New Police Budget Change Is A Potential Gateway To Local Control
3 political implications of the new changes
On Thursday, Mayor Quinton Lucas and eight of his city council colleagues, all of them representing districts mainly south of the Missouri river, proposed and passed minor changes to the Kansas City, Missouri police budget process.
The mayor and city council amended the city budget and withheld $47 million of the police budget until the police made specific proposals around community engagement and prevention. They also added $3 million for a new police academy class, a major ask during the local stimulus negotiations.
You can watch the mayor’s passionate speech here:
In Kansas City, however, we still live in the haze of imaginary cigar smoke and fear of long gone mob bosses who once ruled the city.
Kansas City, unlike every other major city in the country, does not have control over its own police department. Based on corruption that occurred in the 1930s, the State of Missouri took control of the police department, which is now governed by the Board of Police Commissioners. The Board consists of five people, four are appointed by the governor and the odd person out is the mayor.
For Kansas Citians, there are three options to gain more control under our current predicament are:
Contribute to a gargantuan statewide effort to elect a reform-friendly governor and state legislature. We have a better chance of winning the lottery.
Start a statewide ballot petition. There is a good chance the legislature makes this option almost unfeasible.
Lastly, city council could actually control the police budget.
A councilperson once told me that if they wanted to the council could break up the police budget into different line items and buckets and have the police come back to council each time to get approval. That way they could actually exert some control of the police department. This would be dramatically different than the reality that existed just a few days ago—a yearly check was written and no ability to follow-up.
On Thursday, the city council allowed them to do that but not for the entire budget.
Now with 1/5 of the ~$240 million police budget, the police will have to collaborate and work with council on how those funds will be spent.
The battle will be ongoing but this process change creates an opening for the movement for local control of the police department to build even further.
That opening will be created by three political realities:
1 — Managing the budget and specific projects is like catnip for council people
Under the Kansas City governance model, it’s a weak mayor and a strong city manager system. The city manager manages the day to day operations and implements the will of the mayor and city council through policies and programs. That “will,” however, often gets diluted, lost in translation, or isn’t easily implementable.
But when singular projects or budget items come across the city council’s table that seems to be when they can exert the most power.
This reality is exemplified by none other than councilperson Heather Hall, the main opponent of the changes to the police budget and local control.
Hall has spent much of her two terms haranguing city departments, initiatives, and the budget in the name of efficiency and fiscal responsibility.
Despite her conservative beliefs, she led the movement to bring contracted trash services back as a public service to save money and increase service.
She recently requested an audit of un- and under-utilized city office space and buildings and has pushed to quickly get rid of them in the name of government efficiency.
While I don’t agree with where she is coming from, she has made some good points and bringing trash into city hall was a good move.
However, when it comes to the police, Hall and some of her colleagues’ tenacity for accountability and fiscal responsibility is missing in action.
The point is city council people, who worked hard to get elected to office to influence things, will enjoy greatly interrogating the police’s programs, initiatives, and budget.
It’ll be like a drug. Once they see how they can shape at least some of the police budget, council will want to expand their scope.
2 — Each council meeting will have fireworks and highlight the argument for local control
I don’t have the polling but my guess is that a majority of Kansas Citians don't know that we can’t actually control our own police department.
It’s why the council and mayor still get a lot of the blame for violence and crime.
But in the new process, the police will have to come back to city council multiple times. And unlike the current Kansas City Police Department updates, these will not be well orchestrated, rah-rah presentations. Each presentation will be a show.
Every local television station and journalist will be there.
Every time, people will have to be reminded exactly why the Kansas City Police have to present another program and idea—the lack of local control.
Besides structural challenges in changing the status quo, highly involved people and special interests have dominated the conversation about local control. But most normal people, if they know about it, think our current reality is absolutely nuts.
A constant explainer can hopefully move the needle even more.
3 — Expose the police department’s lack of creativity
If you have listened to some people, you’d think Chief Rick Smith’s addition of a few social workers, which was at first majority grant-funded, was the most revolutionary idea of all time. However, they are also the first on the chopping block…
It was a good step in the right direction but hardly groundbreaking.
My hunch is that the police department’s proposals will be underwhelming. They have gobbled up funding for years with little to show for it as our homicides continue to break records.
I’m not sure they’ll be able to come up with evidenced-based programs that aren’t more police or vague “community engagement” events.
That constant showcase will demonstrate the limitations of a police-only public safety solution and the department’s leaders.
The new process creates exposure for criticism, collaboration, and improvement
Some activists were dismayed that the police budget actually increased rather than decreased but the changes passed by council creates an exposure the police department has probably never experienced.
Extra sunlight on their operations, ideas, and most importantly budget will have political implications that potentially set the stage for a stronger movement toward local control.
We can only hope.
Kansas City is the 8th most deadly city in America.
We can’t keep doing the same thing over and over.
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