KCPD has paid nearly $14M in legal settlements in 2025, records show

The Kansas City Police Department paid nearly $14 million in legal settlements in 2025, straining the department’s budget and forcing cost-cutting measures for the current fiscal year.

Legal settlements have been a topic of discussion for weeks after an internal memo from Police Chief Stacey Graves calling for “drastic” cost-saving measures to address settlement payouts and overtime costs.

In 2025, the Police Department made 36 settlement payments totaling $13.8 million. These payments were made from legal cases, including wrongful death lawsuits and workplace discrimination claims.

The cost of settlements should raise concerns among residents, said Anna Stelmach, a member of It’s Time 4 Justice, a community activist organization that monitors law enforcement activities in the Kansas City area.

“It is gravely concerning that local residents have no control, nor oversight, of the detrimental actions taken by KCPD,” Stelmach said.

Stelmach said that former Officer Blayne Newton is an example of the type of officer who has led to the high total for payouts.

One of the largest payouts, $1.75 million, stemmed from a June 2023 shooting involving Newton that left two people dead and another injured.

Newton recently agreed to leave the department in February as part of a $50,000 separation agreement.

The largest payment was a $4.2 million check to Ricky Kidd’s attorneys in June, following the announcement of a $14 million settlement just a month earlier. Kidd was exonerated after spending more than two decades in prison for a murder he did not commit.

Another $4.1 million was paid to settle a federal lawsuit in the officer-involved shooting of Cameron Lamb. Lamb was shot and killed by former detective Eric DeValkenaere in 2019. DeValkenaere was convicted of second-degree involuntary manslaughter in the 2019 shooting and served roughly one year of a six-year prison sentence before his sentence was commuted by then-Gov. Mike Parson in December 2024.

Steve Young, a co-founder of the Kansas City Law Enforcement Accountability Project or KC LEAP, an organization that monitors police activities, said his organization was firmly opposed to any budget increase for the Police Department due to the multiple costly settlements paid out by the department.

“Before asking taxpayers for more money, the department must demonstrate meaningful accountability and systemic reform,” Young said. “Increasing funding without structural change sends the message that there are no consequences for avoidable harm.”

Multiple settlements were paid in civil lawsuits brought by former employees of the Police Department, including the case of former Capt. Darrel Bergquist, even though the case has yet to be dismissed.

Two payments totaling $738,000 were paid to Bergquist and his attorneys after he filed a lawsuit in 2022. In that lawsuit, Bergquist alleged that Police Chief Stacey Graves, who was the commander of the Police Department’s human resources unit, had made rude gestures and inappropriate comments towards him when she was a major in the human resources department.

Once a settlement has been reached, the plaintiff’s side must dismiss the case; however, in the Bergquist lawsuit, this has not occurred, said Police Department spokesperson Capt. Jacob Becchina.

A court hearing in the case is scheduled for later this month.

Becchina said the department’s fiscal team and the city’s budget office have discussions each year to determine a budgeted amount for lawsuits.

“Chief Graves has spoken at length regarding projects she has instituted designed to lower civil risk,” Becchina said when asked how the department plans to handle settlement costs. “Some of which included, instituting constitutional policing training for all members, implementing de-escalation training and principles, professionalizing human resources, and others.”

‘We have seen this freight train coming’

The new fiscal year budget proposal from Mayor Quinton Lucas wants a $17.8 million increase for the Police Department, including a $4 million increase targeted for legal settlements when compared to the year before.

Lucas said predicting settlement costs during the annual budget process can be difficult.

“We have seen this freight train coming, and we continue not to have our long-term policy solutions in connection with it,” Lucas said. “If the city council doesn’t know anything about the settlements until they’re reported in the Kansas City Star and other press outlets, we absolutely cannot actually train for it long term.”

Lucas said this is why his proposed ordinance, which is set to go before the Finance, Governance and Public Safety Committee, would give the city a bit more control over legal settlements that exceed the 25% budget threshold for the Police Department required by state law.

The ordinance would allow the city to negotiate those legal settlements out and move money around from year to year for payments using the city’s legal expense fund, he said.

Lucas said his hope with the ordinance is to make sure the city is more informed on legal settlements and lawsuits moving forward. He wants to mitigate costs from lawsuits in the future by avoiding situations where lawsuits arise, whether from employment disputes or from officer excessive use-of-force cases.

“I don’t think that it’s just an act of God that you’ll always have to pay high legal expenses. Things come up. Lawsuits come up,” he said.

He continued: “That being said, it doesn’t mean that you should not have a plan for substantial potential settlements coming your way. And I think at KCPD and more probably the board of police commissioners, that’s something that we, frankly, can stand to do more of all the time.”

Lucas said that the nearly $14 million in legal settlements paid in 2025 could have covered the $3 million gap for overtime that Graves mentioned when she met with the city council in February.

“I’m sorry, but people should be more outraged by the fact that that drastic service cut is all the fault of a legal cost line item that is more than three times the cost of the request of the true up that the police department is requesting now,” he said.

During a budget hearing session last week, Police Department leaders were asked about the next fiscal year budget. They were also asked how the department’s finances have fared since Graves suggested spending cuts.

“We still have some trimming to do, but we are trending in the right direction since the chief put out the memo to reduce overtime where we can,” said Maj. Josh Heinen told council members. “Our third quarter projection is showing that that is having a savings of around $800,000 between the time that you put out that memo to the end of the fiscal year.”

This story was originally published March 11, 2026 at 12:47 PM.

Ben Wheeler

The Kansas City Star