Trump blames KC officials for policing failure. Does he know we don’t have local control?

Kansas City Police Chief Rick Smith was in the audience at the White House on Wednesday as President Donald Trump charged that violent crime is up in Kansas City, and elsewhere where federal agents are going in, because local officials have failed to do their job. “When they abdicate their duty,” the president said, “the results are catastrophic.”

Maybe the president doesn’t know that officials in Kansas City have almost no duty to abdicate in that regard since Smith and his department don’t answer to them, but to the state-controlled police board.

Surely the president didn’t mean that Missouri Gov. Mike Parson is in any way responsible, since that doesn’t fit his partisan narrative.

Inadvertently, Trump made the point that yes, local officials should be responsible for local problems, which is why Kansas City should control its own police department, the state shouldn’t impose its gun laws on us, and federal agents should either stick to helping clear murders, as originally promised, or get out of town.

The president’s determination to blame Democratic mayors for violent crime is part of his law-and-order-themed reelection campaign, but Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas took exception without answering in kind: “For the president to suggest that we don’t care, or that urban politicians are killing people or harming people, it’s a lie.”

And Smith’s presence there, at a highly politicized White House event to which Lucas was not invited, and where Trump announced that the Justice Department’s Operation Legend had been so successful here that it’s being expanded to other cities, only underscores the point that Smith does not answer to anyone here, or even feel the need to keep Kansas City officials in the loop.

Lucas was surprised, and skeptical, when he heard Attorney General William Barr say that federal agents here have already made 200 arrests; Lucas only knew about the one that was announced on Tuesday, the arrest of a man who was sitting in a stolen car, and who had earlier run over a police officer’s foot. (Turns out, he was right to doubt that number, which includes state and federal arrests back to December.)

If the point of these forays into cities by the feds was really to be helpful, Lucas would not have had to find out on Twitter that agents were coming to Kansas City.

Instead, the point seems to be to incite fear that we — and now Chicago and Albuquerque, where a “major surge” of federal agents is coming soon — could be the next Portland, where agents from who-knows-where are snatching people off the streets in anticipation of the crimes they might commit in the future.

Kansas City clergy are already discussing how to best respond to what feels like an invasion.

These unconstitutional round-ups look a lot like state-side extraordinary renditions, meant to intimidate, incite and up the law-and-order ante ahead of the November presidential election.

If Operation Legend were really, as we were told, an effort to clear the backlog of old homicide cases, why was the first arrest they announced of someone who had injured a police officer?

And if the effort is, as Barr and others explained on Wednesday, a program that identifies and arrests chronic offenders, that sounds a lot like the crime-fighting program that Smith dismantled after he took over as chief in 2017. Homicides have gone up since then, and since state gun laws have gotten progressively less restrictive.

Trump blamed “deadly politicians,” and Barr pinned the spike on the Black Lives Matter protests that have followed George Floyd’s May 25 murder in Minneapolis. It’s a “direct result of the attack on police,” Barr said. Do we even need to say that that makes no sense?

Lucas did: “I hate the fact that they link the Black Lives Matter protests to people getting murdered,” he said in an interview.

“I’m not asking them to leave yet,” the mayor said of the federal agents who are here. But he has more questions now than before Trump’s announcement. “Something’s not squaring up,” he said, and looks forward to hearing some answers from Smith when he gets back from Washington.

We are not a prop in Trump’s campaign, and the mayor is right to call out the racial “dog-whistling” in Trump’s rhetoric about crime, which is really more like a piercing scream.

“I do have concerns with the president’s racial undertones in his rhetoric. When I was growing up, they used to call it dog-whistling. I think the president has exceeded that.”

“What we don’t support is an expanded and broadened mission, which is what we’ve seen in Portland and what we’ve seen hinted at in interviews from the president that look like a federal takeover of policing in Kansas City,” Lucas told The Star.

Operation Legend is named for LeGend Taliferro, the 4-year-old Kansas City boy shot to death in his bed last month. His grieving mother, Charron Powell, spoke movingly at the White House event and pleaded with our city and others to support the effort.

We definitely want to make this city safe for 4-year-olds, and all the rest of us. But whether the feds will help us do that is far from clear.

This story was originally published July 22, 2020 at 6:10 PM.