Police Chief Rick Smith must resign. KC won’t become any safer without new leadership

Kansas City Police Chief Rick Smith’s supporters keep saying his officers love him. Of course they do; if you’re indicted in a fatal shooting for excessive use of force, he’ll defend you and refuse to fork over the necessary charging documents. But the correct term for that is obstruction of justice.

Even in the unlikely event that the toothless, opaque Office of Community Complaints finds you were in the wrong, Smith may well override that, too.

Law enforcement that exempts the guys with the guns and badges from accountability was never OK, and his department’s public position that police shootings are by definition justified shootings is untenable.

So is his non-relationship with Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, who says, “I have tried,” but gotten nowhere with Smith. “I have tried, and I don’t want it to look like I’ve totally thrown in the towel, because as long as he’s there, I’m going to work with whoever is there, but I am out of tools. The paradigm becomes, ‘You never charge a police officer and then we can work with you.’ I can’t live in that construct. That is a violation of my duties. It’s a violation of my oath.”

Also untenable is Smith’s non-relationship with the minority community he often blames for their lack of faith in his department, as if he played no role in that lack of trust.

The chief is a throwback to another time, actually arguing that marijuana leads to homicide. He’s an old-school cop who has shown no sign of understanding that the old school is no longer in session.

Week after week, we’ve argued that the Kansas City Police Department needs to make a number of reforms immediately. These include a ban on the neck restraint that other departments consider too dangerous to use, a zero-tolerance policy for officers who use excessive force and a reimagined Office of Community Complaints, which in 2018 investigated 127 complaints and sustained two. All behind closed doors, of course.

Body cameras won’t do the job alone

We’ve said the department should become far more transparent, that it can’t investigate itself, and that Smith should never withhold probable cause statements from prosecutors.

What’s happened since protests began in late May, after Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd? We might be on our way to getting the body cameras Kansas City police officers should have had long ago, and … that’s it.

Under Smith’s leadership, the department is whiter than when he took this job three years ago. Its officers have shot and killed twice as many Black men as during the first three years under the previous chief.

He did away with the anti-violence strategy that had shown a lot of promise, and still has no real plan to address the fact that homicides are up 40% from last year.

Smith blamed the recent shooting of a police officer by a mentally ill man wearing no shirt and with his pants not sagging but falling off — a man who’d been shouting incomprehensibly and waving a gun around in a McDonald’s — on “the negative narrative on law enforcement.” That man, who was clearly in crisis, was shot dead, too. The chief’s reflexive us-versus-them posture isn’t helping anyone.

One thing Rick Smith is obviously not responsible for is the relaxing of Missouri gun laws in 2007, 2014 and 2017. Those changes would have made any Kansas City police chief’s job harder than the job of any police chief in, say, Quebec, where there are few guns, lots of social services and what do you know, few murders.

But you can only believe that Smith’s performance had nothing to do with any of the above if you believe that leadership doesn’t matter. Even having federal agents on the case in Kansas City now is a confirmation that he’s failed.

Other Jackson County departments don’t look to KCPD

If Smith stays in his job, things will stay as they are. The city won’t become any safer, for Black Kansas Citians in particular.

Keeping him would continue to prevent Baker from doing her job in keeping with modern norms, which hold that police officers should be held accountable in public rather than through the behind-closed-doors process of a grand jury.

“I have nothing yet to report as a change” in the Kansas City Police Department, Baker said in an interview. Other, smaller police departments in Jackson County aren’t opposed to holding their own accountable the way Smith is, she said. “They’re not looking at KCPD as their leader right now.”

As we’ve reported before, Baker saw the police department’s use of force during the protests that followed Floyd’s death as “bizarre” and out of touch: “It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to say that when people are on the Plaza in mass numbers, protesting use of force, maybe you should not show excessive force. … It was like Ferguson never happened.”

Smith’s actions ignore not just Ferguson, but also a Black community that is hurting and out of patience and white Kansas Citians newly unwilling to settle for vague promises of reforms that somehow never materialize. That’s one Kansas City tradition that has to end.

In his own defense, Smith recently told The Star, “I’m working long hours to keep the organization running and doing the best job I can.” No one disputes that he’s working long hours, or that he has a difficult job. “There’s many perceptions of the police department,” he said. “And you know, I don’t think it’s all bad, despite what some might say. I think there’s people out there who think we’re doing a good job.” Of course there are.

But Smith is still out of last chances. For the good of the city, he must step down.

His successor must come from outside the department, or his replacement will too likely offer more of the same.

Local control is a must, too. Boss Pendergast has been dead for 75 years, and the state oversight that his town’s corruption necessitated in another century is no reason for Kansas City to remain the only major city in the country without any real say in how its police department is run.

Rick Smith’s removal and even local control won’t fix all of our problems. But they will make the hard work of fixing them possible. And because that work can’t wait, Smith must leave now.