Can you see KCPD’s Rick Smith testifying as honestly as Minneapolis chief? We can’t
Do you think Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo has any brothers, sisters, aunts or uncles or cousins who might be available to lead the Kansas City Police Department with the same integrity that he showed in testifying against his former officer Derek Chauvin this week?
You could say that all Arradondo really did on the stand was refuse to defend the indefensible. And you’d be right, given that the entire country watched Chauvin kill George Floyd last May, in excruciating slow motion, for no reason, unimpeded by even a flicker of humanity or mercy.
Yet while it’s all too easy to imagine a similar killing in Kansas City, where headlines about the excessive use of force from repeat offenders inside the KCPD just keep on coming, it is impossible to suppose that Chief Rick Smith would ever speak the truth about one of his own officers as plainly as Arradondo did. Smith’s default position is that if one of his men or women did it, then it must have been OK.
“Once Mr. Floyd had stopped resisting, and certainly once he was in distress and trying to verbalize that, that should have stopped,” Arradondo said of Chauvin’s murderous knee-on-the-neck maneuver, which went on for nine minutes and 29 seconds. “There is an initial reasonableness in trying to just get him under control in the first few seconds. But once there was no longer any resistance and clearly when Mr. Floyd was no longer responsive and even motionless, to continue to apply that level of force to a person proned out, handcuffed behind their back — that in no way shape or form is anything that is by policy. It is not part of our training, and it is certainly not part of our ethics or our values.”
Obvious, right? Not in Kansas City, where Smith’s response to allegations of wrongdoing is to reflexively hide the facts from Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, and hope no one finds out about them.
Smith’s response is to continue to refuse to give Baker the charging documents she needs to prosecute a law-breaking cop. This forces her to go through a grand jury, which because that isn’t a transparent process, further erodes public trust.
Last April, Baker wrote to Smith. “By withholding a probable cause statement for an officer-involved incident,” she told him, “you are blocking the prosecutor’s independent review of the facts under the law. Our system of government depends on checks and balances and oversight. Without such, the public will not have confidence in our decisions.”
Here we are, a year later, and he’s still doing it.
That’s called obstruction of justice, and is itself a crime.
Reflexively defending accused police officers
Smith’s determination to shield his officers from accountability hurts Black and brown Kansas Citians most directly, but it also undermines the efforts of officers who do what they do for the right reasons and in the right way.
Just this week, The Star broke the news that two Kansas City police officers sued last week for allegedly beating a man in the summer of 2019 have been accused of two other alleged assaults that year.
Officers Charles Prichard and Matthew Brummett were indicted last year for using unnecessary force in the arrest of Breona Hill, a transgender woman whose face was smashed into the sidewalk. That horrifyingly violent arrest was captured on video, just as Floyd’s death was. They have been assigned to administrative duties while that case is pending, but are still on the public payroll.
A robbery and assault suspect has also filed a federal complaint accusing Prichard of running over him twice with his squad car, and accusing both Prichard and Brummett of beating him while he was handcuffed. Both officers have denied all wrongdoing in both that case and Hill’s.
Prichard and Brummett are among five Kansas City police officers who have been indicted in the last 10 months in cases alleging violent crimes against Black people.
Then there’s the KCPD’s Blayne Newton, who fatally shot an unarmed 24-year-old, Donnie Sanders, last March. And during an arrest in October, Newton allegedly put his knee on the back of a nine-months-pregnant Black woman with her belly on the ground.
The community has long since lost faith in Smith’s leadership, and we on The Star Editorial Board have been calling for his resignation since July.
Just last month, The Heartland Presbytery, a regional body that represents the Presbyterian Church in Kansas and Missouri, called on him to step down, too, citing his refusal to “investigate and discipline police officers who act lawlessly, unethically and without proper respect, especially for Black and brown people” and his determination to block “necessary police reforms, like a ban on the neck restraint that other departments consider too dangerous to use and a zero-tolerance policy for officers who use excessive force.”
On Tuesday, Urban League CEO Gwen Grant said, “Here we go again! How many more Black men, women and juveniles have to be beaten and killed by KCPD officers before the Board of Police Commissioners exhibits the moral character and fortitude to remove Chief Smith and hire a chief of police who will not obstruct justice, but will hold his officers accountable not only for enforcing the law, but also following the law? How many more Black men, women and juveniles must suffer abuse at the hands of KCPD before business, civic and faith-based leaders stand up and demonstrate through their outrage and intolerance that Black Lives do in fact really matter? Their loud silence is deafening. Silence is complicity.”
Without local control of our police department, Smith will continue to get only attaboys from the board made up of governor’s appointees, plus our mayor, that’s supposed to be holding him accountable and does not.
After all that’s already happened, what would it take to replace him with someone even marginally more like Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo? Let’s hope to God the answer isn’t another killing like George Floyd’s.
This story was originally published April 6, 2021 at 1:09 PM.