Kansas City Police Department owes child victims and their families some answers
After a two-year internal review of what looked to the outside world like a criminally negligent Crimes Against Children unit of the Kansas City Police Department — a team so bad it was completely replaced last year — the KCPD is now reviewing that review.
When will the review of the review be completed? The department won’t say. And whether the public will ever find out what it found, police won’t say, either.
Because it involves personnel matters, they claim that it’s not a matter of public record, though if anyone were ever fired or disciplined, we’d know if they appealed those decisions.
Meanwhile, however, we are supposed to just trust them to have fixed the problem.
By all accounts, things have gotten better. Only, real and lasting change doesn’t happen without a public acknowledgment of what went wrong, how it happened and how we know it’s been remedied.
In the fall of 2015, internal affairs investigators began looking into evidence that for years, detectives in the unit had not been doing their jobs. They let some cases go uninvestigated for as long as a year, and worked harder to cover up for themselves than to solve child rapes and other serious crimes against kids.
Detectives rarely even bothered to show up for the forensic interviews specialists conduct with child victims.
Fortunately, that’s no longer the case. And it’s been a year since the entire unit was suspended and replaced. But what of its former detectives? Will any further action be taken?
The suspended detectives were Gleanice Brown, Latondra Moore, Tamara Solomon, Amy Klug, Robert Roubal, Travis Menuey and James Foushee. Other than Klug, who is no longer with the police department, they are still on the public payroll. Solomon is assigned to a supply unit, but the other five are still on patrol, working with and for the public.
The families of victims deserve to know what action has been taken, and the rest of us do, too.
The Star has reported on an internal memo written by a Kansas City police commander, Maj. David Lindaman, that concluded the unit was part of a systemic failure that went on for four years.
Other internal police memos referred to 148 “severely mishandled” cases, “gross negligence,” “incompetence” and an apparent cover-up.
With a record like that, on so serious a matter as crimes against the youngest members of our community, we can’t just trust that all’s been righted, especially with those involved still on the job.
We shouldn’t have to tell police officers that actions have consequences, but what are they? It’s long past time that victims and their families in particular got some straight answers.
This story was originally published December 10, 2017 at 3:30 PM with the headline "Kansas City Police Department owes child victims and their families some answers."