Want police reform in KC? There’s no chance with this police union calling the shots

Members of the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners seem to think they work for the police rather than for the public. If reflexively defending the Kansas City Police Department really were their job, along with fending off needed reforms, then they’d be doing a bang-up job.

But because they’re supposed to be holding the police accountable, they aren’t doing their job at all.

When they accept the appointment from the governor and join the board, they get a real police badge. And apparently, some blinders.

Which is the only way to explain what happened at Tuesday’s monthly commissioners meeting, after the recent indictment of a Kansas City police officer who allegedly sent a Black teenager who’d committed no crime to the hospital. There was praise for the department, praise for Chief Rick Smith, and no action on the modest reform proposals of Mayor Quinton Lucas, the only member of board who is accountable to the public.

In fact, the board is not even set up to take action, which is why until we have local control of our police department, we should at least acknowledge that there is no oversight.

Last Friday, Kansas City Police Department veteran Sgt. Matthew Neal was charged with felony assault for allegedly slamming a 15-year-old’s face into concrete last November. All this went down as at least 11 other officers stood nearby, in the parking lot of a Go Chicken Go restaurant. The teen had been a passenger in a car that tried to get away after police attempted to pull it over.

One of those 11 officers testified that Sgt. Neal kneeled on the 138-pound teenager’s head as he cried out that he couldn’t breathe — six months before that same cry became George Floyd’s last words. Yet if you thought that might convince the commissioners to demand some immediate changes, well, you have never seen the board in action. Or inaction.

Lucas proposed reforms that would require an officer to intervene if he or she sees excessive force, would protect whistleblowers and would begin moving to an independent police complaints process. The department says officers already have a duty to intervene, but right now, it’s up to officers to decide the right time and way to do that, “based on the totality of the circumstances.” In other words, it’s still up to them to decide if and when and how.

And here’s all that will happen now: Meetings will be open to the public starting next month. But the other proposals will be sent to the police union, the Kansas City Fraternal Order of Police, which has 14 days to review them.

Then, the Kansas City Police Department could itself propose some version of these measures.

Finally, these proposals would then make their way back to the board of commissioners, which can only act by acclamation. No one tells our police department what to do, even if commissioners wanted to, which they don’t.

The FOP is in control, even though the police union has already taken the side of the officer who allegedly smashed the kid’s face for no reason, after he got out of the car with his hands up, kneeled down on command, crawled toward the officers on his stomach, as directed, and made no effort to resist.

Brad Lemon, president of the FOP, said in a statement, “The Lodge supports Sgt. Neal and believes that his actions were justified under the totality of the circumstances. We will support our brother as this matter proceeds to court, where we are confident that he will be ultimately exonerated.”

Not the brother who testified to the grand jury, of course. but the brother who was indicted. That all of this happened nine months ago shows how broken the system is.

Officer Dylan Pifer, who shot and killed an unarmed Black man last year, was with Sgt. Neal in that parking lot, and a complaint against him was originally sustained by the Office of Community Complaints. After pressure from Smith’s office, that decision was overturned, though, and the record erased.

Neal is the fourth Kansas City police officer to be indicted in recent months. In June, a Jackson County grand jury indicted Eric J. DeValkenare in the 2019 killing of Cameron Lamb, who was shot while sitting in his pickup truck in his own backyard.

Weeks earlier, two police officers, Matthew G. Brummett and Charles Prichard, were charged with assaulting Breona Hill, 30, a transgender woman they arrested. The officers were accused of slamming Hill’s face against the concrete sidewalk, too, and kneeing her in the face, torso and ribs.

If you still think this system of the police policing themselves works, or that lack of local control doesn’t matter, then you can probably sympathize with the 10 out of 11 officers standing around in that Go Chicken Go parking lot last November who didn’t see a thing.

This story was originally published August 26, 2020 at 5:00 AM.