Mayor Lucas, don’t be another rubber stamp for anything the Kansas City police demand

For years, this newspaper has argued for local control of the Kansas City Police Department. We’ve said the state-appointed police board doesn’t really supervise the city’s largest and most important function, leading to inefficiencies and soaring crime.

That opinion now skates on the thinnest possible ice.

This year’s police budget debacle, and developments since, suggest Mayor Quinton Lucas and his City Council colleagues are losing enthusiasm for meaningful oversight of the department. If that posture continues — and we’ll know for sure in the next 100 days — any rational argument for local control, including ours, will vanish.

That would be tragic. If the city’s elected leaders abandon the effort to oversee the police, the department’s status as an agency answerable only to itself will be strengthened. Hope for significant police reform — or violent crime reduction — will end.

Kansas City would regret that outcome for generations. Here’s how it could happen:

Last May, Lucas urged eight City Council members to redirect $42 million in the police budget into alternative crime prevention efforts.

The council members voted to do so. Critics quickly and inaccurately labeled the decision as “defunding” the department, so it took political courage to stick with the idea of proposing alternatives to the department’s failed crime-fighting strategies.

A few months later, a judge said the $42 million redirection broke state law. Crucially, though, he said the City Council simply chose the wrong time to make the changes, not that the reallocations were inherently illegal.

Missouri law still says 20% of the city’s general fund must go for police. That’s the target: roughly $200 million. Yet for the past three weeks, the Board of Police Commissioners has treated the threshold as a joke.

The final budget, approved last week, spends $243 million from the general fund.

Lucas sits on the police board. He worked hard to ensure $135 million of the budget is spent for salary increases and new officers, not lawsuit settlements and other items. While that’s an important step, it’s accounting reform, not police reform.

And if that $135 million remains intact, the City Council will have to reduce or redirect nearly half the police department’s non-payroll spending to meet the 20% target. That would mean less equipment, training, medical spending and dozens of other cuts.

A change of that magnitude utterly depends on Lucas’ leadership. Yet there is little public evidence that he has the taste for another major budget battle with the department.

“They do gestures,” one City Council member told us about Lucas, explaining his resistance to real police reform.

We can still be proven wrong. We want to be wrong. Some council members say the 20% target is still on the table, which will become clearer next year. We hope that’s right.

Someone must step forward and insist on a 20% hard cap on the police budget, with additional funds provided only after the department commits to community-oriented reforms.

If no one does so, the argument for local control will be weakened beyond repair. It will show the city’s elected leadership is no more willing to take on the police than the state-appointed cheerleaders who run the department now.

The KCPD is already supervised by a rubber stamp. There will be no need to create a new one.

This story was originally published November 15, 2021 at 5:00 AM.