KC Mayor Quinton Lucas has met this moment. Will Police Chief Rick Smith join him there?

So much is going on in this moment — disasters within disasters, like malignant Russian nesting dolls — that we’re all demanding that something come of it, even if we don’t agree on whether that means demanding justice or unleashing “vicious dogs.” (And yes, those two are mutually exclusive.)

After a third night of local protests against police brutality following the Minneapolis murder of George Floyd, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said he hated waking up yet again to the wrong first question.

Everywhere Lucas went, he said in an interview on Monday, “the first question isn’t what we can do for people” to build their trust in police. Instead, he said, it’s: When will the Country Club Plaza recover from all the vandalism?

His point wasn’t that he’s indifferent to property damage. It’s that our never-the-first-question determination to look away from our country’s ongoing racial crimes is what got us here.

To a time in which by day, “what you saw was people saying we want to stand with our brothers and sisters” in peaceful protest, the mayor said. Then, as elsewhere across the country, he saw a “shift at night, to destruction and distraction” from a much different crowd. “That’s my experience and my understanding.”

After weeks of coronavirus closures for mom-and-pop businesses trying to claw their way to survival, looters should not only be arrested but suspected of trying to keep us from making either racial or economic progress.

Yet after centuries of state-sanctioned violence against African Americans, we can’t afford to let their diversionary dance moves distract us.

When Lucas and Kansas City Police Chief Rick Smith spoke at a joint news conference on Sunday, we saw only one of them meeting this moment with focus, leadership and urgency.

The 35-year-old mayor, who has had to lead us through a plague and now these protests in his first 10 months in the job, again gave out his personal cellphone number and invited anyone who wanted to talk about George Floyd or police brutality or anything else to text or call him.

“I want to hear your voices,” Lucas said, and he does hear them, at all hours. “What this is about is making sure we can find justice and find a way to build justice in our community, not just today and not just this weekend, and not just while some folks are going wild.” He is moving the follow spot, and that matters.

Calm as Lucas comes across — of course he does, after a lifetime of practice — he knows firsthand why people are beyond fed up, and talked about some of his own experiences of being racially profiled. Like having cops roll up on him eating sandwiches in the Leawood City Park with his mom when he was 10 years old. His mom held her tongue that day, but what if she hadn’t?

Or having an officer make him show his student ID as he walked back onto campus when he was studying at Washington University in St. Louis, though no one else had to do that. “And once again, I didn’t say, ‘To hell with you.’ If you don’t deescalate, you’re in the wrong.”

Even as mayor, Lucas said, he’s worried that he’ll be pulled over for no reason while driving to Texas to pick up his niece for a visit. And he’s been told by Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, “who makes his father look like Nelson Mandela,” that Lucas was just creating a sideshow when he mentioned that he showed up to vote and couldn’t. Why hadn’t he just shown some patience?

Of course, listening and understanding all too well don’t suddenly solve intractable problems, but they’re the only place to start.

Maybe Smith, whose throwback, us-versus-them attitude has been so exposed by this moment, is coming to see that, too, because he finally met with protesters on the Country Club Plaza Monday.

Along with Lucas, the police chief took a knee and held a moment of silence for Floyd, while also holding a Black Lives Matter T-shirt that said, “Can’t breathe.” Gestures like this have to be backed up by other, less symbolic actions. Right after Smith and Lucas left the Plaza, police once again resorted to using pepper spray. But that Smith showed up and showed respect at least makes progress seem possible.