KC does not need occupying federal forces. Instead, bring justice to our community
We are on the verge of a federal occupation in Kansas City — and you should be alarmed.
Last Wednesday, Attorney General William Barr’s Department of Justice promised to bring 225 agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service to Kansas City as part of “Operation Legend.” In just days, they will be arriving in our neighborhoods.
We are real people who must live with this broken-windows operation. As organizers in the movement for social justice, we’ve brought thousands to the streets in protest of state-sanctioned harm against communities of color. Our organizations, Black Rainbow and One Struggle KC, must articulate our community’s urgent rejection of this authoritarian crackdown, and also uplift the proven truth that more police will not make us safe.
Where was the federal intervention when unarmed Black men such as Donnie Sanders, Ryan Stokes and Terrance Bridges were recently killed by Kansas City police officers? Though Operation Legend is named after 4-year-old LeGend Taliferro — one of the youngest victims of gun violence in Kansas City — we don’t believe that it will protect Black lives like his. Instead, it is a calculated and opportunistic cover for what the Trump administration began last December through a program called “Operation Relentless Pursuit.”
We are simply being used. After Kansas City, the Justice Department plans to crack down on six other similarly-sized cities using more than $61 million of federal money freed up in May. We are the guinea pig for President Donald Trump’s promise to “take over cities.”
Kansas City is not your testing ground for martial law.
This crackdown precisely demonstrates the problem: Our communities have been devastated by generations of socioeconomic deprivation, forcing us to navigate unsafe conditions, feeding an incarceration system that excessively criminalizes Black people. For Black Kansas Citians, this system ends with vulnerability to premature death and a median household wealth about one-tenth that of white households’.
How many more Black children could be saved had Mayor Quinton Lucas asked Gov. Mike Parson for immediate state funding and public health resources instead of “more tools for law enforcement”?
Healing our communities has never been and never will be achieved through increased policing. Instead of a Trump intervention, what do we really need? The answer is already in front of us in the sum of $273 million: We must fundamentally divest from our broken policing system to invest in our communities.
The 2020-2021 Kansas City budget allocates this obscene $273 million to the Kansas City Police Department. As it stands, our public safety system redirects money into reproducing our social problems rather than fixing them. The police budget is six times the economic development budget, nine times the health care budget and 11 times the housing services budget.
Through this systematic drain of resources from our city budget, policing deprives more life than any murderer ever could with guns. From 2012 to 2018, the police department’s budget increased by 28% while the violent crime rate grew by a whopping 47%. It simply doesn’t work.
We don’t want more sentences, prisons and surveillance. We need guaranteed homes. We need living wage jobs. We need health and human services.
Our task now is to build up life-affirming institutions in Kansas City. Instead of policing that devalues and disposes of Black, queer, trans, immigrant and poor lives, we need to fund alternatives that cherish and build up our people. The safest communities in our metropolitan area are well-resourced ones such as the Northland, Leawood and Lee’s Summit, where policing is not at the center of civic life.
Imagine a community that doesn’t put people in cages, but prioritizes restorative justice, health and humanity.
In the coming days, we will be organizing to mobilize against Trump’s incoming federal occupation. We believe in a future where all Black people are able to walk in our communities safely and with dignity. If you do too, join us.
Skyler B. Harrington is a Kansas City activist and organizer with Black Rainbow, working in coalition with One Struggle KC.
This story was originally published July 18, 2020 at 5:00 AM.