Missouri voters pass constitutional amendment requiring increased Kansas City police funding
Missouri voters have re-approved a constitutional amendment requiring Kansas City to spend at least a quarter of its budget on police, up from 20% previously.
Tuesday’s vote emphasizes tension between Republicans in power across the state who worry about the possibility of police funding cuts, and leaders in the city, where about 28% of the population is black, who believe they should have the right to decide how to spend local tax dollars.
“In Missouri, we defend our police,” Republican Sen. Tony Luetkemeyer posted on the social media platform X on Tuesday. “We don’t defund them.”
Kansas City leaders have strongly denied they plan to disband the police department.
Kansas City is the only city in Missouri – and one of the largest in the US – that has no local control of its police department. Instead, a state council oversees the department’s activities, including its budget.
“We see this as a major local control issue,” said Gwen Grant, president of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City. “We don’t control our police department, but we have to fund it.”
In a statement Wednesday, Mayor Quinton Lucas hinted at a possible competing amendment being filed “that represents local control in all of our communities.”
Missouri voters initially approved increasing funding for the Kansas City Police Department in 2022, but the state Supreme Court made the rare decision to knock it down out of concern about the cost estimates and ordered the proposal to be put before voters again this year.
Voters approved the 2022 measure by 63%. This year, it passed by about 51%.
In Missouri, the fight for control of local police has been going on for more than a century.
In 1861, during the Civil War, Confederate supporter and then-Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson convinced the Legislature to pass a law giving the state control over the St. Louis police department. That law remained in effect until 2013, when voters approved a constitutional amendment returning police to local control.
The state took over the Kansas City Police Department from 1874 until 1932, when the state Supreme Court ruled that the appointed board’s control of the department was unconstitutional.
The state regained control in 1939 at the urging of another segregationist governor, Lloyd Crow Stark, in part because of corruption under the highly influential political organizer Tom Pendergast. In 1943, a new law limited the amount a city could be required to spend on police to 20 percent of its general revenues in a fiscal year.
“There are probably things like this in all of our cities and states,” said Lora McDonald, executive director of the Metro Organization for Racial and Economic Equity, or MORE2. “It is in the interest of all of us in these United States to continue to weed out where we see this kind of racism in the law.”
The latest power struggle over policing began in 2021, when Lucas and other Kansas City leaders tried unsuccessfully to redirect a portion of the department’s budget toward social services and crime prevention programs. GOP lawmakers in Jefferson City said the effort a step to ‘defund’ the police in a city with a high rate of violent crime.