Cynical "Operation Legend" Will Make A Bad Situation Worse
KANSAS CITY (July 10, 2020) -- As Kansas Citians gathered to protest police misconduct and federal occupation of the city, National Urban League President and CEO Marc H. Morial and Gwendolyn Grant, President and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City, warned that Attorney General William Barr’s planned “Operation Legend” will make a bad situation worse.
“The crisis of distrust and violence in Kansas City stems from long-standing institutional racism and misconduct on the part of Chief Rick Smith and the Board of Police Commissioners,” Grant said. “Federal occupation will only inflame tensions and further erode trust between law enforcement and the Black community.”
Grant said the name of Barr’s plan to send federal law enforcement into the city is an exploitation of the tragic death of four-year-old LeGend Taliferro, who was fatally wounded as he slept when someone opened fire on his home on Monday.
“Our community is heartbroken over the loss of LeGend and the dozens of other victims of gun violence in recent weeks,” Grant said. “It is the height of cynicism for an administration that has done everything to put more guns on the street to then use the resulting violence as an excuse to clamp down on the community that has suffered the most.”
Morial said Barr’s plan reveals an offensive lack of understanding of Kansas City’s current crisis.
“Crime rises as community distrust of law enforcement falls,” said Morial, who oversaw a dramatic transformation of New Orleans’ troubled police department as mayor in the 1990s and 2000s. “This Department of Justice has wiped out the previous administration’s progress toward reforming local police departments with histories of racially-motivated misconduct. Attorney General’s Barr’s plan does nothing to address the misconduct and brutality that have brought Kansas City to this point.”
The Urban League of Greater Kansas City, supported by the National Urban League, has called for the resignation of Chief Smith and sweeping structural reforms within the Kansas City Police Department. In a joint statement last month with the local branch of the NAACP and the Metro Organization for Racial and Economic Equity (MORE2), the League said, “[We] have become increasingly appalled and very much concerned about Chief Smith’s questionable leadership of the Kansas City Police Department, and the Board of Police Commissioner’s laissez-faire form of governance, which in effect, allows Chief Smith to act unilaterally as the supreme investigator, judge and jury in excessive force and officer-involved homicide cases in his department.”
Among their concerns about Smith are a lack of transparency regarding police-involved shootings, the “incestuous practice” of relying on internal investigations of police misconduct and allowing officers to resume active duty while misconduct investigations are ongoing. The Board of Police Commissioners, they said, “behaves as if they were appointed by the Governor to protect and serve the police chief and police officers rather than to ensure that the department is committed to fair and impartial public safety strategies, dedicated to the principles of fairness, equity and accountability and working actively to build bridges that lead to substantial change.”