Kansas City’s three leading civil rights organizations today increased the pressure on Mayor Quinton Lucas to push for the firing of Police Chief Rick Smith.
In an “open letter” to Lucas, the Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the KC chapter of the NAACP challenged Lucas to use his position on the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners to force a vote on Smith.
Lucas is one of five police board members, and he may be the only Democrat on the board. The other four board members — businessman Don Wagner, lawyers Nathan Garrett and Cathy Dean and minister Mark Tolbert — were all appointed by Republican governors.
Those four do not challenge the chief and rubber stamp every move he makes.
Lucas has told some civil rights officials that he would like to fire Smith but that he doesn’t have the two other votes it would take to remove him.
Urban League President Gwen Grant and others have questioned whether Lucas is sincere about wanting to fire Smith and, perhaps more important, whether he has the courage to lead an effort to fire Smith and lead a movement for local control of the department.
In the letter, the three civil rights organizations put Lucas squarely on the spot…
“On numerous occasions you have told us and others that you and Bishop Tolbert are ready to fire Chief Smith but you don’t have the votes. Our community wants to see you stand on your convictions and do the right thing, irrespective of the politics. If you and Bishop Tolbert believe Smith needs to go, then make it known on the record. At the next Board of Police Commissioners meeting speak up for justice. Make a motion to fire Chief Smith. If what you say about Tolbert is true, he can second the motion. Make your case for Smith’s removal and call for the question. Let the votes fall where they may.
“Let the public see if Don Wagner, Nathan Garrett, and Cathy Dean’s guiding principles are more aligned with perpetuating abusive practices and institutionalizing a two-tiered system of justice, where victims are denied recompense and officers are protected from punishment for abusing their powers, rather than promoting fairness in processes, transparency, accountability and impartiality in the administration of justice.”
Smith
Smith, who became chief in 2017, has virtually no relationship with the Black community. He lives in far south Kansas City and is well liked in the Northland, the least diverse area of the city. This is the record he has established:
He has unilaterally and unequivocally supported officers involved in police shootings of unarmed black people; he has a terrible relationship with Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker; and he has thrown up roadblocks to the prosecution of officers who appear to have assaulted or shot people unnecessarily.
The civil rights groups’ letter went even further, saying Smith “presides over a culture of corruption that breeds a pervasive disregard for the letter of the law throughout the police department” and has “allowed his department to operate without integrity and accountability.”
Those are strong words…and I completely agree.
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For many years, I thought we had a very good police department. But, over time, it has deteriorated under a long string of “home-grown” chiefs and Republican-dominated police boards that have stood by as the police union has gradually increased its power to the point that officers can’t even be questioned about shootings they’re involved in for 48 hours. (They need time, don’t you know, to recover psychologically.)
Thankfully, the police administration has now lost the support of The Kansas City Star’s editorial board, which has begun crusading for Smith’s ouster and local control.
An example of the soured relationship between the police department and The Star evidenced itself at this week’s police board meeting, part of which I watched on YouTube. Smith complained to the board about a weekend story that said the police department’s homicide-clearance rate this year was 43 percent, which is below the national average.
The Star used straightforward, easy-to-comprehend numbers: There had been 129 homicides as of Saturday, and 56 of those cases had been cleared (suspects in custody and charged). The math is simple. Fifty-six divided by 129 equals 43 percent.
Right? No, said the chief; the clearance rate is actually a whopping 70 percent.
And just how did he get there? Well, onto the top number he added 29 cases from 2019 and before that have been cleared this year. Conveniently, though, he kept the same bottom number, 129. Then he put 89 over 129 and came up with 69 percent, which he rounded up to 70.
He didn’t explain his math to the police board, and, naturally, they didn’t ask. But listening to his twisted rationale, my first thought was Smith was not only a bad chief but a guy who would have flunked any high-school math class.
But this lame police board, at least the three commissioners who control the board (Wagner, Garrett and Dean), didn’t dare question their faultless leader. In fact, they began whining about The Star’s story and asking if somebody — somebody — shouldn’t ask for a correction.
I could have laughed out loud. What a bunch of dummies! And what a duplicitous chief.
Geeez, they’ve all got to go, including Lucas, who clearly doesn’t have the balls to stand up to either his fellow board members or the police union.
It’s a sorry state of affairs…
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Now, here’s that lineup of do-nothing, Republican-appointed commissioners who refuse to hold this police department accountable to them or the community. From top to bottom: Board Chairman Don Wagner, Cathy Dean, Nathan Garrett and Mark Tolbert.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
You are right that there are a lot of legitimate reasons to criticize the KCPD in general, and Chief Rick Smith in particular. But, KCPD’s method for calculating their homicide clearance rate isn’t one of them. The excerpt below from the D.C police department (“MPD”) describes the UCR methodology which KCPD uses. The excerpt also states the UCR method is used “by most police departments in the country.” https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/homicide-closure-rates
“The MPD’s homicide clearance rate is calculated, as it is by most police departments in the country, using the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) guidelines established by the FBI in the 1930s. These guidelines are the national standard for reporting several categories of crime data, including homicide clearance rates. Nearly 17,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States provide data to the FBI under its UCR program.”
“Under UCR guidelines, the clearance rate is calculated by dividing the total number of homicide cases closed in a calendar year by the total number of homicides that occurred in that year. The cases closed can be for homicides that occurred in the current year or in the prior years. In other words, some clearances that an agency records in a particular calendar year may pertain to offenses that occurred in previous years. The UCR program measures all of the work that an agency exhausts in closing cases.”
Thanks for that, Mark…It still makes no sense to me to put the total number of cases cleared in previous years over the flat number of homicides committed in a given year. It would be much more logical to go back and apply the newly solved, older cases to the total for the years in which they occurred.
Yes, that would mean changing numbers retroactively, but it’s a fairer way to calculate, and the public would get a clearer picture of actual clearance rates from year to year.
Have you seen this episode from Vice News? It goes along nicely with your reporting of the situation.
Very interesting, Ashley. Thank you. Rick Smith as chief is like trying to put a square peg in a round hole. Just doesn’t work.