Council member addresses recent city crime
Kolin Mattingly believes the crime has come too close for him to remain silent.
Columbia police investigated three robberies on November 9 in the city’s northeast side, all within 30 minutes of each other. One of them, Mattingly said, happened on the same street his one-year-old son goes to preschool. The Columbia resident said he sometimes even feels safer at work than at home. Mattingly works for the Missouri Department of Corrections.
“I only ask that the issue of violent crime remain a top priority for the city council,” Mattingly said Monday night.
He didn’t bring up the numerous gun crimes currently under investigation from Thursday to Sunday. At least four people were shot in that span, two of them dying from their wounds. CPD and the Boone County Sheriff’s Department are both searching for the shooters involved in different Sunday night incidents at Vandiver Drive and Providence Road, and just outside Columbia on Pinehurst Lane.
Officers arrested Monique Parra Sunday for the shooting death of a man in the 1800 block of Kathy Drive. A shooter is still on the loose in the death of Gregory Moore last Thursday inside his central Columbia motel room.
Second Ward Councilman Michael Trapp said people in town should not be fearful that the weekend marks a “crime wave” coming through the area. Homicides, he said, are “difficult to predict, impossible to prevent” crimes that are often rare in Columbia. The homicide on Kathy Drive was the city’s fifth criminal homicide of the year, and seventh since 2014. He said people not involved in a life of crime, or closely associated with serial criminals, had little to worry about in becoming a victim.
“We align our forces with things that are most serious that cause people the most concern, and that are the most dangerous to life and safety,” Trapp told ABC 17 News.
Of the seven criminal homicides since Nov. 2014, CPD has made an arrest in three of them. Along with Parra, Tyrone James, Jr. faces a murder charge for the July killing of Marquez Reed. Stone Midgyett pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter last year for the 2015 death of Deante Smith – that year’s only criminal homicide.
Suspects involved in the deaths of Moore, Rickie Dunn, Gabrielle Rhodes and Ricky Randolph, Jr. all remain at large.
Trapp claims Columbia’s arrest rate for violent crime is better than the national average, but could not remember what that rate was. He credited other services, like drug rehabilitation and the violence “interruption” work of Glenn Cobbins, Sr. and Judy Hubbard, as a preventive measure against violent crime.
“We don’t know how many incidents we’ve prevented with those kinds of services, so that’s why we have a full service city, to engage with people at all levels and not just with law enforcement,” Trapp said.
