To reduce gun deaths, mayor wants KC businesses to demand local control of police | Opinion

Last Friday, I met with Mayor Quinton Lucas to hear what, in his second term, he’s planning to do about Kansas City’s catastrophic number of gun deaths. And about the absolutely related problem that not even one other city in the country has to deal with, which is that our local elected officials have no say over our police department.

Well, no sooner had I left City Hall than I got a text from the mayor: “Not five minutes after you left, there was a shooting right across the street. It never ends.”

This was a drive-by — several shots fired into Ilus Davis Park at E. 11th and Locust, where shell casings were found. It was City Hall security guards who were first on the scene, and the city manager himself who called police leadership and urged them to by all means come on over. No one was hit, this time, and a suspect is in custody, stopped just a few blocks away.

But maybe the one thing everybody in town knows is that something’s gotta change here. A whole constellation of problems keeps an unconscionable number of guns in the wrong hands, and too many families planning funerals instead of graduation parties. Earlier this year, there was even a multiple shooting at a local funeral home.

If any of these problems — poverty, guns galore, and the widespread distrust of police that keeps witnesses from cooperating with them — could be solved by doing a little more of the same thing we’ve been doing, we wouldn’t have had a record 100 homicides in the first half of this year, would we?

What is that something that’s got to change, though?

Missouri Republicans oppose commonsense gun laws

If our gun laws were any more relaxed, they’d be floating — face down, maybe — near one of those Lake of the Ozarks bars you can swim right up to. Yet the Republicans who run Missouri are not about to stop their crusade against all common sense when it comes to firearms, even for domestic abusers, minors and those whose idea of the perfect holiday celebration involves shooting into the sky — yay, America — so heedlessly that they could kill someone, and have.

Gov. Mike Parson, who recently vetoed the legislation that would have made that kind of celebratory stupidity a felony, says that provision in the law he nixed wasn’t really the target of his veto. Parson hadn’t, he said, set out to torpedo Blair’s Law, named for 11-year-old Blair Shanahan, who was killed by a stray bullet shot on July 4, 2011. But that incredibly hard-won legislation was still collateral damage. Kind of like Blair herself, Governor?

With persistent poverty, “younger and younger people getting access to firearms, and awful state legislation, particularly the Second Amendment Preservation Act,” Lucas said, “you have ongoing anger and disputes, clearance rates that aren’t where they need to be, and this incredible cocktail for violence.”

On top of which, “we have an astounding 911 crisis right now. Are we just going to stare at each other for another year, and say well, you’re stuck with 4 1/2 minutes” of wait time, “and that’s kind of too bad?”

All of this is handled, or not, by a police board of the mayor plus four Parson appointees, whose oversight is like that of the parent who never tells his child anything but, “Great job!”

“So,” Lucas said, “you take this to a board that meets once a month. ‘This is troubling; what have you done?’ ‘Well, it’s tough to hire people.’ All of these gun deaths with 911 not working is fascinating,” which I think might be our mayor’s second-favorite f-word, after “frustrating.” And in the Q lexicon, “fascinating” usually means infuriating.

With more modified firearms on the streets, “we’re seeing more sprays in these shootings. It’s almost like we’re going back to a Tommy gun era of the 1920s on the streets of American cities now.”

That’s no joke; I recently saw the jazzy 1996 Robert Altman film noir “Kansas City” about the casual violence in Tom Pendergast’s town in 1934, and thought oh, only the clothes and the soundtrack have changed.

Revoke business licenses of problem nightclubs

There’s a new campaign, called Sensible Missouri, to amend the Missouri Constitution to restore the ability of cities to pass our own gun laws. Its organizers hope to get something on the November ballot next year, and that’s definitely an effort worth supporting.

Lucas, who met with the Sensible Missouri organizers when they were in Kansas City last week, has some other ideas, too. One of which is to revoke the business licenses of some of the unauthorized clubs where police are called again and again, starting with the auto shop/off-the-books club at 57th Street and Prospect Avenue, where there was a shooting at 4 a.m. on June 25.

“I actually went to the scene that morning,” the mayor said. “I was talking to this police community interaction officer and I said, ‘Do you know a lot about the club?’ and he said, ‘We’ve been here dozens of times.’ More and more of our mass shootings this summer have been in club environments.”

Kansas City has also expanded its park ranger service, with 15 rangers budgeted for this year, up from the two who had been policing our 221 public parks.

But this effort seems the most important to me: Lucas hopes to get the business community to fund a ballot initiative that would finally give Kansas City local control over its police department: “I think everybody recognizes that a ballot initiative is the real way to get it done now,” he said. “Maybe this is an existential moment for our business community. I can wallpaper with the best of them, too: We’ve got the World Cup coming, the Chiefs keep winning Super Bowls, and it’s just a great, happy time. Or we can say we can be a truly great city” and do more about violent crime.

How? Lucas believes that the ability to, for example, fire those officers who’ve repeatedly used excessive force would build trust in the community, which would improve the KCPD’s clearance rate and make it easier to recruit new officers, too.

Meanwhile, we all keep paying for the infantilizing and historically racist state control of the KCPD.

(When the department was founded, in 1874, PDs around the country were being established in large part to control people recently freed from slavery. The Missouri bill that gave that control to the state was an unambiguous effort to limit Black power over those who in their view were supposed to be controlling them. And other than between 1932 and 1939, when Pendergast controlled not only our police department but everything else in Jackson County, it has always been that way.)

Taxpayers on the hook for police brutality settlements

Just the latest and most literal example of how we pay for the wrongdoing of officers over whom our city has no say-so is Mack Nelson, the man who was thrown to the ground by Kansas City police officers and will now receive $500,000 from the city — from us, that is — after suing the police department.

A bystander video of what happened to him shows an officer forcing Nelson’s face onto the ground at the scene of a police shooting at a gas station near 55th Street and Prospect Avenue last August. Nelson’s attorney, John Picerno, says the officers never activated their body cameras and said in their report that Nelson had simply fallen to the ground; oops. The officers involved are facing possible criminal charges, but Picerno says they have never been disciplined.

Nelson’s payout is nothing compared to the millions that Kevin Strickland is likely to get in his civil suit against the KCPD. Strickland, who spent 43 years in prison for a triple murder he did not commit, says officers attributed completely made-up statements to him and pressured the lone eyewitness to falsely implicate him.

“When you talk about ticking time bombs,” Lucas said, Strickland’s probable settlement “is a huge one. We paid $8 million in settlements last year,” and then by sheer coincidence, “the ask was $8 million more for the KCPD. There’s great frustration on the city’s part in saying, so we basically just write a check for whatever’s done with no ability to try and address or keep that from happening in the future?” Yup.

Would local control solve all of our problems? Of course not, but that isn’t much of an argument against it. And we would at least have the ability to try and solve them.

I get so tired of hearing more about violence in “Democrat” cities than about what red state gun laws might have to do with that. But again, we alone have almost no say in how our police department responds to violence. And until this Democratic city has something more to say about crime here than, “For how much shall I make the check?” that’s not going to change.