‘What the hell are we doing here?’: Kansas City police already maxed out lawsuit fund

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A Kansas City police van sits outside a patrol station on Linwood Boulevard (Allison Kite/Missouri Independent).

At the end of February, during a public budget hearing, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas asked the police department whether it had requested enough money to manage lawsuit expenses.

Maj. Josh Heinen, from the Kansas City Police Department fiscal division, responded that the $3.5 million the department budgeted for legal settlements was “a reasonable amount” for this year.

So the Kansas City Council voted to approve the department’s $343 million budget, which set aside $3.5 million for settlements.

The council didn’t know then that two months later, KCPD would announce two lawsuit settlements that were five times the amount the department budgeted for — totaling $18.1 million.

Lucas believes that KCPD leaders knew during the budget process that expenses of that size were possible but chose not to disclose them.

When councilmembers and city staff read about the settlements in the news, they were worried that KCPD would be back to ask for more money to cover that unexpected expense.

But Capt. Jacob Becchina, a spokesman for KCPD, told The Beacon in an email that the department plans to pay the settlements out of its own general fund. It won’t affect personnel, he said, but it could cut contracts and equipment for the next fiscal year.

Members of the City Council — including Lucas — are not happy that the $18.1 million expense was never disclosed when the city was laying out the $343 million police budget for this year.

“It makes anyone who’s sitting here in government-land say, ‘What the hell are we doing here?’” Lucas told The Beacon.

Unlike nearly every other major city in the United States, Kansas City does not have control over its own police department. Instead, the police are governed by a five-member Board of Police Commissioners, which includes the mayor of Kansas City and four people appointed by the governor.

The City Council is required to give KCPD a quarter of its annual budget, which the department has near-exclusive authority to spend as it pleases. Lucas, who sits on the police board, and other top city leaders have unanswered questions about how that money gets spent.

KCPD maintains a “Self-Retention General Subsidiary Fund” that it uses to pay legal settlements when they come up. Money in that fund comes from a few sources. In this year’s budget, $2.5 million was allocated to that fund by the City Council. Another $1 million came from the state of Missouri.

Lucas has called on the state to contribute more for lawsuit settlements given the governor’s oversight of the police board. He called the current $1 million yearly contribution “woefully inadequate.”

The finer details of that lawsuit fund are tough to find. When The Beacon submitted a records request in 2022 to understand why that fund had $5.6 million in accounting inaccuracies over the previous 10 years, KCPD asked for $1,700 in research fees.

On April 22, the department agreed to pay $4.1 million to the family of Cameron Lamb, a Black man shot to death in 2019 by a KCPD detective. One week later, the department announced that it would pay another $14 million to settle a lawsuit filed by Ricky Kidd, a man who was incarcerated for 23 years for a murder he did not commit.

This year’s $18.1 million in lawsuit settlements are far more than the $3.5 million in that fund. If the City Council had known the expenses were coming, Lucas argues, it could have helped KCPD plan around them.

But instead, the police board voted to approve a budget that would need to be revised.

That money will not be paid out all at once. The $14 million settlement with Kidd will be paid out over the next four years. If Kidd’s settlement is divided evenly, that puts this year’s bill at $3.5 million, plus another $4.1 million to the family of Lamb, totaling $7.6 million.

When legal settlements exceed the money in its self-retention fund, KCPD has a couple options to make the payments.

One option is for KCPD to ask the City Council to take money out of the city’s budget to help pay for the settlements. That’s what KCPD has done in the past.

“If they did that,” said Assistant City Manager Melissa Kozakiewicz, “then they’re coming before the council to say, ‘Can you pay this amount?’ And the council then can say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”

By way of comparison, this year’s estimated cost for the police’s recent legal settlements approaches the $8.5 million that Kansas City spent to distribute 162,000 trash carts last year.

The other option is for KCPD to pay the settlement entirely out of its own budget. That’s the route that department is taking in this case.

That means transferring money from other parts of the police budget, such as equipment, consulting fees or building repairs.

Many city officials expected KCPD to ask the City Council to cover most, if not all, of the $18.1 million legal bill stemming from the Lamb and Kidd settlements. It came as a surprise when they learned from The Beacon that wouldn’t be the case.

City officials including Lucas and Councilman Johnathan Duncan have grown frustrated that KCPD does not treat the council or city staff as partners in navigating substantial budget decisions like recent lawsuit settlements.

KCPD plans to pull that money from the general fund, which totals $299 million for this fiscal year. Excluding personnel costs, which Becchina said will not be used for the settlements, there is only $23 million available in the general fund.

Lucas said he was frustrated that KCPD leadership chose not to be forthcoming with city officials when they outlined their budget two months before the settlements were announced.

A lawyer himself, Lucas has taught courses on this subject at the University of Kansas Law School.

“Hell, I’ll go on the record as your lawyer expert on this,” Lucas said. “You don’t settle a $14 million case in one day.”

When cases like this are filed — in this case, several years ago — there’s often a settlement demand from the start, he said. The defendant (in this case, KCPD) was probably told years ago that if they paid that sum, the plaintiff was willing to settle out of court.

“If Disney is facing a $1 billion dollar suit from the Trump administration,” he said. “No matter how valid it is or not, you put that in your list of things that could have some material impact on what’s going on.”

As the court date got closer, Lucas said, the lawyers — and leadership at the police department itself — would have been fully aware by February that a lawsuit settlement of this size was not only possible, but likely.

“You don’t have to speculate,” he said, “to at least know that there was someone in leadership, and perhaps many someones … knew that there was high potential that this would have an impact in this fiscal year.”

Becchina, from KCPD, declined to make Chief Stacey Graves available to comment on this story.

Duncan, who represents the 6th District in southwestern Kansas City on the City Council, said he learned about the police settlements the same way everyone else did — by reading it in the news.

The same goes for Kozakiewicz and other staff at City Hall, including the people in charge of the budget.

Over the past several years, Lucas has encouraged the other members of the police board to look into a liability insurance policy for the department.

That insurance, he said, would make the cost of litigation less burdensome for KCPD and City Hall.

The board has researched policies, but Lucas said that the department has cited a $5 million deductible as a reason not to obtain liability insurance. But in the past several years, Lucas said, police settlements have become more and more expensive, and the department has exceeded that amount.

This year’s $14 million settlement with Ricky Kidd was $1 million away from breaking the city’s record for its most expensive lawsuit settlement ever.

If the police department had liability insurance, even with a $5 million deductible, it would have already saved Kansas City taxpayers millions of dollars this year.

In a statement, the Board of Police Commissioners wrote that the $14 million settlement with Ricky Kidd was a rational decision.

“The Board of Police Commissioners of Kansas City, Missouri and Ricky Kidd have amicably resolved the ongoing litigation between Mr. Kidd and the Board for $14 million, payable over the next four fiscal years,” the board said in the statement. “The board resolved this litigation out of a desire to avoid the expense, uncertainty and risk of litigation, and the resolution of the matter is not an admission of liability or wrongdoing by anyone.”

The statement went on to say that the board “takes seriously its obligation to manage litigation in a way that serves not only the interests of the Kansas City Police Department, but, most importantly, those of the community it serves. This resolution is no different. Mr. Kidd’s lawsuit involved former personnel and events of nearly 30 years ago. The Department will take the benefit of the lessons learned throughout the course of this litigation and embed those lessons in its ongoing and continuous efforts to ensure Kansas Citians receive the highest level of police service. The board appreciates Mr. Kidd’s reasoned and sincere efforts in arriving at this resolution and wishes him and his family well.”

Duncan said the latest lawsuit settlement saga is emblematic of his long-standing frustrations with the police department.

“The fact that we do not manage KCPD leaves us in an untenable position,” he said, “where we are liable for any mistakes they make or any lawsuits that arise due to their conduct or misconduct. And we have absolutely zero authority to actively look to correct their practices and procedures.”

And the lack of transparency when these issues arise makes it even more difficult to find a path forward, he said.

“I often feel like the city is held hostage by KCPD,” he said, “in terms of the fact that we are … not made an active partner — not for lack of trying — in how to curb future litigation.”

Lucas said that the system of state control, where all of the police policies and procedures are set by an unelected board appointed by the governor, means the city is unable to hold KCPD accountable for the money that lawsuit settlements cost the taxpayers every year.

The biggest challenge with the police, he said, is a lack of accountability — not just to the taxpayers of Kansas City, but “really their lack of accountability to anyone.”

“We settled the case with Cameron Lamb, right?” he said. “What’s changed? What is the new step that people take? Is there any new discussion? Is there any new thing about how you de-escalate? Is there anything on it at all? Regrettably, at least in terms of what becomes publicly known, there is not.”

This article first appeared on Beacon: Kansas City and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This post was originally authored and published by Josh Merchant from Missouri Independent via RSS Feed. Join today to get your news feed on Nationwide Report®.