KANSAS CITY, MO — Kansas City’s “lame duck” Police Chief, Rick Smith, announced that he has disbanded the Missing Persons Cold Case Squad at KCPD.
“We used to have a missing person cold case squad… and just two weeks ago I disbanded that and put them back into regular homicide and regular assault squad because we don’t have enough detectives,” he’s quoted saying in a video clip posted by FOX4 on Monday.
Smith later noted “we won’t have people to actively work those cases,” implying budgetary constraints and staffing shortages as to why the unit was disbanded, despite the fact the department received an eye-whopping $269 million, $33 million which was over the minimum budgetary requirement.
The unilateral move to make cuts despite receiving a multi-million dollar budget increase comes as a surprise to some — mostly those who have not paid attention to the Kansas City Police Department for the past 147 years.
If you’ll remember, just two weeks ago, a historic coalition of Black community organizations in Kansas City issued a scathing letter “indicting” Mayor Lucas for his “Blank Check” ordinance which gave an additional $33 million to KCPD and required no accountability or transparency on their behalf. Unironically, the letter stated that this exact thing would happen. See the excerpt from the letter below;
“Amidst our city’s vicious housing crisis, the ongoing pandemic, a food shortage in public schools, and horrifically underfunded mental health services, you have chosen to turn away from the People who elected you, and specifically away from the Black community – to instead side with a department that is not only already overfunded, but lies about how it spends our tax dollars.”
Less than three weeks after Black civil rights leaders and community members told the Mayor that if his ordinance did not have teeth that the police would continue business as usual (lying about how they spend money and using it irresponsibly), this is precisely what happened, and now he purports to be surprised.
The replies to the Mayor’s tweets were filled with people reminding him that this is exactly what people said would happen. Twitter user Dylan Pyles’ tweet articulated the general sentiment of the dozens of people who replied;
