Kansas City won’t punish marijuana possession after Council strips it from city code
Kansas City will no longer levy penalties for marijuana possession after City Council members voted Thursday to strip the crime from the city code, effectively decriminalizing most offenses in much of the city.
The legislation was sponsored by Mayor Quinton Lucas and all four of the City Council’s Black members: Ryana Parks-Shaw, Melissa Robinson, Lee Barnes and Brandon Ellington. It passed 9-4 on Thursday.
To supporters, halting city penalties for marijuana possession was an issue of racial equity. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, Black people are 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people despite roughly equal usage.
The change does not legalize recreational use of the drug or alter Missouri law. And users can still be charged for possession by county prosecutors who still pursue those cases.
In 2017, Kansas City voters decided overwhelmingly to eliminate jail time for possession of less than 35 grams of marijuana. They limited penalties to an ordinance violation and $25 fine.
In Jackson County, the move effectively decriminalizes small-time marijuana possession offenses. Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker has already pledged to stop charging most people for possession. In portions of Kansas City that lie in Clay, Platte and Cass counties, those in possession could still face state drug charges.
For that reason, Kansas City’s chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which led the 2017 campaign, said it had qualms about the council’s decision. In a statement, NORML KC’s communications director, Jessica Kelly, said the group worried that removing marijuana from the city code would “effectively remove the citywide protections” of the 2017 vote limiting penalties for small-scale possession.
Kelly urged prosecutors in Clay, Platte and Cass counties to join Peters Baker in not charging low-level marijuana offenses.
“Statewide reforms on this issue are needed so that we don’t have a patchwork of laws that more harshly impact some over others,” Kelly said.
Some members of the City Council shared that concern. Though he voted for it, Ellington noted it does not prevent marijuana users from facing state charges in Cass, Clay and Platte counties where prosecutors have not pledged to stop taking possession cases.
Councilwoman Katheryn Shields, 4th District at-large, said without the option of levying a lower-level city ordinance violation, people in the Northland caught with marijuana may receive harsher state charges.
“By taking this option from the police of being able to file something that’s a city charge and instead taking it to the state prosecutor, we’re putting any of those African Americans and Hispanics who are stopped while … in Clay and Platte county in a possession of perhaps facing much more serious state charges,” Shields said.
But Lucas noted 90% of the city’s municipal marijuana offenses occur in Jackson County.
“90%,” Lucas said, “and so I don’t know if we would say we’re not going to do something good for 90% of people because of the 10%.”
He said it was “fundamentally an issue of fairness” and invoked his sisters, who graduated from Kansas City Public Schools.
“When they went to high school, they had far more peers that ended up getting stopped in connection with different marijuana offenses, got arrested for them, ran into all of the troubles that may exist for someone who is largely Black, in the city, in over-policed neighborhoods,” Lucas said.
Lucas, however, attended the Barstow School in South Kansas City, where he said he knew numerous marijuana users who didn’t wind up in the criminal justice system.
Councilwoman Heather Hall, 1st District, opposed the measure, in part, because she said many municipal marijuana offenders committed other crimes at the same time, including traffic offenses, illegal possession of a firearm or possession of other drugs.
Hall, Shields, Councilman Kevin O’Neill, 1st District at-large, and Councilman Dan Fowler, 2nd District, voted against the legislation. The rest of the council and Lucas voted for it.
