‘We need to have outside eyes’: Former KCK cop and mayoral candidate seeks DOJ probe
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Kansas City, Kansas, mayor election
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Tyrone Garner joined the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department right out of Wyandotte High School, and except for a stint in the U.S. Army spent his entire career there, retiring as deputy chief in 2019.
So Garner, who is running for mayor of the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and KCK, knows what he’s talking about when he says that if he wins, one of his first and most urgent obligations will be traveling to D.C. to explain to officials at the Department of Justice why his community needs a team of investigators here ASAP. “We need to have outside eyes,” he said, to properly investigate the many allegations of serious crimes committed by former KCK police detective Roger Golubski and others.
What KCK needs, he said, is for investigators “who have no connections to any groups, factions, political alliances or anything like that in Wyandotte County to come in and do the right thing for the people.” When Garner said that, in an endorsement interview with our editorial board, I accused him of trying to make me stand up and cheer.
Because yes, that is clearly what it’s going to take to get anything resembling justice for generations of victims.
“There’s been so many allegations of misconduct and nefarious activities by the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department,” Garner said, “I would like to just take the bold step and go to D.C. and meet and have the Justice department come in here. Talk is cheap and talk has gotten us nowhere. … You wait people out. It’s the game I’ve seen played when I’d sit in these meetings and shake my head and say this is crazy.”
“So I would take the bold step — and it’s not even bold, it’s the right thing to do — I want to talk to the chief, the sheriff and the DA and have a unified front and say we need the Justice Department in here. We need the full resources of the federal government to come in here and look at what is really going on with the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department and take it wherever it goes. If people need to be brought to justice, bring them to justice. That’s the only way the people in Wyandotte County are at least going to have a pathway to rebuilding trust in law enforcement.”
OK, don’t care; that sound you hear is me cheering, because that’s exactly what needs to happen. Garner is running on lots of issues besides police reform, but if he accomplished that one thing, it would be a monumental change for his community.
‘There is a blue code of silence. It exists, it’s there.’
As an internal affairs investigator himself, Garner saw that the system was if anything set up to prevent rogue officers from being held to account for some of their most serious violations.
“The way internal affairs worked then and I believe it still works now,” he said, “you couldn’t go out and proactively investigate things. We had to wait for the investigations to be given to us by the chief’s office. So they were controlled. That’s how investigations were ran. You could come in and make a complaint, off the street, and if it’s something low level, like the officer didn’t take my report, he yelled at me or cussed at me, or something like that, those are things we would take, but the bigger complaints — corruption — those had to be ran through my boss and then the chief’s office.”
He did not say this part, but I will: So no wonder nothing was ever done to or later about Roger Golubski. The chief was Terry Zeigler, Golubski’s former partner, when accusations that Golubski had sexually coerced and exploitied a bunch of poor Black women first became public. Some of these women wound up being murdered, and Golubski, who retired four years before Zeigler became chief in 2014, himself investigated some of their homicides, most of which were never solved. Like Garner, Zeigler retired in 2019. He has said the KCKPD never received any complaints against his former partner.
I’ve reported on how the whole culture of the KCKPD enabled and protects Golubski, which is why he’s still walking around free and collecting a public pension. Garner also believes that the culture needs a massive overhaul.
Without being asked about it, he said this: “I’m not a fan of the police culture, let me put it like that, in Kansas City, Kansas. Because of the things I did in internal affairs, I never ascribed to that — and it’s real, and I spoke about this when I was deputy chief — there is a blue code of silence. It exists, it’s there. I used to tell officers that we’d go out in the community and talk about ‘don’t snitch’ to the community, but a lot of officers were the biggest perpetuators of ‘don’t snitch’ anywhere that you could find.”
He insists that he never even heard about Golubski during his years in internal affairs. “I was surprised when those allegations came out.” But what he did hear about convinced him that “the police don’t need to be policing themselves. I learned that in internal affairs because I looked at some of those files going back. I looked at those and I’m like, hmm, interesting. I was one of those officers who didn’t make any friends but I wasn’t there to make friends. I was there to do the right thing for the people and do what I was sworn to uphold. … I didn’t care, and that bothered some people and ruffled some feathers.”
As a man who spent his adult life in a uniform, he’s obviously not anti-police, but anti-corruption.
“There’s people there now that don’t need to be anywhere near a badge and a gun. … And if you don’t like people — trust me, there are people out here that don’t like people — you don’t need to be a police officer. You want to police these people but you don’t want to be associated with these people.”
“A Mayor Tyrone Garner” would, he promises, “go to the Justice Department and say please come in here, we’re going to give you all the resources, the information and whatever we have to do an investigation.”
Yes, please.
This story was originally published July 8, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
