Longtime sergeant raised alarm on fraud in KCPD. Retaliation followed, she says
A longtime police sergeant has filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging she faced retaliation after reporting widespread timekeeping fraud in the Kansas City Police Department.
Sgt. Kathy Coots, who joined the department in 1996 and was promoted to sergeant in 2005, filed the petition for damages in Jackson County Circuit Court in May against the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners, alleging violations of Missouri’s Public Employee Whistleblower Statute.
She alleges she was stripped of duties, denied access to work systems, excluded from routine operations and ultimately forced into an involuntary transfer after raising concerns about misconduct by her commanding officers. That misconduct is alleged to include:
Double dipping: A major and a captain worked off-duty or awarded themselves extra paid days off while still collecting regular pay or overtime. The major is Kari Thompson, currently the commander of South Patrol Division.
School resource officers reassigned: Officers were pulled from their daytime school shifts and sent to work in late-night entertainment districts, violating an agreement with Kansas City Public Schools.
Grant-funded programs misused: Officers in the youth drug- and gangs prevention programs D.A.R.E. and G.R.E.A.T. were paid with funds from COMBAT, Jackson County’s anti-crime tax program, despite not carrying out grant-required duties. D.A.R.E. was ultimately discontinued.
Thompson did not respond to repeated requests for comment. KCPD declined to comment on the allegations “in the interest of fairness to all parties involved.”
One of Coots’ attorneys, Martin Meyers, did not respond to requests for comment. Her lawsuit is seeking damages, reinstatement of her duties and responsibilities, and attorney costs.
Brad Lemon, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 99, told The Star that Coots’ allegations represent “a serious failure on the part of the Kansas City Police Department to run itself.”
“It’s shocking that this department would keep a commander accused of double-dipping — that’s something KCPD would never let a rank-and-file officer survive,” said Lemon, whose union represents officers at the rank of sergeant and below, along with civilian employees. “The community deserves better than to have someone in leadership that is taking money from an outside employer while on the clock of the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department.”
KC schools, crime prevention efforts allegedly shortchanged
The case centers on the Kansas City Police Department’s Youth Services Unit.
Coots was assigned to oversee the Youth Programs Section, part of the Youth Services Unit, in late 2019, shortly after an internal investigation found multiple timekeeping violations in the unit, resulting in “severe discipline” for three supervisors. She says she was instructed to tighten accountability, including teaching timekeeping compliance courses to all sergeants from 2020 through 2022, according to the filing.
The Youth Services Unit was moved in 2022 under the Police Department’s new Community Engagement Division, which was headed by Thompson. Coots says in her lawsuit that shortly after that restructuring, she began to notice and document timekeeping violations in the division.
In March 2023, according to the lawsuit, an officer was transferred to Coots’ unit despite her warning that it violated the union contract’s eligibility list requirements. The transfer went through anyway, and Coots’s attempts to accurately document it were repeatedly blocked.
“The refusal to record the transfer in the timekeeping system was designed to conceal the fact that the transfer violated (KCPD’s) policy for selecting officers to fill vacancies,” Coots alleges.
The lawsuit also says that several school resource officers under Coots’ supervision were pulled from their normal 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shifts in Kansas City Public Schools and reassigned to work in various Kansas City entertainment districts — including Power and Light, 18th & Vine, the Plaza, Crossroads, and Westport — from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m.
Coots says that when she learned that a school resource officer was being reassigned, she would enter their time in the system to reflect it. But on multiple occasions, she says, those changes were reversed by higher-ranking staff.
“This constituted a violation of the Memorandum of Understanding between the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department and the Kansas City Public Schools, which provided that the SROs would be present in their assigned schools whenever school was in session,” the lawsuit states.
Shain Bergan, a school district spokesperson, told The Star that the district “can’t comment on a pending legal matter,” even though KCPS is not a named party in the suit.
In addition to the KCPS-related violations, Coots also alleges the timekeeping problems extended into the department’s grant-funded programs, such as D.A.R.E. (drug prevention education) and G.R.E.A.T. (gang prevention). According to the lawsuit, D.A.R.E. and G.R.E.A.T. officers were paid with COMBAT grant funds — Jackson County tax dollars earmarked for anti-crime programs — even when the work required by the grant was not performed.
Murray Woodard, director of COMBAT, told The Star that his organization has not received any formal notification from KCPD or participating schools regarding the alleged misuse of COMBAT funds. He said the claims referenced in the lawsuit remain “unverified.”
But Woodard added that should any misuse of COMBAT funds ever be substantiated, his office “will take appropriate action, which may include corrective measures, suspension or termination of funding, and other remedies as permitted by law.”
Double-dipping
The lawsuit names several Kansas City police officers in the unit that were either notified by Coots of the violations or participated in the violations, but all of those names are redacted.
One of the majors is referred to as being named head of CED in 2022 and leaving the division in 2025. That matches the employment history of Kari Thompson, who has since moved on to become commander of KCPD’s South Patrol Division, where she earns a salary of $160,000 per year, according to the Police Department.
Coots alleges that while assigned to the Community Engagement Division, Thompson was “working off duty assignments during the hours of her regular shift when she should have been performing her assigned duties for CED.” That lasted between at least March and July 2024, Coots says in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleges that Coots discovered in 2024 that a captain in the Community Engagement Division had assigned himself extra paid days off while claiming overtime for the same shifts, resulting in 2.5 times his proper pay. The Star was unable to verify the name of the captain. Lemon, the FOP president, declined to identify the captain but said he was still active at KCPD.
An investigation ensued that resulted in both the captain and Thompson being transferred out of the unit in 2025. But neither faced significant accountability, according to the lawsuit.
“(The captain) received minimal discipline and (Thompson) received no discipline for the theft of money due to falsely reporting their time, which was reported by (Coots) and substantiated by Internal Affairs,” the complaint reads.
Retaliation against Coots
Coots says she made numerous complaints to her superiors relating to the violations, including one in 2023 that was later found to be unsubstantiated by human resources.
The lawsuit claims that she was retaliated against by superiors after reporting the violations that resulted in the internal investigation into the captain and Thompson.
Coots’ access to the timekeeping system was removed, according to the filing, and she received multiple “unwarranted” reprimands.
“(Coots) was denied access to routine communications and excluded from standard operational procedures within the division, despite other sergeants in the division continuing to have such access,” the filing reads. “Her ability to supervise officers under her command was deliberately undermined through management interference and restrictions.”
According to the lawsuit, the new major in charge of the community engagement unit also told Coots the division planned to discontinue the D.A.R.E. program that she oversaw.
“The true reason for the cancellation of the program was to punish Coots,” the filing alleges, for reporting breaches of professional ethics by a commanding officer.
The filing also claims that on one occasion, Coots was physically locked in a kitchenette by a major. It is unclear if that major was Thompson, Haley, or someone else. Haley referred The Star to KCPD’s media unit, which declined to comment on personnel.
In early 2025, Coots transferred out of CED to “avoid continued harassment,” according to the filing. She remains on the police force.
Lemon, the police union president, said responsibility for Coots’ experience ultimately rests with police Chief Stacey Graves and the Board of Police Commissioners. But he argued that problems like this could be avoided if KCPD assigned personnel duties to trained HR staff rather than police commanders.
“This is what happens when you have a commander in charge of human resources,” Lemon said. “A commander is not going to do something the chief doesn’t want them to do, because all their promotions and all their transfers are 100% incumbent on what the chief thinks of them.”
Lemon said that Graves told the FOP before she became chief in 2022 that she would “civilianize” the human resources department. But that has not come to pass.
“As a result, the department allows commanders to get away with serious, heinous things like this that nobody else gets away with,” Lemon said. “It’s a historical problem with our department. It’s part of why we’re being sued left and right.”
He pointed to a three-year internal investigation into failures in the police department’s Crimes Against Children unit that culminated in 2019 with 17 officers being disciplined.
“Not a single commander paid the price for any of the bad decisions that were made,” Lemon said. “Rank and file took all the hits, every single one of them.”
The police board filed its answer to the lawsuit in July, but the document is not publicly accessible. Judge Jerri Zhang granted the board’s motion to seal it in November.
