Police Reform (Please Don’t Call It Defund)

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Leaders in largely Democratic Kansas City, Missouri, don’t control the city’s police department, hire the police chief or determine how the department spends its tax dollars. A 1930s-era law gives that power to a five-member board largely appointed by the Missouri governor, who since 2017 has been a Republican.

A longstanding dispute over that arrangement is erupting this summer. The two sides are preparing for a statewide vote in November on a constitutional amendment that would give the Republican-majority Legislature even more authority to set police funding.

A key legislative backer says Kansas City police need the support because some Democrats want to defund the force — a charge city leaders vehemently deny.

A local civil rights leader sued on behalf of city taxpayers, arguing that allowing the state to control the city’s police force amounts to “taxation without representation” and discriminates against Kansas City's large Black population, which experiences much of its violent crime.

Mayor Quinton Lucas, who is the only person on the Board of Police Commissioners not appointed by the governor, has indicated the proposal will be challenged in court.

The debate echoes recent confrontations between Republican state officials and Democratic leaders of larger cities elsewhere over issues including voting rights, mask mandates and recognition of the Juneteenth holiday. And it comes as the nation continues to wrestle with racial injustice in policing.

Last year, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia signed restrictive election laws that opponents claimed targeted Democratic strongholds. And school boards in largely Democratic areas defied governors in Florida, Texas and Arizona who sought to ban mask mandates during the height of the pandemic.

Kansas City, with a population of about 508,000, about 28% Black, is the only Missouri city without local control of its police force. It’s believed to be the largest city in the U.S. in that situation, the mayor’s office said.

After racial injustice protests in 2020 sparked calls for more police accountability, Lucas and some City Council members passed two ordinances that would have given city officials some control over how $42.5 million of the police department’s $239 million budget for 2021-2022 fiscal year would be spent. The money would have been used to emphasize social service and crime prevention programs.

Critics, including the police union and former police chief, said the proposal was a roundabout way of defunding the department and would leave it with insufficient money to make it through the year.

Shortly after the ordinances passed, the state-appointed police board sued the city to undo them and won. The judge said state law gives the board exclusive authority over the police budget.

The fight prompted legislators to pass a bill requiring the city to increase police funding from 20% of its general revenue budget to 25%. Republican Gov. Mike Parson signed the bill June 27.

But there was concern the move would run afoul of a state constitutional ban on unfunded state mandates for cities. So lawmakers put an amendment to address that on the November general election ballot.

Lucas tweeted that “the bill represents the raw exercise of power by state lawmakers over the people of Kansas City,” and would be challenged in court. He and other officials have noted the city already routinely funds the police department above the 20% requirement.

State Sen. Tony Luetkemeyer, a Republican who represents counties in suburban Kansas City, said he sponsored the legislation to stand with law enforcement during a time of “radical attempts across the country by city councils to defund the police.”

Melissa Robinson, a Democratic Kansas City Council member, said the current arrangement disenfranchises Kansas City taxpayers by allowing outsiders to decide how their tax dollars are spent.

She said supporters are strategizing how to persuade residents outside the city that the issue on the November ballot is centered on local control, a principle frequently lauded by Republicans.

“This is not about divisive conversations about blue lives and Black lives,” she said. “It’s the basic question of how government should work ... We never said we wanted to decrease funding, we just wanted to separate out some money and ask questions about better ways to address crime.”

Luetkemeyer said all Missourians should care about how the Kansas City police department operates because the city is one of the main economic drivers in the state.

“If Kansas City sees a dramatic increase in crime because police are defunded, that’s going to have a ripple effect across the entire economy in the state of Missouri,” he said.

According to police department crime statistics, reports of the most serious crimes, such as homicides, sex assaults, robbery, fraud and weapons violations decreased 6% from 2020 to 2021.

Homicides in the city have fluctuated between 151 in 2017 to 157 in 2021, with a high of 179 in 2020. The statistics show 78% of homicide victims in the city in 2021 were Black men and women.

Gwen Grant, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City and the civil rights leader who filed a lawsuit over the funding issue, said the current arrangement is steeped in racism.

During the Civil War, Missouri was sharply divided between Union and Confederate supporters, with much of the Union support centered in St. Louis and Kansas City, which had larger Black populations than elsewhere in the state.

In 1861, Missouri Gov. Claiborne Fox Jackson, who supported the Confederacy, persuaded the Legislature to pass a law giving the state control over the police department in St. Louis. Missouri voters in 2013 approved a constitutional amendment returning that department to local control.

The state took over the new Kansas City Police Department in 1874. That changed in 1932, when the Missouri Supreme Court ruled the appointed board’s control of the agency was unconstitutional.

But the state took back control in 1939 at the urging of another segregationist governor, Lloyd Crow Stark, in part because of corruption under highly influential political organizer Tom Pendergast. In 1943, a new law limited the amount a city could be required to appropriate to a police board to 20% of its general revenue in any fiscal year.

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LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Recent revelations about the search warrant that led to Breonna Taylor’s death have reopened old wounds in Louisville’s Black community and disrupted the city’s efforts to restore trust in the police department.

Former Louisville officer Kelly Goodlett admitted in federal court that she and another officer falsified information in the warrant. That confirmed to many, including U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, that Taylor never should have been visited by armed officers on March 13, 2020.

Protest leaders who took to the streets of Kentucky's largest city after she was fatally shot by police say Goodlett's confession confirms their suspicions that Louisville police can't be trusted and that systemic issues run deep. They say officers abused demonstrators after the botched raid, and that her fatal shooting is just one of many reasons why the community remains wary.

“What bothers me so incredibly, is that so many lives were lost because of this lie,” said Hannah Drake, a Louisville poet and leader in a push for justice after Taylor's death. “They don’t even understand the far-reaching tentacles of what they did.”

More than once during that long, hot summer, individual officers escalated rather than calmed a situation. An officer who shot into the restaurant, injuring the dead man’s niece, was fired after taunting demonstrators on social media, daring them to challenge the police. Another Louisville officer faces a federal charge over hitting a kneeling protester in the back of the head with a baton.

“We were right to protest,” Louisville Urban League President Sadiqa Reynolds tweeted shortly after Goodlett’s plea. “People are dead and lives upended because of a pile of lies.”

Some Louisville officers have been disciplined, fired, and even charged with crimes for abusing protesters, in addition to the four officers now charged federally in relation to the botched raid. But the problems can’t be blamed on a few rogue officers, according to a lawsuit brought by Taylor’s white neighbors, who were nearly hit by gunfire during the raid.

They accuse the department of having a “warrior culture” and cultivating an “us vs. them” mentality. And the family of a Black man shot dead in his restaurant's kitchen by law enforcement says in a lawsuit that police aggression during a curfew instigated his death.

Louisville is working on numerous reforms, implementing a new 911 diversion program, increasing leadership reviews of search warrant requests and improving officer training. The city has outlawed “no knock” warrants, conducted an independent audit and paid Taylor’s mother $12 million in a civil settlement. A new police chief, Erika Shields, was hired in 2021.

Such reforms have been implemented amid a continuing U.S. Department of Justice investigation of LMPD's policing practices, which could land at any moment.

The chief called Taylor's death “horrific,” and said in an interview with The Associated Press that she welcomes the federal investigations, which led to charges against Goodlett and the other officers. “I think we’re in an important place that was necessary to get to, before we move on,” she said.

Mayor Greg Fischer, whose 12-year run ends this year, said city officials turned the probes over to state and federal officials “because the community rightfully was saying LMPD should not be investigating LMPD, and I agree with that.”

Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron's investigation then ended without any officers being charged directly in Taylor's death. It took federal prosecutors to convict Goodlett — she pleaded guilty to conspiracy and admitted to helping create a phony link between Taylor and a wanted drug dealer. Goodlett resigned the day before her charges were announced in August and awaits sentencing next month.

In August court filings, federal prosecutors said another former officer, Joshua Jaynes, inserted the crucial information into the warrant request that drew Taylor into the narcotic squad's investigation — claiming that a postal inspector had verified that the drug dealer was receiving packages at Taylor's apartment.

Goodlett and Jaynes knew that was false, as did their sergeant, Kyle Meany, when he signed off on the request, Garland said.

“Breonna Taylor should be alive today," Garland said.

Goodlett, Jaynes and Meany were all fired, as was a fourth officer, Brett Hankison, who faces federal charges for blindly firing into Taylor’s home through a side door and window. He was exonerated on similar state charges earlier this year. Jaynes and Meany are being tried together. That trial, along with Hankison's, is scheduled for next year. Goodlett is expected to testify against Jaynes.

Metro Council President David James, a former police officer, said that to restore trust, Louisville’s Black community “just wants the police to treat them the same way they would treat people in another part of the city.”

No incident highlighted the racial divide more than the fatal shooting of Black restaurant owner David McAtee as police sought to enforce the city’s curfew in a predominantly African American neighborhood far from the center of the Taylor protests.

Just before midnight on May 31, 2020, Louisville officers and Kentucky National Guard members were sent to a gathering spot near McAtee's YaYa's BBQ “for a show of force (and) intimidation,” McAtee’s family alleges in a lawsuit.

A few nights earlier, officer Katie Crews had been photographed in a line of police as a protester offered her a handful of flowers. Crews posted the image on social media, writing that she hoped the protester was hurting from the pepper balls she “got lit up with a little later on.”

“Come back and get ya some more ole girl, I’ll be on the line again tonight,” Crews wrote.

When officers marched toward McAtee's restaurant, Crews escalated the tension by firing non-lethal pepper balls at the crowd, an LMPD investigation found. Many people rushed into McAtee's kitchen, where his niece was shot in the neck by Crews with the non-lethal rounds.

That prompted McAtee to pull a pistol from his hip and fire a shot. Seeing that, Crews and other officers switched to live rounds and McAtee, leaning out his kitchen door, was fatally shot in the chest by a National Guard member. The deadly force was found to be justified, but the police chief was fired by Fischer because the Louisville officers involved had failed to turn on their body cameras, just as they did during the Taylor raid.

Crews later admitted that no one in the crowd had been disorderly. She was fired by Shields in February. Now she faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of a federal charge of using unreasonable force.

James groaned while recalling McAtee’s death, saying he was saddened because he knew him and had eaten his food. The “extremely unfortunate and tragic” shooting has stuck with him as an example of bad policing, he said.

Drake said more systemic changes are needed. In the meantime, she said authorities should apologize for their treatment of protesters, and drop any cases against people arrested for demonstrating that summer. Hundreds have been cleared, but some remain criminally charged. Knowing it was all so unnecessary only deepens the pain, she said.

“We could have avoided all this,” Drake said. “And I think that’s where the pain comes from — we were right!”