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New KCK Police Chief Karl Oakman says there’s nothing to see. Victims deserve better

Kansas City Kansas Police Chief Karl Oakman told The Star that he disagrees with those of us who have been begging for a Justice Department investigation into the department he’s been running since June: “I think a DOJ investigation would do far more harm than good.”

Why is that, Chief Oakman? If, as you say, you’ve seen no evidence of the corruption and crimes that I keep writing about, and that the local bureau of the FBI has known about since at least the late ‘80s, then what harm would a DOJ investigation do?

If, as you say, there’s nothing to look into, then wouldn’t such a probe do far more good than harm by restoring confidence? Right now, much of the community wouldn’t trust the department with the time of day.

“I can’t speak to what happened in the past,” Chief Oakman told our paper. But the shame, Chief, is that you seem to want to keep it that way.

If any of the many rape and other serious allegations against former Detective Roger Golubski and other retired officers are true, how could you suggest that their victims and survivors deserve no answers and no justice? Since when does the KCKPD have no interest in past crimes?

And what about those sitting in Kansas prisons today who have no reason to be there?

According to defense attorney Sarah Swain, today’s KCKPD, and Oakman himself, along with Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree and his office, have been unresponsive to her motions for discovery as she attempts to get an innocence hearing for two men, Celester McKinney and his cousin Brian Betts, convicted of murdering Golubski’s nephew in 1997.

More than a year ago, the Kansas Court of Appeals ruled that new information about Golubski’s role in a case involving his own family should at least entitle McKinney to an evidentiary hearing on a new trial.

Doesn’t it interest you, Chief Oakman, to know how many other Lamonte McIntyres may be out there? McIntyre was exonerated in 2017, after serving 23 years for a double murder he did not commit. The chief witness in that case, Niko Quinn, has said she was coerced by Golubski and Wyandotte County prosecutor Terra Morehead into giving false testimony against an innocent man.

And now that we know that McIntyre had nothing to do with those murders, is no one interested in finding out not only who really killed Doniel Sublett Quinn and Donald Ewing on April 15, 1994, but who paid for the hit? Is there some secret statute of limitations on murder in Wyandotte County that we don’t know about?

DA Mark Dupree won’t comment on Roger Golubki

Quinn’s mother, Saundra Newsom, wonders every day if the guilty will ever be punished, and if not, why not: “Has there been any movement? Is 28 years long enough” for a mother to wait?

Dupree recently turned down my request for an interview on that subject. He told an intermediary that he can never say anything about any Golubski-related matter, though a simple “I do care and am on it” would not compromise any investigation. You know, if any were in fact going on.

The public only ever heard of Roger Golubski because of Lamonte McIntyre’s exoneration.

And what happened years ago isn’t over for Golubski’s many accusers, because he’s still walking around collecting his pension, and for all we know, victimizing others.

Corruption in Wyandotte County is “worse now than in the late ‘50s and ‘60s,” says local historian Chester Owens.
Corruption in Wyandotte County is “worse now than in the late ‘50s and ‘60s,” says local historian Chester Owens.

Chester Owens, the 88-year-old local historian who in 1983 became the first Black man ever elected to what was then the Kansas City, Kansas City Council, told me recently that he thinks there’s more police and other official corruption in his community today than at any time in his adult life: “It’s worse now than in the late ‘50s and ‘60s.”

Yet somehow, after only weeks on the job, Chief Oakman started going around publicly saying he’d looked in the closets and found no skeletons.

As the Rev. Rick Behrens, former chaplain for the KCKPD and senior pastor of Grandview Park Presbyterian Church has said, even in recent years, “there have been many many lawsuits against our police department for abuse, for discrimination, for misconduct of all kinds, and millions spent to cover up these crimes. So any claims that this is ancient history … these are not true.”

Oakman spoke at Behrens’ Rotary Club “when he’d been on the job for less than a month,” and according to Behrens told the group “that these claims are more perception than reality.”

“We thought we were maybe getting somebody different, somebody who would be able to come in and maybe change the culture, but when he says it’s all perception and it all has to do with 20 years ago and Golubski and not today, that is painful to hear.”

Over the last two years, a federal grand jury has issued nine subpoenas for 22 years worth of documents and evidence from the KCKPD.

As KCUR was first to report, based on heavily redacted documents obtained through a Kansas Open Records Act request, those subpoenas seem to suggest that the grand jury is looking into police misconduct far beyond that of the much-accused Golubski, though the grand jury has asked for homicide cases for the period between 1988 and 2010, the year Golubski retired.

Al Jennerich, a former FBI agent who tried without success to interest his superiors in pursuing allegations against Golubski and other dirty KCK cops in the late ‘80s, says he “there were a lot of dirtballs; it wasn’t just Golubski,” who even then was known to have been extorting and coercing a number of Black women sexually.

‘A little Chicago, with corruption at every level’

So what does it mean that the investigation has already been going on for so long without any visible result? It means “they don’t know what they’re doing,” Jennerich told me. “That’s, ‘keep the media happy and make it look like they’re doing something.’ It’s a joke.”

“KCK is a little Chicago, with corruption at every level,” says Jennerich, who also investigated police corruption in Cook County.

The KCKPD says there’s no indication that the FBI is looking into today’s department. Nor is there any indication that they’re looking into cases before 1988, though Golubski joined the force in 1975, and some of the murders of women linked to him do go back further than that.

Star Cooper, who knows that her murdered mother, Dorothy Cooper, was connected to Golubski, says she’s found more leads about her mom’s 1983 killing on her own than police have. “It’s going to take some out-of-town people” from the DOJ to take over from both the KCKPD and the local FBI, she feels.

When former KCKPD officer Tyrone Garner was running for mayor last summer, he promised that if elected, he would personally go to D.C. to ask for a DOJ investigation. I thought I’d ask him how his travel plans were coming during a Thursday interview that had been scheduled for nearly a month. But on Tuesday, his assistant canceled the appointment.

I regularly talk to past and present victims of KCK corruption, not all of it connected to the police department. And yes, it could be that the FBI investigation is so sprawling that that’s why it’s been going on for two years without any visible result. Or, Jennerich could be right that it’s an exercise in wheel spinning, headed nowhere at all.

Either way, the DOJ needs to step in without any further delay. Victims don’t have the “perception” of a problem; they have the kind of real pain that any real public servant would see needs to be acknowledged and addressed.