KCK urgently needs new police chief, but months later, the search hasn’t even started
Six months after Kansas City, Kansas Police Chief Terry Zeigler announced he was retiring amid demands for his firing, there doesn’t seem to have been any movement on finding a permanent replacement.
Given the department’s many problems and deservedly tarnished reputation, you’d think that finding the best possible new leader would be an urgent matter, but it isn’t.
“The process is really just getting underway right now,” said Mike Taylor, spokesman for the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas. Even that is a bit of a stretch: There will be a national search, Taylor said, but the city hasn’t yet chosen a firm to conduct that search. In a recent meeting, he said, there was some talk that “we need to get moving.”
That’s for sure.
On Nov. 4, Mayor David Alvey said in an interview on KCUR that the search would take at least six months, though the department was down about 50 officers, or 15% of the total force.
He blamed these unfilled openings on “the perception of law enforcement as really being a problem. It’s people want to cast all police officers and all law enforcement to a negative light, so it’s not necessarily attracting people.”
This isn’t a case of the perception becoming the reality, but of the reality becoming the perception.
And the reality is, there’s a hole the size of the Kansas Speedway where this community’s trust in law enforcement should be. Why is that?
▪ Zeigler left amid calls that he be fired over a “sweetheart deal” in which he paid very little rent to live in a county-owned lake house he was fixing up. What he did not fix was the department itself. But since Kansas City, Kansas officials defended and praised him on his way out the door and ever since, do they even see the necessity for not just a replacement, but a reformer?
▪ One recent lawsuit alleged that last October, a man with no previous history with the Kansas City, Kansas police was beaten in the middle of the night in his own bed by an officer who’d broken into the man’s home with other officers. Why?
▪ A police cadet was fired a month after reporting that her supervisor had sexually assaulted her. After that supervisor was charged with misdemeanor battery, her car was vandalized, and she received threatening text messages. If you’d been sexually assaulted, are these the folks you’d call?
▪ 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. He was the inspiration for a new Kansas law, authored by state Rep. Cindy Holscher, that made it illegal for officers to have sex with those they’ve stopped or detained. Golubski’s partner on the force was Zeigler, who as chief called the allegations old news. Again, until this supposed old news is investigated, what’s changed?
▪ One of the women who has accused Golubski of sexual assault is the mother of Lamonte McIntyre, who spent 23 years in prison for two murders he did not commit. Now Kansas City, Kansas police and city officials oppose approval of the compensation the state owes McIntyre for the years that were stolen from him, even though the law passed to compensate the wrongfully convicted was signed in McIntyre’s own church. Does this tell you that Kansas City, Kansas officials want to see justice done, or that they want to see themselves justified?
▪ The announcement of a conviction integrity unit to investigate wrongful convictions was vehemently opposed by officers and officials in Wyandotte County. See above.
This isn’t only a problem for those law-abiding residents who feel they have reason to fear the police, but for those law-abiding police officers in desperate need of some backup. The city’s leisurely approach to finding a police chief suggests that officials don’t see any of this.
When they do get around to looking for a new chief, the process has to be as transparent as the department itself should become under new management. And if the city brought some of its critics in the community into the process, that would be a great first step.