If KCK police didn’t beat man in his own bed for no reason, what was the reason?

Another day, another horror story about cops in Kansas City, Kansas.

A new lawsuit alleges that a local artist named Joseph Harter was asleep in his own bed at about 3 a.m. on Oct. 28 of last year when he realized that there was someone — and then more than one someone — in his room.

One of those strangers, who turned out to be Kansas City, Kansas Police Officer Faisal Hassan, beat him for no reason he could fathom, the suit says, while other officers looked on.

At some point, Harter himself couldn’t look on any more, because he had so much blood in his eyes.

Neither the police nor the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, would answer the allegations. “We have no comment on it,” a police spokesman said. “We can’t speak on it at this time.”

So if there’s some logical, non-criminal reason they were there, we don’t know what it is. If they meant to assault someone else and got the address wrong, we don’t know that, either.

But in Kansas City, Kansas, where the police department’s non-ironic motto is “Safety First, Courtesy Always,” a lot goes unexplained.

Previously on “That’s Just How It Is in KCK,” in only the last couple of years, a police cadet was fired a month after reporting that her supervisor had sexually assaulted her. After that supervisor, Steven Rios, was charged with misdemeanor battery, her car was vandalized — covered with salsa, which made for a piquant defacement of property. She also received threatening text messages.

The department has also been sued over allegations that now-retired police detective Roger Golubski routinely closed cases by manufacturing evidence, including testimony coerced from some of the poor black women he’s accused of extorting into having sex with him.

Last summer, a fed-up local faith-based group marched to police headquarters on Minnesota Avenue to demand “that Wyandotte County, Kansas City, Kansas, and specifically the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department turn in a new direction.”

Protesters called on Mayor David Alvey to fire then-Police Chief Terry Zeigler, Golubski’s former partner, who had himself been investigated for “double-dipping” while living in a county-owned home for very little rent.

In response to the serious allegations against Golubski, Zeigler called them old news and said, “I really don’t want them to detract from the great work our officers are doing in the community.”

Of course, Zeigler wasn’t fired. Instead, when he announced his retirement in July, Alvey said, “He will be remembered for his devotion to our citizens, his pride in his officers and staff, and his hard work and professionalism spanning nearly three decades.”

There’s something deeply wrong with a department where the announcement of a police conviction integrity unit to investigate wrongful convictions provokes panic and angry opposition from officers and officials.

Yet in a letter dated July 30, 2018, Zeigler, police union presidents Scott Kirkpatrick and Max Sybrant and Wyandotte County Sheriff Donald Ash wrote to Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt to argue that funding a unit like that could, if the cases were mishandled, “have an enormous economic impact on our community” and make citizens less safe.

Or maybe they were worried about the economic and other impact if such cases were correctly handled. And less safe than being attacked by cops while asleep in your own bed, like 43-year-old Joseph Harter says he was?

Harter’s suit says after he was beaten, he was arrested, taken to the hospital and then the jail, where he was charged with battery of a law enforcement officer. Those charges were later dropped, and Harter’s attorney has yet to see any police report, though he’s tried.

“My client did nothing wrong,” said Harter’s attorney, Bill Dunn. “I’d love to hear somebody from the city explain why” any of this happened.

So would we.

“Otherwise,” Dunn said, “it’s a cautionary tale: Don’t go to sleep in your own bed.”