‘There hasn’t been an adopted change yet’: Why needed KC police reforms have gone nowhere

At Tuesday’s meeting of the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners, Mayor Quinton Lucas introduced some of the modest reforms that he’s been talking about since right after George Floyd’s killing in May.

Lucas is proposing that the Kansas City Police Department’s Office of Community Complaints extend the time citizens have to file a complaint from 90 days to two years. People of any age should be able to file a complaint, he says. Witnesses to an incident should have standing to do so, too, and complaints shouldn’t have to be notarized.

These are good little tweaks in answer to police brutality, rather than the major reforms we need. But here’s why change is so small and so slow: All such proposals must be reviewed, agreed upon and modified by the Kansas City Police Department itself, before being sent back to the board.

Hey foxes, you good with these give-a-pullet a sporting chance revisions to the henhouse protocols? Or as Lucas put it, “It’s intriguing to me that it actually gets reviewed by the regulated entity itself.”

These edits to current policy now have to be reviewed by the police department’s Executive Committee. What’s that, you ask? “The chief and perhaps the deputy chief,” says Lucas.

The department’s Research & Development Committee will weigh in, too, as will the Fraternal Order of Police.

The Kansas City Police Department doesn’t have to come back to the board within any certain time period, or at all.

But if and when its leaders see the need to do anything, they will send their recommendations back to the police board for “I assume, an up-or-down vote,” Lucas said in an interview after the meeting.

Wait, he assumes? Lucas doesn’t know for sure, he said, because in the more than a year that he’s been on the board, there have been no formal proposals to do anything at all. “There hasn’t been an adopted change yet.”

When the mayor got the police department to agree that all officer-involved shootings would from now on be investigated by the Missouri State Highway Patrol, that was done informally, Lucas said. The Kansas City Police Department is keeping them busy; there have been six officer-involved shootings since June.

But no one forced the department to make that change. “Actually, the department has sometimes been more amenable than the board has been,” Lucas said.

Nothing about the pep club police board’s make-believe oversight of the police department is working for us, Kansas City.

Chief Rick Smith: Send me an email

At Tuesday’s meeting, Merrell Bennekin, executive director of the Kansas City Police Department Office of Community Complaints, said his office was trying to become more responsive. “De-escalation is the big thing now,” he said, and his office is trying to do that with complaints by answering them.

It’s “utter nonsense” that the low percentage of substantiated complaints is a problem, said Commissioner Nathan Garrett, the board’s most enthusiastic proponent of the status quo. “The numbers will be whatever the numbers will be.”

Here is Tuesday’s discussion on the mayor’s proposed changes:

Commission President Don Wagner: “We’ll take a look at ‘em.”

Bishop Mark Tolbert: “These are now going to be submitted for further discussion?”

Police Chief Rick Smith, whose resignation we have called for multiple times, as has every civil rights organization in town: “Then we’ll come back to the board.”

If you have any thoughts, Smith told Tolbert, just let me know in an email.

Heaven forfend they have anything approaching a real exchange of ideas in a public setting.

Smith, who gave the board a report on the serious current COVID-19 spike among officers, wasn’t wearing a mask for most of the meeting, and neither was Garrett, who was seated just a few feet from Lucas.

“I wish more would wear masks in more situations,” the mayor said when asked about it. “You choose your battles sometimes in this job.”

If this board never met again, nothing would be lost.