Racist, hateful recordings show the Wyandotte County DA’s ‘integrity’ unit had none
What’s been going on inside the Wyandotte County District Attorney’s office is vile.
DA Mark Dupree’s “Community Integrity Unit,” tasked with policing the police and reviewing wrongful convictions, just blew up. Two members of the three-person unit, one white and one Black, had to be fired after being secretly recorded disparaging Black people as well as those who are gay, disabled, Chinese, transgender and unemployed.
The two also disparaged people who make claims of a wrongful conviction — in other words, the very people the unit was in theory set up to help.
According to recordings obtained by KCTV5 News, the white official says of Black people: “And now you have a generation of complete sh--bags, who are sh--bags to the core, who are out doing sh--bag things and are like, ‘I’m Black, you can’t do nothing to me.’”
The Black official agrees.
“All our criminals, all the sh--heads and unemployed, ship them on a plane, give them a rifle and drop them in China,” the white official says.
“You know what they do with their homosexuals?” the Black official says of China. “I’m not sure, but they probably kill them.” Laughter follows. “I’m not saying we should kill the homosexuals. That’s not what I am saying. I’m just saying I don’t understand why I need to be proud that you’re homosexual.”
Adds the white official: “I am down for, like, killing these freaky a-- people that are so confused …”
“You mean trans people?” the Black official asks.
“Uh-huh.” More laughter. “I’m fine with cleaning that out.”
What’s been cleaned out is that so-called “Community Integrity Unit.”
That such an important office employed people who obviously have no integrity is shameful.
And that’s squarely on Mark Dupree, who either knew and didn’t care or didn’t care enough to know what was going on in that office.
Why wasn’t this unit getting anything accomplished, we kept wondering. Why weren’t they reopening unsolved cases? Well, now we know.
The recordings were made by the third of the three-member team, who had already been fired for not working well with the other two. Under the circumstances, that’s understandable.
So, this was not much of a unit at all..
The “integrity” unit, originally a Conviction Integrity Unit, was expanded and renamed last year to give Dupree’s office a dedicated staff and mission to investigate police misconduct. Only that hasn’t happened, has it?
Here’s how important Mark Dupree thought this unit was: Another attorney in the former Conviction Integrity Unit left after it came out that she wasn’t even licensed to practice law in Kansas.
One of the two he fired for the offensive remarks was immediately hired by new Douglas County DA Suzanne Valdez, who trumpeted it as a win for diversity.
After the news of his firing in Wyandotte County became public, Valdez quickly fired him again. Dupree’s castoff was employed by Valdez just from May 24 to May 26, doubtless after minutes of rigorous vetting.
Dupree and Valdez have worked together in the past, so if they talked about this employee, Dupree clearly said nothing to dissuade Valdez from hiring him.
“There’s no way in the world he should’ve walked over somewhere else and got hired. Do an investigation of these people,” says Khadijah Hardaway of Justice for Wyandotte.
You’d almost think Dupree had only wanted a fake integrity unit to begin with.
Whatever his motivation, his commitment to taking on police corruption is invisible to the human eye.
This is, however, a happy day for those who never wanted such a team funded to begin with, because they want lifelong criminal Roger Golubski and his many collaborators at the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department to remain protected in perpetuity.
This, too, is why only the Department of Justice can take on corruption in Wyandotte County: Those inside the system either have a conflict of interest or are just not interested.