The week in review: Changing clocks, KC police brutality payments, Bill Self punished

A daylight saving time compromise

Daylight saving time ends for most of the country this weekend. That means the now-familiar ritual of re-setting clocks on the microwave oven and in the bedroom. (In this case, we fall an hour back.)

It also means the hand-wringing and caterwauling over our peculiar clock management will begin anew. Standard time fans say daylight saving time is unhealthy. Summerites prefer the extra hour of rays in June and July.

Everyone complains about changing the clocks twice a year. They’ll do so again in March, when we spring an hour forward.

There is an obvious, modest answer. Let’s move the clocks by 30 minutes, just once, then leave them alone. In this case, next March, we could spring forward half an hour, then walk away forever.

A 30-minute adjustment would provide some additional evening light in the spring and summer, but not force kids to wait for the bus in the dark in November. It would end the ceaseless battle over daylight time, and protect the microwave.

Sometimes the route to compromise is clear. You’re welcome.

Bad policing costs Kansas City taxpayers

Enough is enough. Kansas City residents should be long fed up with paying big bucks for bad behavior by individuals in our police department.

The answer should be to change that behavior with better training and protocols and get rid of the bad actors.

But police have not been transparent about what, if any, specific changes they’ve made after settling several brutality cases costing taxpayers many millions of dollars. No surprise there though, since a lack of transparency between police and the public has long been business as usual in Kansas City.

On Thursday, the city learned that the Board of Police Commissioners agreed to pay an astronomical $5 million to settle a wrongful death police brutality case. It was the largest such payout in KCPD history, but it wasn’t the only hefty one the department has made this year.

The latest payment is on top of about $3.5 million that KCPD has paid so far in 2022 to settle lawsuits or excessive use of force claims filed by victims or their families. The fact that nearly $9 million is coming out of the police budget probably means some police services that would benefit this city are not going to happen. What those cut services are, we don’t know, with the lack of transparency and all. This, while KCPD is asking for more taxpayer dollars and Kansas City has one of the nation’s highest homicide rates. We do know, as we and city residents have said, that enough is enough.

KU, Bill Self admit to cheating?

We’ve been critical of Kansas basketball coach Bill Self and remain skeptical of his plausible deniability in the NCAA’s yearslong infraction case against the Jayhawks. But to his credit, Self finally accepted some semblance of responsibility for the basketball program running afoul of NCAA bylaws.

We find it hard to believe the national championship-winning Hall of Fame coach and his top lieutenant, assistant coach Kurtis Townsend, didn’t know about alleged illicit payments to former Jayhawks Silvio De Sousa and Billy Preston.

The infractions case against Kansas began in 2019. The inquiry stems from a 2017 federal investigation into cheating that led to the conviction of shoe company executives with KU sponsor Adidas.

If the Jayhawks broke the rules — and evidence suggests they did — more punishment from the NCAA could follow. But the self-imposed four-game ban Self and Townsend agreed to is an important step in concluding this long-standing case.