Kansas City may do away with warrants for unpaid parking tickets, failure to appear
Kansas City’s municipal court may stop issuing arrest warrants for those who don’t pay parking tickets, the latest in a series of reforms by the City Council, including striking marijuana offenses from the city code.
Mayor Quinton Lucas announced a resolution Thursday urging municipal court to stop issuing warrants for those who fail to appear for low-level ordinance violations, such as parking tickets.
“In my city and in most of the country if you don’t pay your parking tickets over a certain amount of time, you could end up … with an arrest warrant, end up in jail,” Lucas told MSNBC Thursday. “I think at this point there is no reason for that.”
“We should not criminalize poverty, and we should not criminalize entire communities.”
Since Minneapolis police killed George Floyd on Memorial Day, the U.S. has been once again wrestling with its racist and inequitable history. In Kansas City, elected officials have eliminated municipal marijuana offenses, noting Black people are arrested at 3.7 times the rate of white people, despite roughly equal usage of the drug.
The council also barred city prosecutors from bringing charges against nonviolent protesters who turned out in the wake of Floyd’s killing. They also amended the city code to state clearly that bystanders have the right to film police, a move that came after officers arrested Roderick Reed, who was recording their brutal arrest of a Black trans woman.
Lucas was expected to introduce the legislation at Thursday’s City Council meeting. He also introduced legislation asking the city to find a way to offer pre-trial diversion for at least 20% of nonviolent cases of ordinance violations.
He also introduced legislation to track and publish statistics about the Kansas City Police Department’s performance.
