Columbia leaders walked downtown over the weekend to see the community’s reaction after a deadly shooting, with Boone County Prosecutor Roger Johnson noting extra police presence has had an impact.
“We convened and met and walked around downtown with some of the business leaders and talked to some business owners who were out this particular weekend,” said Johnson. “The crowds cleared out really fairly quickly, I’d say by about 1:45 or even 1:30. The downtown was mostly cleared out of people who had gone out to the bars.”
Johnson told Missourinet about how local and federal agencies are working together to confront violent crime in the city.
“And we would meet and share intelligence and discuss people that were presenting a public safety risk,” said Johnson. “So, our goal was to try to know about and focus our attention on the people that were causing a lot of problems in the Community. We know that a small group of people tend to cause a lot of the problems.”
Johnson told Missourinet about the crime in Columbia and the mental health challenges that often come with it.
“And we’ve worked together with our local law enforcement agencies to try to help us locate people that are maybe evading our process servers,” said Johnson. “So that’s something we’ve been working on, on the mental health realm that’s, I think, an even more complicated issue.”
Johnson said while the process has improved, it can still take up to six months for the Department of Mental Health to complete an evaluation.
Copyright © 2025 · Missourinet