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

From yesterday’s election, it is now clear that a City Council action a year ago regarding Police Department funding has backfired badly.

By a whopping 63-37 percent margin, Missouri voters on Tuesday approved a constitutional amendment that will force the city to appropriate five percent more of the city’s general-revenue budget to the Police Department.

The outcome represents another hard-to-swallow escalation of state control of KCPD, and it could mean the City Council will have to spend millions of additional dollars per year on police operations.

The bottom line politically is that what looked last year like the Council successfully ambushing the Board of Police Commissioners now looks like the Council having stepped into a bear trap.

Here’s how Constitutional Amendment 4 unfolded.

In March 2021, the Council approved a $224 million budget for the Police Department for the 2021-22 fiscal year. In April 2021, the Board of Police Commissioners approved the same budget.

In May 2021, the month the new budget took effect, Mayor Quinton Lucas and the eight City Council members living south of the Missouri River approved two ordinances reallocating $42 million from general operations to “community services and prevention.”

That prompted immediate charges of “defunding” from some of the four Northland City Council members and from many Northland residents.

It turned out, however, that the Council members who had executed the slippery move had not done their legal homework, or, if they did, they didn’t get good legal advice from the City Law Department.

The police board, on the basis of better legal advice, filed suit seeking to overturn the action. In October 2021, a Jackson County Circuit Court judge ruled that state law grants the police board “exclusive management and control” of the Police Department and said that the two City Council ordinances interfered with the board’s management of the department.

The judge went on to say that while the Council has some leeway in adjusting the Police Department’s budget, it has none after the Council and the Police Board have approved the budget.

At the time of the police board-City Council skirmish, state law required the city to allocate a minimum of 20 percent of the city’s general fund for police operations every year. The $224 million significantly exceeded the 20-percent threshold, but pro-police politicians in Jefferson City nevertheless wanted to further crack the knuckles of the Council members who had had the impudence to pull a fast one.

So, the Republican-dominated General Assembly passed a law, which Gov. Mike Parson signed, putting on the November ballot the constitutional amendment giving the legislature the power to increase the minimum level of general-revenue police funding from 20 to 25 percent.

As presented on the statewide ballot, Amendment 4 sounded innocuous and pro-police, which made it appealing just about everywhere in the state except Kansas City south of the Missouri River.

The amendment read like this: “Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to authorize laws, passed before December 31, 2026, that increase minimum funding for a police force established by a state board of police commissioners to ensure such police force has additional resources to serve its communities.”

Most voters outside of Kansas City probably had no idea that the amendment applied only to Kansas City, which is the only major department in the state that is overseen by “a state board of police commissioners.” (St. Louis engineered its emancipation from state control 10 years ago.)

So, in the election, a whopping 63 percent of voters statewide gave “thumbs up” to Amendment 4. Kansas Citians living in Clay and Platte counties gave it a slightly larger ratio, 65-35. It only lost south of the river. The ratio there was 61-39 “yes,” but that amounted to a few drops in the statewide bucket.

Retrospectively, the City Council’s 2021 ambush of the police board was a huge miscalculation. That impulsive action will not only result in the city spending more on the Police Department than it has in the past, but it served to deepen the gulf between the two Kansas Citys — the one south of the Missouri River and the one north of the river.

Mayor Quinton Lucas is in line to be handily re-elected next year, but if he has an opponent, that opponent — whoever it might be — could well win the Kansas City vote in Clay and Platte counties. And if Lucas should ever run for statewide office, the 2021 caper could haunt him further.

All in all, Tuesday was a bad day for us residents south of the river.