Letter to NBA sends a serious warning: Police brutality will cost Kansas City
Last week, the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners adjourned, fled and hid out in closed session until the civil rights protesters who were there to demand a vote on whether to fire Kansas City Police Chief Rick Smith had left the building.
Once they had gone, board members reemerged, and went back to pretending everything is fine. It isn’t, though, and won’t be without serious reforms that include Smith’s departure.
Instead, the Kansas City Police Department just keeps giving us fresh examples of the kind of inhuman treatment of Black Kansas Citians that convinced us to call for Smith’s firing months ago: An unarmed Black 15-year-old on his knees and putting up no resistance has his face smashed into concrete, and that’s just another Thursday night. A Black woman who is nine months pregnant is thrown onto her belly and handcuffed while an officer holds his knee on her back.
Still, the board that theoretically oversees the police department continues to pelt Smith with rose petals. And sure, its members can continue to duck protesters at police headquarters. But city leaders can’t continue to ignore the reality that the need for change is urgent.
The protesters deserve the vote they’re asking for and won’t get. Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas says “that would just be a purely performative act” and because it wouldn’t result in Smith’s ouster, could lead to even more frustration.
But here’s how well failing to address the pain of so many in any substantive way is working: On Saturday, local civil rights leaders began speaking the language that corporate Kansas City understands. They wrote NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and asked him to keep the Kansas City Police Department’s “extreme hostility” toward Black people in mind when considering the city as a possible temporary home for the Toronto Raptors.
“There are some issues which supersede fun and economic interests,” the letter said. “Although Kansas City is a great sports city, it is also a city where law enforcement has demonstrated extreme hostility and excessive force towards Black people.”
We aren’t likely to lure the Toronto Raptors here, anyway. But Kansas City’s civil rights community just sent up a flare that from here on out, it’s going to be taking on economic power.
And that’s a promise that will be a lot harder to ignore than the strong words that sent police board members running.
Lucas said the letter changes nothing because every city in America, Kansas City included, is already trying to make sure people of all races feel safe. “I believe Black lives matter whether we have the Toronto Raptors playing here for a few months or not. … I understand where people are coming from, but that’s something I wake up caring about every day.”
People of all races don’t feel safe here, though, and don’t have reason to.
Gwendolyn Grant, president of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City and one of those who signed and sent the letter, said, “Over the summer, the mayor and other civic leaders expressed a commitment to Black Lives Matter but failed to remove a bigoted and incompetent police chief. I hope they recognize that the continued presence of Rick Smith is not only detrimental to substantive police reform and authentic community-police relationships. It will have a deleterious impact on our convention and tourism business.”
Remember when the NCAA threatened to move the Final Four, and maybe even its headquarters, out of Indianapolis over legislation that would have allowed businesses to discriminate against gay people? It was the potential loss of dollars and prestige, expressed in a memorable front-page editorial in the Indianapolis Star, that sent then-Gov. Mike Pence and Indiana state lawmakers scurrying to amend that law five years ago.
Likewise, this letter to the NBA is a dead-serious signal that the new corporate employers and institutions so crucial to Kansas City’s future are not going to choose a city that continues to mistreat its Black citizens. Why would they?