KC Mayor Quinton Lucas: Opponents of police reform ‘using our tragedies as fear porn’

When we predicted that opponents of Kansas City’s new police reform ordinances would run through the land shrieking as if pursued by wild beasts, yes, that happened.

There’s really no reason to sweat this predictable pushback, though.

The allergic reaction has been dishonest and fearmongering. (If, with a $200 million budget, you suddenly can’t make payroll, that will have been your choice, Chief.) But the resistance may very well wind up making the reforms far stronger than they would otherwise have been.

That’s because the lawsuit that the state-appointed police board wants to file against the city would put the whole issue of our Kansas City-funded but Jefferson City-controlled police force in the courts.

Any legislation mandating that we spend even more of our city’s budget on a police department over which Kansas Citians have no say would be Exhibit A in litigation that at this point feels inevitable.

Mayor Quinton Lucas wrote the reform ordinances himself and got an immediate “hell, yes” from all of his south-of-the-river City Council colleagues in a single day just ahead of the vote.

He told The Star Editorial Board that he really does welcome the involvement of the courts, because we are never going to be able to take back control of our own police department otherwise. That’s unfortunate, but it also happens to be true.

No question a court case would be messy, drawn-out and expensive. But the current system of a police force with no accountability isn’t working for anyone, cops included.

We just keep losing a record-setting number of Kansas Citians to homicide. Our legislature just keeps relaxing state gun laws, nullifying federal gun laws and preventing local gun laws from taking effect.

Our police chief, Rick Smith, just keeps protecting problem officers and refusing to work with our prosecutor. Our police board, really a one-man band named Nathan Garrett, keeps insisting that everything Smith does somehow sets the national standard for excellence.

And our statewide officials just keep arguing that only doing more of the same while shouting, “Back the blue!” will solve our violent crime problem.

“Everyone has been very predictable,” Lucas said, in response to the new city ordinances, which put about 20% of the KCPD budget effectively under local control through police contracts with the city. “I expected the police board to sue us. I welcome the suit, not as a matter of bravado but because it allows us to raise counterclaims we’ve been wanting to raise for years. I do not think this is a constitutional system. That’s the way this gets to the light of day. This is about setting up the strongest argument we’d be able to make” for local control.

“I’d be interested in having a court discussion about, ‘Can the state legislature require more of our budget to be police funds without the voice of the people of Kansas City?’ That’s what our state senators and representatives are positing. I don’t think the court would find that. I don’t think a court would find that it’s reasonable that one city in Missouri is treated differently than every other city and jurisdiction.”

Everyone is unhappy with the current situation, though it’s the Black community that’s suffered the most from the police brutality that Smith’s “if we did it, it must be right” attitude enables.

To those who say that local control is no panacea: You’re right. It’s a needed first step rather than a solution in itself.

But same-old, same-old is guaranteed to keep getting us the same deadly results.

And the mayor is right that victims of this violence have been tellingly absent from the furor over the reforms.

“We’ve heard from the state attorney general, the governor of Missouri, and no one’s talked a single thing about murders other than wanting to use them as a scoreboard to show how problematic the cities of St. Louis and Kansas City are. So rather than using our tragedies as fear porn in a political game, I wish they would actually work with us on fundamentally addressing ways we can improve our response to violent crime.”

When the city’s public works department flubs the response to a snowstorm, we don’t say, “Oh, but they were out in bad weather working so hard!” We say, “Hey, you missed 63rd Street,” because it’s through that accountability that service improves.

Yet when our most expensive department keeps showing unacceptable results in response to our most pressing problem, we say that to hold police accountable would somehow be shameful.

State oversight that’s no oversight at all, by a quasi-colonial power, “is a system that has to come to an end,” the mayor says, and we strongly agree. “It’s a shame it has to go to school district-style desegregation litigation.”

But even that would be better than the current nightmare, from which too many Kansas Citians really don’t ever wake up.