Severed ties between Missouri police department, community push leaders to incite change

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Much is weighing on the Kansas City Police Department — a high number of homicides and questionable rates of solving serious crimes, a poor ranking in a national study on discrimination and police violence, and troubled relations with Black and Hispanic residents.

There have been allegations of racism in the department, a break with once-allied pastors over police killings, and calls for the police chief's resignation and a U.S. Justice Department probe of the KCPD.

Many American cities have already changed their approach to policing or are looking to remake it after the May 2020 death of George Floyd, filmed dying under the knee of white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, as well as high-profile shootings by police, such as the death of Breonna Taylor of Louisville.

States or cities quickly banned chokeholds and no-knock warrants. Big cities like Chicago — as well as smaller ones like Salina, Kansas — have set up civilian boards to review police use-of-force incidents. Still others have slashed police budgets or redirected funds to keep armed officers from responding to calls that might be better handled by health or social workers.

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Some cities and states, such as Iowa, Oklahoma and Florida, have gone the other way, backing a more pro-police approach, banning some protests and effectively allowing drivers to hit demonstrators without punishment while making it illegal for protesters in some circumstances to block traffic.

Kansas City instituted new body-camera rules, the Jackson County Prosecutor's Office launched a site for police-misconduct complaints, and, after police used tear gas and other nonlethal weapons to disperse protests after Floyd's killing, the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners restricted use of such weapons at demonstrations.

But this heartland city of 500,000 faces an impediment to change that's unique among medium and big police departments: It falls under strict state control.

Mayor Quinton Lucas says he knows the troubles in the city, but he is largely powerless to make high-level moves to shift the department’s culture, spending or personnel deployment.

Lucas, in the middle of a four-year term, has no authority to hire or fire the police chief, little say on the five-member police governing board, and almost no power to implement what some here say are his too-progressive ideas that amount to “defunding the police.”

That could change. A lawsuit has been filed in a tug of war over control of the police department between the heavily Democratic city's leaders and the GOP-dominated Missouri state government.

On one side are the police board and the Missouri attorney general, who claim the mayor — a lone voice on the police board — and the City Council are trying to illegally withhold funding from the KCPD budget.

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On the other are Lucas, the City Council, the Jackson County Prosecutor's Office and activists like Gwendolyn Grant of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City. They argue that the absence of local control hinders efforts to beat back homicides, better solve crimes and weed out rogue officers.

"We provide some $270-plus million a year to that police department, but they answer to no one," said Grant, who filed a motion to intervene in the lawsuit as a resident, not president and CEO of the organization. "It's 21st century colonialism to have the state government and state representatives have more power about what's happening in our city."

Unique structure a product of history, politics

Until 2013, St. Louis operated under the same rules, but voters shook the department loose from state rule. The only other American city in a similar position is Baltimore, which is partially under the authority of Maryland, but not nearly to the extent seen in Kansas City.

“That is clearly a unique wrinkle,” said Ken Novak, criminal justice professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Lucas, Grant, prosecutors and activists have called for a greater shift of funding away from armed officers and into programs to bridge the gap with minority communities.

"I intervened in that lawsuit on behalf of the 200,000 African Americans in Kansas City," Grant said, alleging that the setup violates tax laws, specifically the Missouri Constitution's Hancock Amendment, and does not afford federal guarantees of equal protection under the law for the city's Black residents.

The motion has since been denied, but Grant is considering other court action to keep her arguments alive.

So why is Kansas City in this position?

History plays a role. The state's domination of the city dates to 1874. State control was interrupted only by the corruption-filled era of Mayor Tom Pendergast in the 1930s. Because of the corruption, the state again took control in 1939.

It's been that way ever since.

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Politics also plays a large role, pitting a red state versus a blue city and mayor and leading to the politicization of the term "defunding police," according to activists, the mayor and criminal justice experts.

The right has broadly panned the idea of shifting resources away from armed officers responding to every 911 call and putting more money into programs to address mental health issues and other social crises, portraying it as an effort by the left to bankrupt or abolish police departments.

Mayor: Problems 'fester' in KC because of no local control.

Part of the battle stems from a decision by the City Council and Lucas to withhold and shift about $42 million from a $273 million budget into programs to strengthen broken ties with minority communities and add ways for social workers and mental health professionals to answer some calls.

"I find it actually very creative," Lucas said of holding back the $42 million. "I think it's been exploited by politicians on the right as defunding just because that's the one-trick pony that I think they're using for any type of policing reform."

State Republican leaders see the move as an attempted power grab by local leaders. Republican Attorney General Eric Schmitt has jumped into the fray, filing a brief that alleges the move is illegal under Missouri's revised state statutes.

Lucas, the only no vote on the police board's decision to sue over the funding shift, defended his push for local authority as returning power to voters.

"Our form of governance means that elections actually don't solve (policing) issues," Lucas said.

In other American cities, problems like crime, police abuse and a sharp imbalance between the city's racial makeup and that of the department don't "fester," he said. Elsewhere, police departments are under local control, and mayors run for office "able to say this will change, that will change or we will enhance community policing," he said.

Many Kansas Citians don't recognize that their police are effectively under state control, Novak said, so the issue doesn't resonate with areas of Missouri's largest city that are not impacted by crime.

"The general flavor that I got from Kansas Citians is, 'It doesn't seem broke. Why would we mess with it?'" Novak said.

Yet Lucas and activists say that Black residents, who make up a third of the city, are not treated fairly or their interests represented. They have repeatedly called for Chief Richard Smith to step down or be fired, but he has the backing of the state and the police board, which can dismiss Smith only for cause.

Smith said last week that he has no plans to step down.

Grant, for her part, pulls few punches.

"The Kansas City Police Department is ineffective. It's incompetent," she said. "The chief, the leadership, we consider to be racist. We have over-policing in minority communities. There's no accountability and no transparency."

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Police violence, clearance rate for critical cases questioned

Exactly how many violent crimes, including homicides, that the department has solved is also up for debate. The police state that the clearance rate is solid, sitting at 73% of last year's 176 murders.

Others are calling that good public relations, but bad math.

According to data from the Urban League and the prosecutor's office, the clearance rate for murders in 2020 was 33% — down from 46% in 2019 — and just 18% for nonfatal shootings.

"If nonfatal shootings are not cleared, then that's fertile ground for an escalation in fatal shootings," Grant said. "Retribution because (victims) feel like they got to take these matters into their own hands."

Another point of contention: how allegations of police violence are handled.

According to the office of Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, the police department turns over a total of 5,000 cases each year, involving all manner of crimes, to the county for prosecution. The referrals come with a statement of facts to support the charges sought for prosecution.

But with allegations of police use of force or violence, including shootings by police, the department doesn't turn over probable cause statements, prosecution sources say.

This has caused a rift between the two agencies, which must work together to rid Kansas City's streets of violence. Baker has called for outside agencies to investigate fatal police encounters in Kansas City, and the Missouri Highway Patrol has filled that role since June 2020. But the police department conducts in-house investigations into use of force in nonfatal encounters.

In a statement, the police department said probable cause statements amount to testimony under oath, and if the department doesn't believe its officers committed a crime, submitting one would amount to perjury.

"Our department investigators submit a PC statement in occurrences they believe a crime has been committed; that has always been our practice," said spokesman Jacob Becchina.

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City seeing rise in homicides, reflecting national trend

Lucas and Grant say winning local control is simply a step toward battling a host of problems here, chief among them being violence. The year started with news that homicides in Kansas City had risen to a record 176 in 2020, compared with 2019’s 151.

The headlines haven't gotten much better for the department since.

In a study by the Police Scorecard rating 500 police departments across the country on police violence and discrimination, the KCPD ranked 495th.

The police department says the data used in the report is flawed.

“As we looked further into the scorecard, some concerns arose," Chief Smith said, adding that department partners who study criminal justice were left with "many questions about completeness, validity, and methods of information gathering, as well as comparison and analysis."

Smith described his department as "constantly looking for ways to innovate and improve."

Kansas City's increase in homicides reflects a national trend. Homicides jumped by roughly 30% nationally during the pandemic, according to some studies, and were up by 25% from 2019 to 2020, according to preliminary FBI data.

The rising toll has drawn in the U.S. Department of Justice. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced strike forces in cities such as Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, the Bay Area/Sacramento and Washington D.C.

While Kansas City was not among the cities, Lucas said on CBS' "Face the Nation" July 25 that he would welcome any federal help in combatting crime here.

'Deepening mistrust' prompts call for federal investigation

However, the city may be getting federal attention from a different angle.

On July 26, Jackson County Prosecutor Baker wrote to Garland backing activists’ calls for an investigation of the KCPD, saying the department “is greatly troubled by deepening mistrust between it and its community."

Baker added that there have been “too many excessive force and deadly force incidents involving minority community members…"

Five officers face charges of excessive force — four of them felonies — but remain, with pay, on the force.

She pointed to the governance of the KCPD as “deeply troubling… The police board and police command can simply ignore the community.”

The relationship is so frayed in many Black neighborhoods that it has devolved into an us-versus-them mentality, Lucas, Grant and activists said.

This broken relationship also plays into the rising homicides and low clearance rates, Novak, Lucas and sources in the prosecutor's office said. People don't trust the police, and they don't want to come forward with information.

Part of the problem, according to Grant, are the personnel stats. Of the roughly 1,250 officers on the KCPD, nearly 77% are white and just 11.7% are Black and 5.4% Hispanic, according to the Urban League. The numbers are even more disproportionate to the city's makeup at higher-rank positions, including in the homicide squad, where there are no Black supervising sergeants, Grant said. The entire command staff in the violent crimes division is white.

For Grant and her supporters — Lucas among them — the answer is local control.

"We believe that the absence of having any control over policies, practices and procedures of a public entity that we fund is absurd," she said. "We need help here."

Follow Eric Ferkenhoff on Twitter: @EricFerk.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY NETWORK: Police control in Kansas City, Mo., draws line between the community