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

Is Kansas City safe at night?

52% of Kansas City's reported incidents happen between 6pm and 6am, and 19% of them fall between midnight and 6am. That share swings from 0% to 71% 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 incidents after dark

Neighborhood	6pm–6am	Share	Index
1 CBD Downtown	1,386	55%	9/100
2 Old Westport	1,150	61%	12/100
3 Hanover Place	1,125	59%	12/100
4 Crossroads	1,111	61%	12/100
5 Plaza Westport	1,040	60%	14/100
6 Quality Hill	1,026	59%	13/100
7 Southmoreland	903	62%	16/100
8 Hospital Hill	730	57%	16/100
9 North Hyde Park	728	50%	15/100
10 Broadway Gillham	718	51%	16/100
11 Valentine	706	51%	16/100
12 Santa Fe	691	45%	13/100
13 Central Hyde Park	688	56%	17/100
14 Parkview	616	53%	17/100
15 Roanoke	602	55%	19/100
16 Oak Park Northwest	585	47%	16/100
17 Key Coalition	585	46%	16/100
18 Forgotten Homes	583	52%	18/100
19 Longfellow	581	52%	18/100
20 Country Club Plaza	577	51%	21/100
21 Independence Plaza	558	50%	17/100
22 Center City	536	51%	19/100
23 South Indian Mound	527	48%	18/100
24 Paseo West	517	47%	18/100
25 Crown Center	515	59%	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
Verona Hills	71%	41	87/100
Northeast Industrial District	71%	73	78/100
New Mark	67%	108	74/100
Sunset Hill West	66%	27	90/100
Meadowbrook Heights	65%	104	70/100
Westside South	65%	321	43/100
Fairway Hills	65%	68	79/100
Birmingham Bottoms	64%	9	97/100
Harlem	63%	161	62/100
Southmoreland	62%	1,447	16/100
Westside North	62%	697	27/100
Marlborough East	62%	188	53/100

Least night-weighted

Where what gets reported is most concentrated in daylight hours.

Neighborhood	Night share	Incidents
Blue Ridge Farms	0%	5
Swope Park	13%	35
Briarcliff West	30%	24
Shoal Creek	30%	5
Oakwood	32%	25
Brown Estates	33%	61
Barry Harbour	36%	12
Minneville	38%	12

Common questions

Is Kansas City safe to walk at night?

52% of Kansas City's reported incidents happen between 6pm and 6am, and 19% 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 71% 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 1,386 reported incidents between 6pm and 6am — 55% 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?

Verona Hills is the most night-concentrated in Kansas City: 71% 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.

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.