Night-time safety · Kansas City · data through September 2026

Is Kansas City safe at night?

52% of Kansas City's reported incidents happen between 6pm and 6am, and 20% of them fall between midnight and 6am. That share swings from 0% to 75% depending on which neighborhood you are in — which is the whole point: the question worth asking is not whether Kansas City is safe after dark, but where and by which route.

These figures describe when reported incidents happen, not how dangerous a street is. Somewhere with a night-time crowd reports more after dark because more people are there — that is a fact about footfall as much as about risk, and it is why the tables below show the count and the share side by side.

Most reported reported incidents after dark

Neighborhood	6pm–6am	Share	Index
1 CBD Downtown	1,200	56%	9/100
2 Crossroads	970	61%	12/100
3 Old Westport	964	62%	12/100
4 Hanover Place	935	60%	12/100
5 Plaza Westport	897	61%	14/100
6 Quality Hill	882	61%	13/100
7 Southmoreland	770	64%	16/100
8 Hospital Hill	623	57%	16/100
9 North Hyde Park	594	50%	15/100
10 Broadway Gillham	588	51%	16/100
11 Valentine	573	52%	17/100
12 Central Hyde Park	563	57%	18/100
13 Santa Fe	560	45%	14/100
14 Parkview	508	53%	17/100
15 Roanoke	508	56%	19/100
16 Key Coalition	492	48%	16/100
17 Country Club Plaza	488	51%	21/100
18 Longfellow	481	52%	18/100
19 Oak Park Northwest	480	47%	16/100
20 Forgotten Homes	476	52%	18/100
21 Independence Plaza	463	50%	17/100
22 Center City	454	52%	19/100
23 South Indian Mound	435	48%	18/100
24 Linwood Homeowners-Ivanhoe	432	53%	19/100
25 Crown Center	428	60%	22/100

Changes most after dark

Ranked by the share of reported incidents that fall between 6pm and 6am, against a Kansas City median of 51%. A high share is not a high total — a quiet neighborhood whose few incidents mostly happen at night sits near the top — so the count is shown beside it.

Neighborhood	Night share	Incidents	Index
New Mark	75%	90	74/100
Verona Hills	72%	27	90/100
Birmingham Bottoms	71%	8	97/100
Northeast Industrial District	69%	66	78/100
Westside South	68%	260	44/100
Glen Lake	67%	29	87/100
Meadowbrook Heights	67%	89	70/100
Fairway Hills	66%	51	80/100
Southmoreland	64%	1,201	16/100
Westside North	62%	584	27/100
Sunset Hill West	62%	21	90/100
Tanglewood and Regency North	62%	95	67/100

Least night-weighted

Where what gets reported is most concentrated in daylight hours.

Neighborhood	Night share	Incidents
Blue Ridge Farms	0%	5
Swope Park	12%	27
Briarcliff West	26%	22
Minneville	27%	10
Oakwood	29%	22
Brown Estates	31%	53
Shoal Creek	33%	4
Barry Harbour	36%	12

Common questions

Is Kansas City safe to walk at night?

52% of Kansas City's reported incidents happen between 6pm and 6am, and 20% fall in the small hours between midnight and 6am. That is a description of when incidents are reported, not a verdict on the city: the figure varies far more between neighborhoods than it does between cities, from 0% to 75% here. The useful question is which neighborhood and which route, not whether a whole city is safe.

Which neighborhood in Kansas City has the most reported crime at night?

CBD Downtown, with roughly 1,200 reported incidents between 6pm and 6am — 56% of its total. Somewhere busy usually tops this list because more people are out, so read it alongside the daytime picture on its own page rather than on its own.

Which neighborhood changes most after dark?

New Mark is the most night-concentrated in Kansas City: 75% of what is reported there happens between 6pm and 6am, against a Kansas City median of 51%. A high share does not mean a high total — a quiet neighborhood whose few incidents mostly happen at night will rank high here — which is why the table shows the count beside it.

How does SafeRoute use this at night?

The app scores each walking route against the same Kansas City Police data, and can weight it toward the time you are actually walking rather than a flat all-day average. It also shows how much of each route runs on lit streets, and lets you share a walk and check in on arrival.

Methodology

Every incident reported to the KCPD carries an occurrence time, which is bucketed into daytime (6am–6pm), evening (6pm–midnight) and the small hours (midnight–6am), split weekday against weekend, and weighted by severity so violence counts for more than shoplifting. A neighborhood's night share is the weighted proportion falling between 6pm and 6am; its night count is that share applied to its total. The city-wide chart weights each neighborhood by its own volume, so a busy centre is not averaged against a quiet suburb as though they were the same size.

Each incident reported to the Kansas City Police Department is weighted by severity — violence counts for more than shoplifting. For every neighborhood we sum weighted incidents within 1 km of its center, and normalize against citywide rates onto a 0–100 index, higher = safer. Boundaries are the city's own 246 neighborhoods, grouped by the 18 Area Plans the city itself plans against. Two are not scored: KCI & 2nd Creek, which is the airport, and Longview, which wraps Longview Lake and carries almost no recorded incidents anywhere inside it — a page there could only have said “0 incidents, 100/100”, which is missing data dressed as proven safety. Kansas City covers a lot of ground, and several neighborhoods along the Missouri and Blue river bottoms are industrial or largely undeveloped; those pages say so rather than letting an empty count read as a quiet street. Time-of-day charts use KCPD incident timestamps, severity-weighted. Pages regenerate as new data is published.