After Lamb-DeValkenaere verdict, KC Police Chief Rick Smith needs to quit or be fired

When asked about the manslaughter case against Kansas City police detective Eric DeValkenaere, Chief Rick Smith always said that it was a prosecution based on nothing and going nowhere. All politics, he told everyone who asked, and certainly nothing to worry about.

That’s not how Jackson County Circuit Court Judge J. Dale Youngs saw it. He found DeValkenaere’s violation of Cameron Lamb’s Fourth Amendment rights rather a big concern. And last Friday, he found the KCPD veteran DeValkenaere guilty of killing Lamb in 2019, nine seconds after arriving in the man’s own backyard, where the officer had no reason or right to be.

In court, DeValkenaere’s defense team argued that every single KCPD officer would have done exactly as he did.

And based on the chief’s response, we’re inclined to agree, which is the even larger problem.

What DeValkenaere did do was charge into Lamb’s backyard, gun drawn, without any permission, warrant or probable cause. As if Lamb’s basic protection from unreasonable search and seizure didn’t exist.

He had every right to be there, DeValkenaere said on the stand, because Lamb had been seen speeding after another car and might be dangerous. We believe that he believed that. Because how he’d been trained. That’s how he saw the job.

Which makes Smith at least as wrong as DeValkenaere, who will soon be behind bars.

For 16 months, we’ve been arguing that Smith can no longer lead this department.

In July of 2020, we said: “Smith’s supporters keep saying his officers love him. Of course they do; if you’re indicted in a fatal shooting for excessive use of force, he’ll defend you and refuse to fork over the necessary charging documents. But the correct term for that is obstruction of justice.

“Even in the unlikely event that the toothless, opaque Office of Community Complaints finds you were in the wrong, Smith may well override that, too. Law enforcement that exempts the guys with the guns and badges from accountability was never OK, and his department’s public position that police shootings are by definition justified shootings is untenable. So is his non-relationship with Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, who says, ‘I have tried,’ but gotten nowhere with Smith.”

Smith is hugging his officers to death.

And by now, it must be obvious even to him that he can’t stay. Periodically, a rumor runs through town that his wife wants him to retire. Chief Smith, if that’s true, listen to the woman.

Cameron Lamb’s family will surely sue and win

DeValkenaere’s defense is that after he ran into Lamb’s yard, as Lamb was backing his truck into his basement garage, he saw right-handed Lamb pull a gun from his waistband with his severely injured left hand. This while also taking a call with his right hand. Sure, right.

Lamb’s gun, which was not seen right underneath his left arm hanging out of his truck by the first officer who arrived on the scene after the shooting, magically materialized later.

And will we ordinary peons who pay your police salaries ever hear what actually happened? Under Smith, no, and how cruel of us to ask.

For now, what we know is that for 14 minutes after DeValkenaere shot Lamb, as many as nine police officers milled around in the garage where he’d been shot four times. If they weren’t planting evidence, as the prosecution said they were, then what were they doing? What other possible reason did they have for letting a man bleed out while they hung out?

Lamb died without ever being seen by a paramedic, though EMTs were there and ready and barred from approaching. And that, too, makes his death an official crime rather than one perpetrated by a single rogue officer.

The Lamb family is going to sue, of course. His loved ones are surely going to win a huge settlement from the KCPD. How many of those do taxpayers have to absorb before the police board decides that maybe a change is in order?

All the public is ever told is that everything the department does is by definition right. All shootings are justified and all criticism is unjust.

Only, a man died, absolutely needlessly, and the KCPD can’t go on like this. Not only for the sake of the Black Kansas Citians like Lamb, who suffer most from the idea that cops can do anything at any time for any reason.

Officers themselves are put at risk by the way they’re trained, assigned and taught to think that they can do no wrong.

The Star’s news coverage of Friday’s verdict quoted Black officers as saying that nothing would change with Smith in charge. They didn’t want to be quoted by name, they said, for fear of retribution for even speaking to reporters.

Be true to your tribe, in other words. Only, Kansas City deserves a police force that protects its officers by protecting all citizens. The “us versus them” mentality encouraged by Smith is a lose-lose proposition.

After the verdict, Mayor Quinton Lucas said he did not view the outcome as a broader indictment of Kansas City police.

On Monday, he called us to say that after thinking about it, he’d decided that his initial response had been wrong, and that a Star column criticizing him had been right.

“The mayor did have it upside down,” Lucas said, because police board members can’t “keep their heads in the sand” and pretend that the status quo is sustainable.

For the good of all Kansas Citians, Smith now has to resign or be fired. Because as those Black officers said, nothing can change while he’s running the department.

With a new member on the board of police commissioners, Dawn Cramer, comes a new opportunity for the accountability that the board has never before shown any interest in imposing.

There would be nothing anti-police about saving the KCPD from the kind of mistaken view of its mission that is about to send one of its own to prison.

This story was originally published November 23, 2021 at 5:00 AM.