Lucas says ‘taxpayers just want a say’ in police funding. But will he follow through?

Mayor Quinton Lucas has promised to push for some local oversight of the police department, but will he follow through? Even hoping that he will feels somewhere between naive and delusional at this point. Because Lucas, we’re sorry to say, is someone who rarely keeps his promises.

The mayor will face voters a year from now. And he seems to have decided that he wants to give the department everything it wants and then some. The city’s new budget blueprint calls for more police and raises for everyone in the department.

In his state of the city address, Lucas said the city’s new budget will allocate 20% of its “general revenue” to the police department, as required by state law. That’s roughly $195 million.

The budget, the mayor said, will also allocate an additional $42 million for other police purposes, including hiring more officers and raises for current members of the force. It’ll go in what’s called the Community Policing and Prevention Fund.

That $42 million set-aside sounds familiar. It’s the same amount Lucas and others tried to reallocate to alternative crime-fighting initiatives last May. In the face of a record murder rate, the City Council wanted more police accountability and better performance.

The department, and the Board of Police Commissioners, were furious. The board sued the City Council, claiming mid-year police budget changes are illegal. A friendly judge agreed.

But the court said the mayor and City Council could make those changes at budget time, in February and March. That time has arrived, so Lucas could and should act now, but will he?

Splitting police funding into two categories — the required 20%, plus an additional $42 million — is only a start. If that’s all the city does, it will have enacted accounting reform, not police reform.

The additional funding would be used in part to hire “roughly” 150 new police officers. What happens if the department gets the money but fails to do the hiring? Under past practice, the police would just spend money somewhere else, without any review by the council.

Any unused funds should be sent back to the city. If KCPD fails to hire more cops, or beef up 911 operations, or expand community policing, or augment the violent crimes division, the money should not go back to the police for other things.

The department cannot be allowed to use any part of the $42 million on any program not expressly authorized by the City Council. Now is the time to make that statement explicitly.

That’s what Lucas wanted last May, or said he did.

A contract, signed by the police board and the City Council, is the best approach. But there are other options, including specific clawback language in the budget ordinance, or requiring that the department reach explicit benchmarks before cash is transferred.

Lucas says the exact details of the arrangement have yet to be worked out. “We just want a say,” he told us. “The taxpayers just want a say” on how the department spends at least some of its cash.

That’s the whole point, of course. Kansas City can no longer write a quarter-billion-dollar check to the police and then walk away, surrendering multimillion-dollar decisions to an unelected, unaccountable police board.

We stated that view firmly in 2021, when the mayor made his first attempt to change police funding. We’re not backing away now, and he shouldn’t either.

This story was originally published February 11, 2022 at 5:00 AM.