KC Mayor Quinton Lucas gives his word, yet again: Police won’t lose a single dollar
The whole idea of “defunding the police” is in most cases a fantasy bordering on shared hysteria. Conservative, progressive or moderate, ask six different people what the phrase means, and you’ll likely get eight different, politically self-serving answers.
No matter where the shouting matches go, though, city councils across the country are left to deal with reality. For Kansas City, the reality is that our city’s lack of any control at all over our own police department isn’t working for anyone. The city this year is on track to see its second highest number of murders — with this year second only to last year.
It’s way past time to try something new.
That’s why I’m convinced the Kansas City Council nailed it when in a 9-4 vote on May 20, it approved putting about a sixth of the police budget, $42 million, in a separate pot that police will get, too, but only after negotiations over how best to spend it. In all likelihood, the KCPD will end up with more dollars rather than fewer; if that’s defunding, where do I sign up?
The Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners then sued Mayor Quinton Lucas and the council for taking this action, because heaven forbid our city’s elected leaders have any say at all in how our tax money is spent.
The suit filed in July in Jackson County Circuit Court claims the city is attempting to “defund,” the police, even though that wasn’t the intention and won’t be the result.
“I have said it a thousand times,” Lucas told our editorial board last week. “There is no way, according to the ordinances, money goes anywhere outside the Kansas City Police Department. Unless the Board of Commissioners wants to decide that the money would go to some other group, which I think is very unlikely.”
“It is a bold-faced lie,” the mayor said, to pretend that any limits exist on how police can spend the millions that have been set aside. If Chief Rick Smith can prove it’s essential to spend it on an artillery of 20 new helicopters, “talk to us about it and odds are they may get that money,” Lucas said. He gave his guarantee every penny would go to policing.
It doesn’t ‘punish police’ if cities have a say in spending
Let’s say you think it’s Lucas who is lying. Let’s say you believe that this personal guarantee that the police won’t lose any funding is meaningless. Only, for that to be true, you would also have to believe that he isn’t interested in either a second term as mayor or in running for any other office. Sure, because extending this guarantee and then walking away from it would be political suicide.
If anything, Lucas has significantly limited the city’s leverage in negotiations with the police department by promising, even before those negotiations begin, that the KCPD doesn’t stand to lose anything at all. He’s effectively just answered the question of what happens if negotiations reach an impasse: The KCPD gets the money anyway.
Still, the hegemonic Board of Police Commissioners and siloed conservatives living detached from communities terrorized by gun violence insist on attaching the ill-defined “defund the police” label to ordinances that — and I repeat — do not abolish or even take anything away from police; that’s an obvious and intentional mischaracterization.
“Defund means we are taking this money from you and you can’t get it back,” Lucas told us last week. “What we are saying is we actually just want to talk to you” about how the money is to be spent.
The first of the two relevant ordinances basically captures the money and the second directs it back to police but authorizes the city manager to “execute an agreement,” with the Board of Police Commissioners “for Kansas City Police Department to provide certain community outreach.”
It’s clear that police work would be funded out of the $42 million. “That is money that is in the city’s budget. Is already allocated to the Kansas City Police Department,” Lucas said.
The idea that, as Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt’s fear-mongering lawsuit states, “These ordinances seek to punish police and will prevent law enforcement from keeping Kansas City safe” is laughable.
Is every other city in Missouri punishing police, then, by having a say in how their local tax dollars are spent? Kansas City is not safe now.
There is no mystery about what will happen if we keep doing the same thing the same way. Trying to wrest even a small measure of local control is mostly symbolic. That it’s provoked such a disproportionate and dishonest reaction ought to make us wonder exactly what about that is so threatening.
