Interim KCPD chief doesn’t want the job for good. He should force his successor’s hand
Two recent events — the death of a potential police recruit and the involvement of three off-duty Kansas City Police officers in a deadly shooting over the weekend in Westport — show why interim Police Chief Joseph Mabin must chart a new course for the department.
Those two incidents, along with others in recent years, demonstrate a lack of accountability and transparency by the police department, which falls under the direction of the Board of Police Commissioners.
Even after former Chief Rick Smith’s retirement in April, the Kansas City Police Department hasn’t shown the discipline and courage needed to be forthright and honest with the public about use-of-force incidents.
And now the department wants to hide behind privacy laws to explain why we didn’t know a police recruit died after a training exercise? Unacceptable.
The public wasn’t alerted to the tragic death of Brelande Edmond, a 23-year-old applicant at the Regional Police Academy. His mother Kayla Edmond told The Star her son died at a hospital July 3 after finishing a physical agility test. The hospital ruled his death the result of heatstroke and liver shock, she said.
We asked police officials if the department had announced Edmond’s death. No, officials wrote in an email. The man wasn’t a member of the police department, and his illness and death was a private matter, they wrote.
“The incident did not involve a KCPD employee and further involved private medical information that wouldn’t be appropriate or even legal to speak about publicly,” a department official wrote.
“We would also always want to respect the privacy of any family members in an occurrence such as this that is not of a criminal nature.”
No police incident report was taken either, the official added.
Fire department personnel, on standby to provide emergency medical services, rendered aid to Edmond. Privacy laws precluded the department from releasing a medical report, according to fire officials.
But what responsibility do Kansas City police have to make basic information known? The public must be alerted when a potential police cadet experiences a medical emergency during training and later dies.
So it was left to a grieving mother to speak up for her son.
True, Edmond was not a Kansas City Police Department employee. So what if he wasn’t? The 23-year-old was a prospective recruit taking part in an officially sanctioned, pre-employment police academy agility training exercise.
Questions about deadly Westport shooting
Mabin, the interim chief, has said he does not want the job on a permanent basis. But he still has an opportunity to set the department on a new path from his predecessor. The department’s code-of-silence, back-the-blue culture under Smith did little to improve community relations.
In the case of the weekend’s deadly Westport shooting, police released little information about what happened in the shooting death of 24-year-old Cardell Crawford of Kansas City. Crawford was killed Sunday outside the Westport Ale House. Five other people were injured.
Three off-duty Kansas City police officers performing security duties at the bar were involved, according to the Missouri State Highway Patrol, the agency investigating the incident.
This is no indictment of the officers involved. But we should know who they are and what role each had in the shooting. The continued refusal by the police department to name officers involved in critical incidents will further erode trust in an agency that needs to repair its relationship with the community it serves.
By Wednesday, Kansas City Police officials also had yet to reach out to Crawford’s family to provide important information about his death, his mother said.
Real change has to start somewhere. Chief Mabin, you have an opportunity to set a new course of accountability and transparency that would be hard for whoever takes the permanent job to reverse.
It should have been done a long time ago. We hope you take this chance.
