A newly surfaced conflict should end Hall’s KC police board bid for good | Opinion
Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe on Thursday withdrew his nomination of former Kansas City Councilwoman Heather Hall to the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners.
Good.
But in the same statement, he made clear the door isn’t fully closed, saying the move was made “in order to preserve Hall’s ability to serve on this board in the future.”
Not good.
Hall’s nomination ran aground for a few reasons. Some of it was plain politics. After a year in which state Senate Republicans brushed aside long-standing norms to muscle through legislation — undoing voter-approved policies related to paid sick leave and abortion, and fast-tracking redistricting — Democrats entered this session looking for whatever leverage remained. One of the few tools available to them was the confirmation process.
Northland Democratic state Sen. Maggie Nurrenbern, whose sign-off was needed before Hall’s nomination advanced, used that leverage to stall Hall’s appointment. Call it institutional payback if you want. That’s part of the story. But it’s not the whole story.
Even prior to last year’s trampling of Senate traditions by Republicans — Hall was named interim commissioner in July — Nurrenbern and others expressed substantive concerns about Hall’s fitness for the job.
Much of that early criticism centered on Hall’s close ties to the department — namely that her husband, Eben, is a retired Kansas City police officer. But her record raised broader questions as well: As a member of the City Council from 2015 to 2023, Hall opposed returning local control of the police department to Kansas City and supported efforts that could weaken the city’s earnings tax, a primary source of public-safety funding. None of it inspired confidence in her independence or judgment on a board meant to oversee policing.
But there appears to be another, more direct conflict that until now hasn’t gotten much public attention.
Hall’s husband is the president of a private security firm called Custos Security, founded in 2023. State paperwork as recently as October lists Eben Hall as the company’s president, and the firm is authorized by the Kansas City Police Department to employ security officers in the city, KCPD confirmed to me Friday.
Hall has been serving on the police board in an interim capacity since July. That means there have been, at minimum, several months during which a sitting commissioner’s spouse led a private security company operating in the same city — the kind of company that regularly comes before the Board of Police Commissioners on appeals or other matters involving commissioned security officers.
Hard to conjure a clearer conflict of interest than that.
Lisa Pelofsky, who served on the police board from 2010 to 2014, told me that during her tenure private security firms were frequent visitors.
“We heard cases all the time from private security companies,” Pelofsky said. “I knew almost every security company in Kansas City by the time I got off the police board.”
Asked Friday whether Hall’s husband’s company posed a disqualifying conflict, Kehoe’s office declined to comment beyond the statement announcing her nomination’s withdrawal. A call to Custos on Friday was not returned.
There was a time when the mere appearance of a conflict like this would be enough to end a nomination outright. In 2014, police commissioner Michael S. Kilgore resigned after questions arose because his law firm represented clients suing the board. Kilgore said he could be walled off from those cases but stepped down anyway, acknowledging the distraction.
That’s the standard that should apply here, too. The police board wields enormous authority over a department Kansas City residents don’t even control. At minimum, its members should be free of obvious entanglements and capable of commanding broad public confidence.
There’s half a million people in this city. Surely, the governor can find someone without this much baggage.
This story was originally published February 6, 2026 at 2:53 PM.
