JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

Chief Rick Smith should be on the cover of a poster promoting local control of the police department.

This is a chief who seldom fails to disappoint and who, like many chiefs before him, probably wanted the job mainly to boost his eventual retirement pay and boost his accrued vacation, sick and comp time, like his predecessor, Darryl Forte.

I’m convinced his main goal is to keep his powder dry so he can retire quietly, start drawing his big retirement check and then, like Forte and some of the retired chiefs before him, go on to another big-paying job. (Forte, as you know, didn’t retire to play golf or go fishing. After going out the back door with half a million bucks in accumulated vacation and other time, he quickly ran for Jackson County sheriff. He’s now safely entrenched in that cushy, low-pressure post for the next several years.)

Smith’s tenure got off to a bad start when he came in under the cloud of the appalling scandal in the children’s unit, where detectives were stuffing case files in their desk drawers and letting them rot. How do we know that situation has been fixed? As far as I know the department has not announced a reorganization or a plan for moving forward with renewed vigor.

And since taking over, Smith has consistently ducked the press on big stories. On two big KC Star stories within a month — one in late December that exposed the police department’s assault squad as ”woefully understaffed” and one on Sunday about the police department backing out of a multi-agency strategy to reduce murders — Smith refused to talk to The Star. Instead, he made underlings deal with those pesky reporters.

Finally, with the shoot-em-up at the 9ine Ultra Lounge off U.S. 40, Smith was forced to emerge from his office. He joined Mayor Quinton Lucas at a Monday press conference to talk about the Sunday night incident…I’ll tell you this, though: He didn’t look comfortable. He was tentative and hardly projected the take-charge, “we’ve-gotta-fix-this” attitude you want too see in a big-city police chief.

Smith on Monday

There is one and only one reason Smith hides in his office and marks the days off his calendar: With the police department firmly under state control — a holdover from the Pendergast era when local politics was thoroughly crooked — the police chief is effectively accountable to no one.

Instead of being appointed by and accountable to the mayor — who is directly accountable to voters — Kansas City’s police chief is appointed by and reports to a relatively obscure Board of Police Commissioners. Under state law, the mayor is one member of the board; the other four are appointed by the governor.

The four appointed by the governor are not accountable to the public in any way, just to the governor, who is physically and politically far removed from Kansas City. Missouri Gov. Mike Parson is so removed from Kansas City that Smith would almost have to commit a crime in order for Parson to get involved. Just being MIA is not going to get the governor’s attention.

Think how different this situation would be if the police chief was appointed by and accountable to Mayor Lucas, who has made murder reduction his biggest goal and speaks publicly about it frequently. Lucas could order Smith to come out of his office and speak to the press and answer difficult questions — questions like why the assault squad is so understaffed and why he decided the department should get out of the “no-violence alliance” aimed at reducing murders.

In fact, Lucas would be able to call Smith into his office and say, “Hey…I’m telling you right now the police department is not getting out of the no-violence alliance. You stay involved or I’ll get a chief who will.”

**

My concerns about Rick Smith go back a long way. I first wrote about my misgivings in July 2017, when Smith was one of two finalists to succeed Forte.

…Everyone remembers the case of Shawn Ratigan, the Catholic priest who is serving a 50-year prison sentence for producing or attempting to produce child pornography. Specifically, he took “up skirt” photos of young girls attending the Northland grade school operated by the parish where he was assigned. Smith, a police commander, at the time, might have kept that case from totally embarrassing the diocese had he just used common sense at an early juncture, when he had the chance.

Long before the Ratigan case came to public attention, Smith was a member of a Catholic diocesan review board that assesses sexual abuse allegations. Then-Bishop Robert Finn and then-Vicar General Robert Murphy knew about the photos but did not initially bring them to the attention of the review board. Instead, Murphy phoned Smith and told him about a photo of a nude girl found on a priest’s computer. Murphy himself had not seen the photo, and he described to Smith what he understood the photo to show. Based on Murphy’s description, Smith said it might meet the definition of child pornography but probably did not.

Apparently Smith did not did not ask to see the photo and did not contact any other review board members about it. Much later, Smith told investigators he was shocked to learn there were hundreds of photos.

Finn, as we all know now, was ultimately convicted of a misdemeanor count of failing to report child sex abuse, and Pope Francis forced him to resign five years ago.

…When Smith was chosen chief over Norman, Oklahoma, Police Chief Keith Humphrey, The Star reported he was greeted by “yells, celebratory screams and thunderous applause from a large group of police officers and civilian employees.”

He may be popular down the ranks, but “Seldom Seen” Smith is a far cry from what Kansas City needs and deserves in the chief’s office. The next chief needs to be from out of town; the department needs fresh blood and new eyes to examine the entire operation and shake the department out of its somnolence. (For a nearby analogy, look at the horrible and scary state of the KCK Police Department, the result of promoting one insider after another to the chief’s job.)

Beyond the need for new eyes, it is way past time for Kansas City to gain control of its police department.

It would not be easy — the best approach probably would be a statewide initiative petition followed by a statewide vote — but it could and should be done. The St. Louis Police Department, the only other one in the state that held the ignominious distinction of being under the state’s thumb, broke free in 2012, when Missouri voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition A.

I would urge Quinton Lucas to make local control of the police department just as high a priority as reducing the murder rate. For one thing, he’d have a lot better chance of reducing the murder rate if control of the police department was rooted in City Hall instead of sleepy Jefferson City.