Mayor Q should make local control of Kansas City police a major focus of 2nd term | Opinion

Any minute, Kansas City will have — or by the time you read this, perhaps already has — broken our previous hideous homicide record, hitting a toll of 100 lives lost only halfway through 2023.

So what can stop this rolling crisis? We certainly support a return to the kind of violence intervention program that had been working in Kansas City, and never should have been ended under ex-Police Chief Rick Smith.

We’ve also spent years begging lawmakers to stop relaxing our gun laws, which are already so flabby that even convicted domestic abusers can have firearms, no problem. Federal gun laws are no longer enforced in the state, for now, anyway, with predictably heartbreaking results. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Kevin McDermott is right that our Republican electeds in Missouri never miss an opportunity to make our urban problems more difficult to solve.

But in the state with the highest Black homicide rate in the country, Kansas City is not going to turn this trend around until the KCPD earns the trust of all of our communities. Which is not going to happen until we have local control.

With his reelection behind him now, we’d love to see Mayor Quinton Lucas make a campaign for a statewide ballot referendum on that issue a major focus in his second term.

Yes, such a campaign would be expensive, but maybe, just for example, someone seeking a bunch of public funding for the infrastructure to support a new baseball stadium could contribute to making that new stadium a safe place to see a game. The business community really does need to be part of making Kansas City a safe place to live and do business.

“The kinds of reforms that are necessary to build community trust in law enforcement can only be achieved through local control,” said Urban League CEO Gwen Grant.

We agree, because public safety is too important, and this scourge of gun violence too costly in human terms, to continue to leave the oversight of our police department up to the rubber-stamping, see-no-evil police board appointees of any Missouri governor.

Gov. Mike Parson thinks he’s pro-police, but the former sheriff’s protege and appointee as attorney general, Andrew Bailey, just made things so much worse for all of us, cops included, by trying to overturn the conviction of the first Kansas City police officer ever found guilty of killing a Black man.

The fact that that convicted former detective, Eric Devalkenaere, is a longtime neighbor of current Police Chief Stacey Graves — though no, Graves presumably wasn’t consulted before his family moved in across the street from hers in 2008 — only deepens the impression of a two-tier justice system, with an endless number of off-ramps for some and none for others. That no one in power cares how this looks, or is, is going to make this a long, hot summer.

State oversight has roots in slavery, Civil War

Ours is the only major city in America without any real say in its local law enforcement. And other than between 1932 and 1939, when political boss Tom Pendergast controlled not only the police department but everything else in Jackson County and beyond, it has always been that way.

The racist, post-Civil War history of how the state took control in the first place is worth reviewing: When the KCPD was founded, in 1874, why were departments around the country being established? In large part, to control people recently freed from slavery.

Before our major political parties switched places on race and civil rights, it was Missouri Democrats who pushed through the bill that gave that control to the state after the Civil War, in an effort to limit Black power over those who in their view were supposed to be controlling them.

A decade ago, St. Louis won local control in the kind of state referendum we need to push for.

No wonder homicides have surged there, as here, in the years since then, because it was also after that that our gun laws were gutted. The simple law requiring gun owners to register with a local sheriff’s office worked pretty well. But in January of 2017, permitless carry took effect, allowing loaded firearms in most public places. Private sales require no background check at all.

Missouri’s 2021 Second Amendment Preservation Act, which is in effect while its constitutionality is being appealed, says that officers enforcing federal gun laws should be fined $50,000 — just about exactly an officer’s average annual salary in the state.

It’s galling that after making guns so much more readily available and law enforcement so much harder, the General Assembly then turns around and says that because violence is up, it needs to take control back from St. Louis.

Kansas City, meanwhile, hasn’t even had the chance to attempt to hold our department accountable in a way that would encourage witnesses and victims of crime to cooperate.

The argument against local control has always been that it doesn’t solve all problems. And of course it doesn’t, but it would give us the tools to try and the responsibility for the outcome.