Patrol at 1,725 (down from 2,065). South Patrol, which covers the city's southern reaches, recorded 1,089. North Patrol, Shoal Creek, and other specialty divisions combined for just 615.

At the beat level, the concentration gets even sharper. Beat 241 — in the East Patrol Division — led the city with 283 firearm reports. Beats 314, 234, 543, and 332 rounded out the top five, with counts ranging from 240 to 254. Seven of the top ten beats for firearm crime are in the East or Metro divisions.

This is the pattern that persists even when the topline numbers improve: the same neighborhoods bear a disproportionate share of gun violence, year after year.

The enforcement signal: felon-in-possession cases surged

One number moved sharply in the opposite direction from the overall trend, and it's worth pausing on.

Reports for "Felon/Prohibited Person in Possession of a Firearm/Ammunition/Body Armor" — the legal charge for someone who isn't allowed to have a gun being caught with one — jumped from 338 in 2024 to 514 in 2025. That's a 52.1% increase.

City weapons offenses stayed essentially flat (533 to 535). But the felon-in-possession spike suggests that enforcement activity around illegal firearms may have intensified. Whether that enforcement contributed to the broader decline in gun crime is a question this data can't answer on its own — correlation isn't causation, and there are dozens of other variables in play, from policing strategy to economic conditions to seasonal weather patterns.

But it's a notable data point. More people were caught with guns they weren't supposed to have, and fewer people were shot. Make of that what you will.

What the data can't tell us yet

• Why the decline happened. The dataset records incidents, not causes. We can see that firearm crime dropped, but we can't attribute it to any specific policy, enforcement strategy, or external factor from this data alone.
• Whether clearance rates improved. These are reports filed, not cases solved. A decline in reports with a flat or falling clearance rate would tell a very different story than a decline paired with more arrests and prosecutions.
• Victim and community context. The data includes basic demographics (age, race, sex) but doesn't capture the lived experience of neighborhoods where gun violence concentrates. A 20% decline in East Patrol still means 2,883 families, blocks, and intersections touched by a firearm incident.
• How 2025 compares to pre-pandemic years. The 2024 dataset is available for comparison, but we don't have a convenient multi-year series in this same format to assess whether 2025 represents a return to some earlier baseline or is still elevated.
• What happened to the people involved. The data captures involvement types (victim, suspect) but not outcomes — no hospital records, no court dispositions, no long-term follow-up.

What to watch next

1. Whether the Q4 slowdown in murders holds into 2026. Murder reports plunged in the final quarter of 2025 — just 12 in October, 18 in November, and 35 in December. If that pattern holds through the winter, it could signal a more durable shift. If it bounces back, the annual number might be a misleading average.
2. Whether felon-in-possession enforcement stays elevated. A 52% increase is dramatic. If KCPD sustains that level of prohibited-person enforcement, it'll be worth tracking whether the gun violence numbers continue to respond.
3. Beat-level trends over time. Beat 241 led the city in 2025. Does it again in the first half of 2026? Or does the concentration shift? Beat-level persistence is one of the clearest signals of structural, place-based drivers of violence.
4. The gap between East Patrol and the rest of the city. EPD's share of firearm crime has been stubbornly consistent. A meaningful improvement in citywide gun violence would need to include a narrowing of that geographic gap — not just across-the-board declines that leave the proportions unchanged.

Methods and sources

• Firearm-involved crime is defined as any report where firearmusedflag = true in the 2025 dataset or fire_arm_used_flag = true in the 2024 dataset.
• Murder report counts include all records classified under the "Murder" offense field. These are KCPD incident reports, not confirmed homicides — a single event may generate multiple reports (one per involved person).
• Year-over-year comparisons use full calendar year 2024 (110,029 total reports) vs. full calendar year 2025 (105,503 total reports).
• Police division abbreviations: EPD = East Patrol Division, MPD = Metro Patrol Division, CPD = Central Patrol Division, SPD = South Patrol Division, NPD = North Patrol Division, SCP = Shoal Creek Patrol.
• Beat numbers correspond to KCPD patrol beats. Beat boundaries are not published in this dataset.
• Source: KCPD Crime Data 2025, KCPD Crime Data 2024
• Processed file: data/processed/kcmo-crime-firearm-decline-2025.json