After 6 days, KC Police Chief Smith finally speaks, still doesn’t say ‘George Floyd’
I was about ready to see if we couldn’t put Kansas City Police Chief Rick Smith’s face on a milk carton: Have you seen this man?
Because until Sunday, when he finally appeared at a news conference at Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas’ personal invitation, Smith had said zero words publicly about the sight of George Floyd pleading for air and for his mama, as dying men have always done.
He’d said nothing about the Minneapolis cops who killed Floyd like you’d squash a bug, or about the many other cops across the country who lit the match and now can’t believe there’s a fire.
For six days, Smith had no comment on the officer who’d held his knee on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. For five days, he kept to himself his thoughts on the protests Floyd’s murder had set off in other cities. For two days, he said nothing about protests here in Kansas City.
Smith didn’t have the week off or anything; he was at the protests, though not visible, working from the police command center. But it was Capt. Dave Jackson, a public information officer, who was sent out to speak.
That’s not leadership.
Nor is it the least bit surprising from a man whose idea of accountability and transparency is to write periodic blog posts complaining about the lack of community cooperation with the Kansas City Police Department.
When Smith finally did show himself on Sunday, and was asked why it had taken him six days to make a sound, this was his answer: “I think we put out a statement when it happened.”
Here is that May 28 statement in its entirety: “The tragedy in Minneapolis has impacted all of us. We recognize our community has questions. KCPD is committed to training our officers to protect and preserve life. We are reiterating to our officers our commitment to reasonable use of force to further our mission to protect and serve with professionalism, honor and integrity.”
The next day, the department also issued a news release on police procedures.
Across the country, other police chiefs and former police chiefs, including Kansas City’s former chief, Jackson County Sheriff Darryl Forté, knew how important it was to speak out, and they did so, forcefully condemning the police killing of yet another black man who should still be alive.
Even when Smith did step to the microphone Sunday, his central message was to tell protesters to “stop destroying our reputation as a city.”
More than once, he claimed “every single officer got assaulted yesterday,” at the protest on the Plaza, while “every single protester” did not. He said that because “I asked if anyone who was there last night did not get hit by an object, and not one officer could raise their hand.”
He volunteered nothing about any other injuries, and nothing about why there were protests in the first place.
Asked why pepper spray and tear gas had been used on even peaceful protesters, he said that once they’d been asked to leave and didn’t, they could no longer be considered peaceful.
What would he say to those worried about police brutality? That the Kansas City Police Department does a good job, by and large, and that we want to have the best police department in the country, Smith said.
Only when he was asked why he’d waited six days to so much as allude to Floyd’s death did he say this: “The whole thing that happened is disheartening. There’s nothing worse to see what you watch on TV, on video. Like I said to someone else, this is my chosen profession, the one I love. It is hard to watch things like that for me. It’s hard to see a citizen who’s totally compliant, who appears to be handcuffed on the ground treated like that. You know, it hurts all of us. I wish it never happened. I wish some officer would have stepped up and said, ‘Don’t do that.’ I wish he wouldn’t have put a knee on him. I wish circumstances didn’t unfold that way.”
And still, he couldn’t bring himself to say these two words: George Floyd.
Kansas City should be better than this, he said to protesters, and he’s right about that; breaking glass and throwing rocks helps nobody. But Kansas City also deserves better than this, better than a police chief in hiding.
This story was originally published June 1, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
