KC considers dropping Chiefs Super Bowl rally at Union Station after last year’s shooting

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Should the Chiefs become the first NFL team to win a third straight Super Bowl, Kansas City will host another civic celebration to honor the team, Mayor Quinton Lucas says.

But that event might look a lot different from previous ones in response to security concerns after last year’s event was marred by fatal gun violence, The Star has learned.

“We’re going to keep being a city that does things,” Lucas told The Star. “We’re going to keep being a city that creates opportunities for people to come together.”

But maybe not at a large rally outside Union Station.

Lucas rejects any suggestion that the city should shy away from holding large public celebrations. He says there should be a parade downtown, as there has been in three of the past five years when the Chiefs brought home the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

But he said local leaders and the Chiefs have been discussing whether to forgo another mass rally like the one last year where one woman was killed and more than 20 others wounded in a shooting melee.

They are considering more manageable alternatives — if the Chiefs win another title. They open the playoffs Saturday against the Texans.

Lucas confirmed that one option is that the parade would follow a ticketed kickoff rally — location not yet determined — that would feature remarks by the Chiefs and local dignitaries. A much smaller crowd would enter that venue through security checkpoints as fans do for any professional sporting event.

The parade would begin afterwards, some blocks away, and there would be no ending ceremony.

Nothing has been decided yet, not even the parade route. And in an interview on Tuesday, Lucas was coy about his own preferences when discussing how he imagines the event will or should be organized.

“It’s too early for me to share kind of what those plans will be, other than to say we will evaluate everything,” he said. “You know, we are always looking at ways that we can both reinvigorate events and we’re the rare and blessed city that has had a good chunk of them in the last decade.”

When asked to comment on the plans under discussion, the Kansas City Police Department issued the following statement:

“The KCPD will continue to work with our partners on the collaboration and discussion of different ideas and ways that we can create a more safe, secure, and enjoyable environment for all attending any event held in our city.”

Departure from past celebrations

If the end-of-parade rally is eliminated in favor of a small kickoff event, that would be a complete departure from the six championship celebrations that Kansas City has staged in honor of the Royals and Chiefs since the football team won its first championship, Super Bowl IV, in 1970. Each began with a parade and ended with a rally.

Aside from the rally, officials are also considering lengthening the distance of the parade so that the crowd is more spread out. With thinner crowds along the route, police might be better able to look for trouble and address it more quickly.

Led by Kansas City’s police department, more than 800 members of law enforcement from agencies across the metro worked last year’s parade, but it wasn’t enough to prevent tragedy.

Elizabeth “Lisa” Lopez-Galvan, a 43-year-old mother and local disc jockey, was shot and killed as that rally was ending. Several people have been charged in the aftermath of the shooting, and the Kansas City man accused of firing the fatal shot is scheduled to stand trial in January 2026. More than 20 others among the massive crowd suffered gunshot injuries.

KC parade preparations

It might seem presumptuous now to think the Chiefs will even get to the conference championship game, much less play in and win the Super Bowl in New Orleans on Feb. 9. They first need to beat the Texans in the AFC Divisional Round on Saturday at Arrowhead Stadium, after all.

But with the conference’s No. 1 seed and three trophies since 2019, there is good reason to anticipate at least the possibility, and pulling off an event of this scale requires lots of planning.

Since the Chiefs became a perennial contender a decade ago, the Kansas City Sports Commission and Foundation has begun preparations for a potential victory celebration well in advance of the playoffs.

Hundreds of hours of work over many weeks go into a victory celebration, sports commission President and CEO Kathy Nelson has said in the past.

This year, Kansas City officials seem to be taking a more central role in that planning than in the past. Previously, the sports commission arranged for security and police protection, and hired an event planner to help with other logistics, such as lining up portable toilets and decorations along the parade route.

The city, Jackson County and the Jackson County Sports Complex Authority helped cover those costs, along with contributions from the business community. The total parade budget in 2023 was estimated at $3.5 million, but the sports commission does not normally make those numbers public.

Financial arrangements for this year’s potential parade have not been announced yet.

City of champions

The commission has built upon lessons learned in the 10 years since the Royals made the playoffs in 2014 for the first time in three decades and came within a game of winning that year’s World Series.

Nelson’s crew had no template for how to put on a victory parade at that time, other than news clippings and memories of people who were around when the Royals beat the Cardinals to win the 1985 World Series.

“We laugh that we were building the plane in the sky in 2014 not knowing exactly how to do this,” Nelson told reporters at last-year’s pre-Super Bowl parade press conference.

In 2015, the Royals won it all. And each Chiefs celebration since has worked the same way — a parade down Grand Boulevard followed by a rally at Union Station with a huge crowd of people packed out front with no barriers to access.

While weighing changes, Lucas was adamant in a wide-ranging end-of-December interview with two Star sports columnists: The city should not back away from its traditions just because last year’s event was marred by violence, he said.

“In today’s Kansas City, and in today’s America, there are so few opportunities for everybody to come together — rich people, suburbanites, rural folks, Black, white, what have you,” Lucas said. “And those parades have kind of built up their own special thing that really has been great for Kansas City.”

Lucas opposed having a celebration at Arrowhead, as some have suggested, because it is far from the city’s core, and might present the same security challenges as Union Station.

“Doing something for the community in the community is going to be very important,” Lucas said. “Not to mention that at Arrowhead, you can oddly enough run into the same issue, which is that you have a bunch of people just standing around in the parking lot.”

Celebrations changing across the U.S.

Kansas City wouldn’t be the first to do away with an open-air victory rally in an era where drivers in pickups have run down revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve and a man with an assault rifle has massacred dozens gathered for a country music concert in Las Vegas.

When the Rams won the Super Bowl in 2022, players climbed aboard open-air buses for a 1.1 mile parade through downtown Los Angeles. It ended with a rally at the Coliseum, the team’s former home, and which had room for 20,000 fans.

All had to pass through metal detectors as they would every other event at that venue.

Even Boston has switched things up. No city has had more championship parades in recent decades. After each of the New England Patriots’ six Super Bowl victory parades since 2001, there was a rally.

But when the Boston Celtics won the NBA title last summer, Boston flipped the script. The city’s celebration began with a private event at half court in TD Garden, the team’s home arena, followed by a parade.

Similarly, the Los Angeles Dodgers had a rally at their stadium to celebrate winning the 2024 World Series, before taking to the streets of downtown LA for a big parade.

Kansas City’s championship era began with a parade on the day after the Chiefs won Super Bowl IV on Jan. 11, 1970. Quarterback Len Dawson waved at the crowd from a white convertible amid a procession of cars that rolled through downtown, beneath showers of confetti.

The parade ended with a rally at Liberty Memorial, where the crowd cheered so loudly that the remarks from coach Hank Stram, Dawson and Mayor Ilus Davis were mostly drowned out by the noise.

There was no gunfire to dispel the boundless joy of the community and the players who made it possible.As Dawson summed things up that day:

“This is the ultimate; this is all there is.”