Criminal cases soar
County ‘a corridor for drug trafficking’
Staff Writer
County Attorney Michelle Brown is seeing an unprecedented surge in criminal filings and drug-related crime, with filings running at double last year’s pace.
Brown told county commissioners Monday that a bit more than halfway through the year, she had 129 new criminal cases — 74 filed since January and 55 pending filing. In all of 2025 there were just 138 cases. In 2024, there were 128 cases. In 2023, there were 128.
“I can’t tell you the exact reason,” she said. “I’m sure it’s a number of factors. We’re on track to double our numbers.”
The total of all cases, including traffic and other classes of violations, on the docket for May 1 to July 29 is 409. She termed that number “kind of unthinkable for a county this size.”
Sixty percent of that total, she said, are felonies.
“I can’t tell you that even reflects an increase in crime,” she said. “I can only tell you it increases the number of pieces of paper that my staff has to process.”
She described the county as a corridor for drug trafficking, particularly meth.
Her midyear, moment-in-time crime tally was part of a budget presentation to justify a new full-time hire.
Brown said she was not asking for a 2027 budget increase because in her 2026 budget of $376,000 she had a surplus. Her main new asks within that amount are for a staff member and more space.
“We need another full-time person because of the uptick in all of these cases that, unfortunately, we have to file,” Brown said.
Each of the 409 cases open involves preparations for motions, filings, and journal entries — “a daunting task,” she said.
She painted a picture of an urgent, mounting workload in a tight space with files lining halls and shared staff phones — one of which has a 30-foot cord from a desk to a phone jack in another room.
“The other thing we need is space,” she said. “I have four people — three full-time people and a part-time person — crammed in 700 square feet.”
Commissioners discussed possibly moving emergency medical services out of the courthouse satellite office to give more space to the prosecutor.
Her presentation Monday coincided with release of Kansas Bureau of Investigation data showing crime in Marion County had declined significantly last year.
Brown’s statistics are for filed cases only. The KBI statistics are for reported crimes and do not include drug crimes.
The KBI report, Brown said, “surprises me because I don’t see it. I don’t see a decrease in crime. But, of course, I’ve only been here for a year and a half. So I can’t speak to what it was like before that.”
She suggested there might be inconsistencies in reporting crime statistics to the KBI. She noted that Peabody has had three police chief turnovers in three years and now has only one police officer.
“I don’t know if he even has time to compile statistics,” she said.
In fact, KBI data notes that only three months of statistics were provided for Peabody.
The KBI report indicates that countywide, police and sheriff’s deputies reported just 7.8 crimes per 1,000 residents in 2025, down 21% from 9.9 crimes per 1,000 residents in 2024.
The biggest decrease was in Hillsboro. For 2024, it had the highest crime rate in the county, 18.3. For 2025, it had among the lowest rates, just 6.8, down 62.8%.
The reverse was true in Marion, which had the lowest crime rate in 2024 but the highest in 2025, rising 42.9% from 6.3 in 2024 to 9.0 in 2025.
Peabody technically had the lowest crime rate in the county, 3.3 per 1,000 residents in 2025, but Peabody data for three-fourths of the year were missing.
The crime rate in areas policed by the sheriff’s department declined 11.1% from 9.9 to 8.8.
Overall, Marion County’s crime rate was considerably below the crime rate for the entire state and rates for all but the two smallest neighboring counties:
County Rate
Saline 25.2
Statewide 22.5
Harvey 14.1
McPherson 12.0
Butler 11.8
Dickinson 8.9
Marion 7.8
Chase 4.4
Morris 3.6
In comparison, the crime rate in Sedgwick County was 47.6.
Countywide in 2024, law enforcement officers reported 21 violent crimes, including one rape and 20 cases of aggravated assault or aggravated battery.
A total of 61 property crimes were reported, including 18 burglaries, 38 thefts, and 5 vehicle thefts.
Data reported in annual KBI crime statistics has significant limitations, however.
Not only are drug crimes not included. KBI lists only reported crimes. Crimes not reported — either by victims or by police — are not included. Nor do crimes necessarily correlate to criminal prosecutions.
Moreover, because numbers of crimes in smaller jurisdictions are small, trends and comparisons between jurisdictions can be statistically insignificant.
Most sophisticated tests of statistical significance, for example, indicate that a decline from 110 crimes in 2024 to 82 crimes in 2025 was not statistically significant despite seeming to be a 25.5% decrease.