After officer payout and amid protest, Overland Park canceled public safety meeting
The Overland Park City Council will skip its monthly public safety meeting this month, despite push back from residents and councilors hoping for time to discuss a $70,000 payout given to a former officer, and to address police use of force and racial profiling.
The meeting, originally scheduled for Wednesday evening, was canceled by Councilman and Committee Chair Paul Lyons on Monday. Lyons said he made the decision because there were few items on the agenda and he had hoped to schedule an implicit bias training for councilors at that time.
The bias training, Lyons said, was subsequently canceled, but requests from residents to speak came too late for him to place it on the committee’s agenda.
Lyons said he is currently considering allowing the public to offer public comment on those issues during the August public safety meeting but is speaking with city attorneys first to ensure that is possible.
“I didn’t feel like I should be asking the committee to come in just to listen to public comment on something we weren’t really prepared to deal with at that point,” Lyons said.
For future meetings, he said, people can speak as long as they let him know ahead of time. Residents looking to have a place on the agenda, he said, need to give him at least a week of notice while residents looking to give comment can give notice the day of the meeting.
Sheila Albers, the mother of John Albers who was killed by an Overland Park officer in 2018, said she requested last month that Lyons place the police use of force policies on the agenda.
Albers said she was frustrated that Lyons did not place the item on the agenda and also canceled the meeting after it was reported that the officer who killed her son had been paid $70,000 in severance.
Albers called the cancellation “shameful” and said it prevented citizens from having the opportunity to speak, face to face, with city leaders.
“I find it unacceptable that you would ever cancel a public safety meeting unless there was some enormous crisis,” Albers said. “I feel it was deliberate to avoid having open conversations about important topics such as use of force and severance packages that are offered to officers that should have been terminated.”
Lyons said he declined Albers request to address use of force because the council has no authority over those policies. Given the political climate, he felt that conversation should happen at the county level and that it was not an Overland Park specific issue.
He also said he felt Albers wanted to talk about the policies in the context of her son’s death. Lyons said he was “not interested in going back and revisiting what happened to her son two years ago.”
Bob Hoffman, another Overland Park resident who said he wanted to speak about racial bias in policing at Wednesday’s meeting, said he felt there are numerous things that should be discussed by the committee immediately in the midst of the pandemic and in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
“We are already, I believe, losing some momentum,” he said. “The public interest is sky high, the public support for Black Lives Matter has never been as high as it’s been,”
“That stuff dies down. It’s carpe diem, seize the moment.”
‘Very fruitful communication’
At Monday’s city council meeting, Council Member Faris Farrasati asked Lyons to “un-cancel” the meeting so that the members could hear from the public.
“Every time there is a sensitive item to be discussed the public safety meeting, boom, is canceled,” Farassati said referring to the officer’s severance payment. “The optics sir, with all due respect, don’t look good.”
“This could have been a very fruitful communication, maybe even one sided for us listening and for people explaining how they feel.”
Lyons called the suggestion that he was canceling the meeting in an attempt to hide something or to avoid public discussion “complete and total nonsense.”
The public safety committee’s next meeting is scheduled for August 12.
Farassati is also seeking an executive session of the council to discuss the severance payment given to the officer.
Mayor Carl Gerlach said in the meeting that all councilors should have been told about the agreement in 2018.
Also at Monday’s council meeting, City Manager Bill Ebel said the city would fund crisis intervention training for all Overland Park officers in 2021. Currently, only 50% of officers receive such training.
The training had been called for by Albers and her organization, JoCo United, following her son’s death.
This story was originally published July 8, 2020 at 4:38 PM.
