KCPD body cameras, KCK vaccination and ‘cancel culture’

Need the facts

Disturbing data from 2020 show that it not only was the deadliest year for Wyandotte County children and young adults in more than a decade, but half of all deaths of ages 1-24 were homicides. No one can deny that what is happening here is unacceptable

To determine community action, each child and youth death must be studied to find patterns. That is what Wyandotte County wants to achieve by establishing a youth fatality review board to include all deaths of those 1 to 24 years old. This initiative is supported by more than 134 organizations and individuals across the county.

Simply allowing Kansas counties to access their own data is the first step to empowering Wyandotte County’s leaders to address the issue of youth violence.

This is where state legislation is needed. If a youth fatality review board in Wyandotte County is established, it would be the first county-level child and youth death review in Kansas. Yet, data sharing from law enforcement, hospitals, schools, the Kansas Department for Children and Families and other agencies is severely limited without a state mandate.

- Rebecca Goins, Kansas City, Kansas

Must be always on

We are in the process of purchasing body cameras for officers at the Kansas City Police Department. (Jan. 14, 1A, “Body cameras come to KCPD after years of community pressure”) Since those cameras have on/off switches that can be used by the officers, we should save our money.

Those cameras should be on 24/7, with no ability for the wearers to turn them off, in order to avoid situations where the camera just happens to be off while an officer is shooting or being shot. They’re basically useless otherwise.

- Jeff Greenbaum, Kansas City

Cared for in KCK

My widowed father, who is almost 95, moved 900 miles from his home in upper Michigan last August to live with me. We have been isolating, in accordance with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines, since I am working from home. I signed both of us up for the COVID-19 vaccine as soon as the Kansas government provided a website for doing so, not holding out much hope for hearing anything anytime soon.

To my pleasant surprise, I received a call within days to set up an appointment for my dad’s vaccination. He received the first dose in a clinic set up in a former Kmart store at 78th Street and State Avenue. The people working there were without exception friendly, helpful and kind. They brought my father a wheelchair as soon as we walked in and put him at the head of the line.

I left feeling very good about my home since 1997: Kansas City, Kansas.

- Elaine Hines, Kansas City, Kansas

Classical blinders

I’m no fan of so-called “cancel culture,” but John Kass doth protest too much, methinks, in his Feb. 4 column, “They’re erasing classic literature for our children.” (11A)

After all, “woke” director Spike Lee and Kansas’ own Kevin Willmott based “Chi-Raq” on Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata.” Woke Nobel Prize poet Derek Walcott’s “Omeros” is based on Homer’s writings. Woke Norwegian writer Jo Nesbo’s “Macbeth” is based on guess what? Woke cartoonist Stephan Pastis has quoted Yeats in “Pearls Before Swine.”

I don’t think Kass sees the classics as a source of inspiration and enlightenment, but rather a means of giving himself a veneer of false sophistication.

And speaking of the classics, someone needs to update Dante’s “Inferno” to include people from the Trump administration. Unfortunately, that might include people Kass likes.

A critical thinker doesn’t cherry-pick a few egregious examples of cancel culture to paint a whole generation with a broad brush.

- Gary Brush, Kansas City

The wrong judges

John Kass is right: Purging objectionable literature from school library shelves is counterproductive. Writing in Harper’s Magazine in 1995, Jonathan Rauch argued that society can never “eradicate prejudice” because it is endemic to human nature. Rather, we must “make the best of prejudice.”

Literature is one of the most effective ways to confront and expose prejudice. Literature provides windows onto the world as it was, as it is and as we hope it may become. Removing books limits children’s possibilities for growth. According to Rauch, such “safety measures” often harm those they are intended to protect, such as when Black students, not white ones, were prosecuted under university hate speech codes. What better way to teach children about prejudice than to encounter it in works of literature and discuss why the characters’ attitudes are unfair?

One definition of “liberal” is “willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own.” If children are never allowed to encounter diverse ideas, how can they grow to become liberal-minded adults?

The removal of a book about lesbian relationships in the 1980s from my daughter’s junior high library illustrates how fraught making school librarians the arbiters of what is acceptable can be.

- Joy Raser, Olathe

Police our own

What does it say about Kansas City that our police officers do not want to live here? (Feb. 4, 1A, “Kansas City leaders condemn push to end residency rule for police”) The explanation offered by Sgt. Brad Lemon, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 99 — “They have lives and families with diverse needs and desires that go beyond just them individually; they have other needs” — doesn’t pass the sniff test or the red-face test.

If law enforcement officers do not want to be part of the community they swear to protect and serve, I sure don’t want them on my payroll.

- Linda Neal, Kansas City