Defund police? Here’s how much Kansas City area spends as debate rages across U.S.
Erase the thin blue line.
Dissolve local police forces and create something new to enforce the laws and help people in a more humane, cost-effective and less violent way. That’s the demand from some across the country in the wake of the Memorial Day police killing of George Floyd.
The Minneapolis City Council plans on doing just that. The death of Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, not only sparked worldwide protests of police brutality, but also rekindled a movement that’s been smoldering since racial unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, six years ago stirred calls for radical reform of law enforcement.
Justice Horn, a Kansas City protest organizer, said much of the Kansas City Police Department’s funding could be used to help fix other disparities. It could be used, he hopes, for communities to better themselves.
“If education is better, if safety is better, if people are healthy,” Horn said, “then hopefully we don’t need to police those areas anymore.”
Minneapolis is so far that rare example of a community taking activists’ calls to “defund the police” and applying the slogan quite literally. But for others, there’s resistance to throwing out the existing system entirely and starting all over.
Defund the police?
“What does it mean? Who the hell knows,” a New York Daily News editorial asked and answered last week.
The president of the police union in Kansas City is not sure he knows, either, but thinks he has a good guess what would happen if there were a whole lot fewer cops on the street.
“Defunding police departments will only get people killed,” said Brad Lemon, Fraternal Order of Police Local 99 president.
Still others worry that replacing professional police forces with social workers and community-based peace keepers would only lead to dead social workers and vigilantism of the kind that killed African Americans like Trayvon Martin eight years ago in Florida and Ahmaud Arbery this past February in Georgia.
No one in a position of power is advocating anything so drastic as to dismantle the Kansas City Police Department or any of its suburban counterparts.
Even many leaders of the Black Lives Matter protests, now finishing out their third week, aren’t in favor of replacing police departments altogether.
“I don’t think we are pushing for defunding the police,” said Henry Service, an attorney who helped organize the protests in Kansas City. “I think you need some police. What would not having a traditional department look like? It would probably look like a substitution for a police force.”
Still, many policy makers and community activists here and across the nation do favor reforms that address some of the aims of the “defund police” movement, short of zeroing out police budgets and handing the money over to social service agencies and neighborhood watch committees.
On Monday, House and Senate Democrats introduced the Justice in Policing Act of 2020, which among other things would ban chokeholds, set up a national database to track police misconduct and make cops more liable to pay damages in civil suits. It also would make it easier to prosecute police for misconduct by changing the threshold from “willful” disregard to “knowingly or with reckless disregard.”
At the local level, there’s a growing willingness to re-evaluate how police and sheriff departments perform and see if there might be smarter ways to spend some of the billions of tax dollars that the nation’s cities and counties spend on law enforcement each year.
“I do not support the defunding of police departments,” Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas told The Star. But he added that “I absolutely agree that we need to re-imagine how we do police, how we do community contact and relations between the police department and the citizens of Kansas City. Particularly the black community, the brown community, etc.”
Across the state line in Kansas City, Kansas, Unified Government Mayor David Alvey created a task force to gather ideas from his community on how to improve police-community relations.
When asked if subsequent discussions might result in the creation of a “non-paramilitary based” public safety agency instead of the current police force, he said: “I don’t think there is any topic that we will not address.”
Two thirds of Americans oppose defunding police departments, according to a Yahoo! You Gov poll conducted during the week after Floyd’s killing. Whites overwhelmingly so. But even among Blacks and Hispanics, who see police less like protectors than as an occupying force, more oppose defunding police than support it. Neither camp has a majority because so many are in the middle.
Yet that same survey showed there was a recognition that change is needed. Two thirds of respondents favored banning neck restraints like the kind that led to Floyd’s death after former police officer Derek Chauvin crushed his knee into Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds.
More than four out of five supported outfitting all officers with body cameras, adding early warning systems to identify problem officers and more training for police on how to de-escalate conflicts.
What that poll didn’t ask is whether some of the responsibilities that now fall to armed police would better be assigned to social workers, such as answering calls for help for people with mental health issues who are in crisis.
On Friday, San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced that police officers will no longer answer calls for help on noncriminal matters involving mental health, the homeless, school discipline and neighbor disputes. Instead, trained, unarmed professionals will respond.
Policies like that could reduce the potential for deadly encounters with cops, said Sheila Albers, whose suicidal 17-year-old son, John, was shot to death by an Overland Park police officer two years ago as he slowly backed out of the driveway in the family minivan.
Even though he was in no danger of being hit by the vehicle, the officer fired his gun 13 times.
“I am absolutely not in favor of dismantling police departments and agree that would create chaos and a lack of law and order in our society,” Albers said. “But we are in a place where we need radical, systemic changes in policing and law enforcement.”
Where the money goes
The four largest cities in the metro area will spend over $400 million on law enforcement this year. That doesn’t count the millions spent on courts, prosecutors and jails. Just the men and women in blue.
Naturally, Kansas City, Missouri, spends the most, having the largest population and the most law enforcement needs. No single division within city government gets more financial support than the police department.
The KCPD is budgeted to get $273 million this fiscal year, which amounts to 16 percent of the city’s $1.7 billion budget. That works out to about $554 for each of the estimated 492,000 people who were living within the city limits at last count.
That’s more than twice the per capita amount that suburban Overland Park spends on its police department and four times more than the citizens of Omaha, Nebraska, pay for police protection in a city whose population is only slightly less than Kansas City’s.
As with any police department or private business, for that matter, most of the KCPD’s budget goes to pay the salaries and benefits of its personnel, roughly 1,400 sworn officers and 600 civilian workers.
The fire department is second with 1,300 employees, followed by the water department.
Just under a quarter of the police budget goes toward paying the health insurance and pension obligations the city owes to employees and retirees.
From a program standpoint, about $100 million supports the patrol bureau, which includes all those cops you see driving down the streets responding to calls for service and enforcing traffic laws.
About $41 million underwrites investigations, of which just under a third is aimed at vice and narcotics crimes, another third to investigate violent crimes and the rest to cover other investigations and underwrite the cost of the crime lab.
Large amounts of the budget go for support services, like vehicle maintenance and the computer network.
Yet even with a quarter-billion-dollar-plus budget, the police department could always use more to keep up with all the demands placed upon it, said Nathan Garrett, one of the four members of the five-member board of police commissioners appointed by the governor that sets department policy. By state statute, the mayor of Kansas City has the fifth vote.
Calls to defund this or any other police department, Garrett considers “quite possibly the most absurd, nonsensical suggestion I’ve heard in my lifetime.”
Rethinking how some of the money is spent, now that’s another thing, said Garrett, an attorney in private practice who before that was a state trooper, FBI agent and federal prosecutor.
Garrett said he is open to discussing shifting money around within the police budget, but even small cuts to the department’s budget would reduce the number of cops on the street. That gives him pause at a time when violent crime in the city — especially murder — is on the rise.
“We’re running from call to call all night long, every night,” he said. “Folks really have no clue of what they’re in for by reducing our force.”
Police Chief Rick Smith has not spoken much publicly about the defunding debate since it started making headlines in recent weeks.
But through a spokesman, the department issued a brief statement this week in response to The Star’s request for comment.
“We are focused on using the resources we have in our budget to make Kansas City as safe as possible,” Sgt. Jacob Becchina said in an email. “There have been a wide variety of reports and potential details regarding defunding of departments across the country, it is something we will monitor as it progresses.”
Lemon, the police union president, is far from neutral on the matter. Cutting funding to the department is simply not an option, as far as he’s concerned. He wrote on Twitter last weekend that, should his department’s budget be slashed, he won’t forgive or forget those behind that effort.
“I will remember that you chose to change laws to make my life less safe,” Lemon wrote. “I will remember that you defunded police departments. I will remember why I chose to find a safe city in which to live. I vote and I support law enforcement. There is no middle ground for me.”
A middle ground?
Some do envision a middle space between extreme budget cuts and the status quo, but there are broad ranges of views occupying that zone.
Gwen Grant, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City, advocates taking $100 million from the Kansas City Police Department’s budget and using it to address some of the underlying societal and economic problems that drive crime rates in inner city neighborhoods and occupy so much of the police department’s attention.
“Increasing access to livable wage jobs, quality education and economic opportunities will be much more effective in reducing crime than flooding communities with more officers,” Grant said. “Chief Smith has tried that. It isn’t working.”
At the opposite pole is freshman City Councilman Kevin O’Neill. He’s open to having a discussion on the police budget, but fears that big cuts to fund social programs would make the city less safe.
The day after one of the protests across from the Country Club Plaza, O’Neill said, five people were shot in the Jazz District.
“Most of the debate we are hearing now is just anti-police,” he said. “Most of the alternatives is let’s defund the police, but that’s not the answer.”
Redirecting large amounts of money spent on keeping people and property safe from thieves and violent criminals to some unspecified community-based organization or private companies is also a non-starter for Lucas.
“If you get rid of police tomorrow, you are going to have the same problems, but with a private security force and I don’t know something else to replace it,” Lucas said.
But like Grant, Lucas believes that addressing income inequality and providing adequate funding to mental health services and other societal needs for the disadvantaged would lead to a decline in police calls.
If the police department were to make some wise financial moves by pooling resources with city government on things like hiring, perhaps some money could be freed up for some of those things, he said.
“I know my discussion of those kinds of things are bureaucratic and not nearly as sexy as defunding the police,” Lucas said. “but I think frankly that if you address those tomorrow you can get those dollars reallocated and spent in a number of areas such as social services that would be more helpful in our community.”
However, unlike almost every other city in America, Kansas City does not have the power to force those kinds of changes directly, as the police department is a state agency independent of the City Council and has been for all but seven of its 146-year history.
The city can, however, have an indirect impact through the budget process by determining how much to fund the department. By law, it must contribute at least 20 percent of the general fund, but chooses to allot close to 40 percent, according to how it calculates things.
That difference gives the city some significant leverage, said Councilwoman Melissa Robinson.
“After we comply with the state regulation,” Robinson said, “we can look at doing some zero-based budgeting to really be able to inspect further expenditure for policing. So I think that might be a strategy we can utilize.”
The leader of the police union, however, says that strategy might not work as well as Robinson and others think it might. Lemon said the way the city calculates its general fund contribution is bogus and thinks a court would agree with him that, instead of 40 percent, the city is barely meeting the state mandate.
If true, that would undercut the city government’s ability to use financial pressure to affect change within the police department.
“I don’t think they have the leeway they think they have,” Lemon said.
Bang for the buck
One argument for cutting police budgets is that communities don’t see all that great of a return on investment.
Kansas City is no exception.
Murders in the city have been going up, not down, and only about half of them lead to an arrest or some other resolution.
Data compiled by the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office found that in 2017 the Kansas City Police Department cleared just 51 percent of all the murder that year, compared to 60 percent nationally.
The clearance rate was 14.4 percent for forcible rapes and 14 percent for robberies, which was half as much or less than the national numbers.
So why not cut the police budget and try something else? some ask.
Marquita Taylor, president of the Santa Fe Area Council, said she appreciates that Kansas City police engage with neighborhood groups like hers. They send representatives known as community interaction officers to meetings, bring gifts and talk to kids.
But often they come with excuses on why they fall short of meeting expectations in addressing the area’s crime problems. Taylor suggests that perhaps that’s because the department spends too much on administration and not enough in trying to protect her community.
“Do we need to defund you to wake you up and say maybe you’re a little top heavy? Why are you getting (40) percent of the budget and you’re still saying that you don’t have enough money?” she said.
Others question whether the department spends too much on military-style equipment in furtherance of a police culture that’s hostile to the communities they serve.
“In our cities, we don’t need warriors, we need peace officers,” said Linwood Tauheed, an economics professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
There’s lots more to talk about, and this conversation is just getting started. On Tuesday, the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners is set to meet to discuss several policy reforms they hope will ease citizens’ concerns about incidents that could lead to officer-involved shootings and excessive use of force.
Defunding the police is not on the agenda.
This story was originally published June 14, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
