How to look up a Kansas City animal control case

Kansas City used to publish how long animal control took to reach you. The dataset is still there, on the city’s open data portal, under the plain name Animal Control Median Response Time. It holds sixty-six monthly figures. The first is May 2012. The last is November 2017, at 16.99 minutes, and its rows have not been touched since December 11, 2017.

The cases themselves are still published. Four different files hold them, three are frozen, and between them they leave 565 days of Kansas City animal control unpublished entirely. The one file that is live carries its timestamps on two different clocks, which means the number the city stopped reporting in 2017 cannot be reconstructed from it by anyone.

The thirty-second version

• The current file is sxcw-gd9k, Animal Services (Post-June 8, 2025), at data.kcmo.org. Free, no account, no records request. 15,255 cases, created July 19, 2025 through June 22, 2026, pulled by The Kansas City Stare on September 18, 2026.
• It was last refreshed on June 22, 2026 — 88 days before that pull, and the same day as its newest case.
• Type the case number in capitals. The filter is case-sensitive and a lowercase case number returns an empty list, not an error.
• Older cases are in different files. 4mkm-gagx for December 2020 to December 2023; xbnb-pqk8 for 2007 to 2021.
• Nothing published covers January 1, 2024 to July 18, 2025.
• Do not try to compute how long the city took to answer a call. The section below explains why the obvious calculation produces a clean, plausible, wrong number.

Which file, and when

There are six animal entries on the portal. One, jtss-8fu9, is a narrative page rather than data and returns an error to any query. One is the frozen response-time measure. The other four are cases, and nothing on the portal tells a resident which to open.

The hole in the middle runs 565 days, a little over eighteen months. The 4mkm-gagx file is the KC Pet Project era; its own description says it begins December 1, 2020, when KC Pet Project began receiving animal services requests directly, and that it will be updated weekly. Its last case is dated December 31, 2023.

The current file’s title names June 8, 2025, the day its description says animal control returned from KC Pet Project to the City. Its earliest case was created 41 days after that, on July 19, 2025. What happened in those 41 days is not something this reporting establishes. The file simply does not carry them.

Looking up a case

One unauthenticated request. Capitals matter:

# Look up one animal control case by number
curl -s 'https://data.kcmo.org/resource/sxcw-gd9k.json?case_number=NAS-2026-07972'

That returns the case. The same query with nas-2026-07972 returns []. Not an error, not a warning — an empty list, which reads exactly like a case that does not exist. If you are not sure of the capitalization, force it:

# The same lookup when you are unsure of the case number
curl -s "https://data.kcmo.org/resource/sxcw-gd9k.json?\$where=upper(case_number)%20like%20'%25NAS-2026-07972%25'"

The same file runs the opposite convention one column over. Addresses are stored in mixed case. Searching the address field for a street name in capitals returns nothing; the same name capitalized normally returns matches. The Kansas City Stare tested both on September 18, 2026 against a major Kansas City street: 116 cases in mixed case, zero in capitals. One column in this file wants capitals and another refuses them, and neither tells you which.

Case numbers run NAS-YYYY-NNNNN. Each row carries the status, the county, the inspection level, and the timestamps discussed below. Of the 15,255 cases, 14,504 (95.1 percent) are marked Complete, 448 are closed as duplicates, 123 canceled, and 92 still pending.

What people call about

By county: Jackson 12,576, Clay 2,045, Platte 619, Cass 3, and twelve rows with none recorded.

The catch: two clocks in one file

The file carries four timestamps per case — when it was created, when it was assigned, when the inspector actually arrived, and when it closed. The obvious thing to do with them is subtract the first from the third and find out how long Kansas City takes to show up.

Do that and you get a median of 13.3 hours. It is a clean number, it is well formed, and it is wrong.

Here is what breaks it. On 9,382 of the 14,547 cases that carry both — 64.5 percent — the case is recorded as assigned before it was created. Half the arrival times, 6,968 of 13,803, land before their own case existed. Another 1,257 cases are assigned after they were closed.

Those are not scattered errors. They cluster: of the backwards assignment gaps, 3,779 are almost exactly five hours and 1,847 are almost exactly six. Five and six hours are the offsets between Kansas City’s local time and UTC in summer and winter. The creation timestamp is being written on a different clock from the rest of the row.

Two more reads say the same thing. Sorted by hour of day, the assignment timestamps look like a working day: they peak at noon and every hour from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. carries under one percent of the volume. The creation timestamps peak at 4 p.m. and go quiet only at 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. — the same working day, displaced. The two operational timestamps then agree with each other where neither agrees with creation: arrival follows assignment correctly on 94.3 percent of cases.

Shifting the creation column five hours does not rescue it either. It cuts the impossible cases from 64.5 percent to 29.7 percent and leaves nearly a third still backwards. Elapsed time from the moment a resident called cannot be measured from this file. Which is the same number the city stopped publishing in November 2017.

The one wait that can be measured

Assignment and arrival share a clock, so the gap between them is real. It is not how long you wait. It is what happens after the call has been taken and routed: dispatch to on scene.

Of the 15,255 cases, 13,496 carry both timestamps; 768 of those record arrival before assignment and are dropped, leaving 12,728 usable measurements. Measured by The Kansas City Stare on September 18, 2026:

Triage is visible in it, and works the way it should. On the 595 cases logged as an emergency animal inspection the median is 37.6 minutes; on the 5,041 logged Level 1, 81.7 minutes; on the 6,666 logged Level 2, 141.9 minutes. By subject, a report of an animal biting a person ran to a median of 51.1 minutes and a wildlife call 51.5, against 116.2 for a stray at large and 145.1 for cruelty or neglect.

This figure is not comparable to the city’s old one. The 16.99 minutes last published in November 2017 was measured from the complaint. The 107 minutes above starts after the complaint has already been taken and assigned. Anyone setting the two side by side is comparing two different things, and the file that would let you convert between them is the one with two clocks in it.

Checking us

Everything above is one file and its metadata:

# Count every case in the file
curl -s 'https://data.kcmo.org/resource/sxcw-gd9k.json?$select=count(1)'

Returns [{"count_1":"15255"}]. Parse that as JSON. Stripping the non-digits out of it to get the number yields 115255, because the 1 in the key count_1 survives the strip — a trap that has already produced a page of confident wrong counts in this newsroom once.

# Ask the portal when the response-time file stopped
curl -s 'https://data.kcmo.org/api/views/rpwu-u3bj.json' \
  | python3 -c 'import json,sys,datetime; m=json.load(sys.stdin); \
      print(m["name"], "| rows last updated", datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp(m["rowsUpdatedAt"]))'

Returns Animal Control Median Response Time | rows last updated 2017-12-11 17:33:38.

One thing to know before republishing anything out of the case file: its DESCRIPTION column is free text typed by a dispatcher and routinely carries a street address and caller detail. It is a column to count, not to quote. The Stare’s own archived copy of this file drops the address column, the assigned officer, and the dispatcher for that reason.

What this does not tell you

It does not tell you how long Kansas City takes to answer an animal call, because no published file supports that number and the city stopped reporting it nine years ago. It does not explain the 565-day gap, or the 41 days between the date in the current file’s title and the first case in it. It does not say whether the case you are looking for exists, only which file it would be in. All of it is a measurement of a file that stopped moving on June 22, 2026. Pull the current one before you rely on any figure here.