Crime monitor

A heuristic keyword read of headlines (shooting, homicide, stabbing, armed robbery, assault, and the like) — fatal crashes, fires, and storms are excluded. Measures how much of the incoming wire is violent crime, and which outlets and hours drive it. The classifier is deliberately simple; eyeball the recent list to sanity-check it.

This counts coverage, not crime. The official denominator is KCPD data (NIBRS, data.kcmo.org); charged cases live in the Crime Index and the bench that hears them in Judiciary. A gap between this page and those is the story, not an error.

The outlets above are the public river only. The internal lane (KV social) carries the ones the river cannot: The Kansas City Star and the Business Journal, routed around their bot walls via Bluesky and nitter, plus the Google News query feeds and r/kansascity. The Star is the metro's largest crime desk, so a source ranking that omits it is not a ranking of KC crime coverage.

These numbers are a live snapshot of the current fetch, not seven ledger days. The lane has no archive — nothing carries forward, nothing is appended to the ledger — so it cannot be added to the counts above and is never comparable to them. Read it as who is talking about this right now.

This is the one control that changes what every reader sees on the homepage wire. It is an editorial decision, not just a setting. Nothing is deleted — the permanent ledger keeps every headline; this only shapes the live public view. Default is off.