Do you have a Ring (TM) or similar video camera by your front door? With the curved end of a claw hammer, deliver a sharp downward stroke to the device’s top edge. Think of the blow as a slicing or chopping motion. When the unit is severed from your doorway, place it in the trash.

For stubbornly attached units, you can also use the flat side of the hammer in a straight-on strike, repeated until the item is rendered into a pile of splinters that can be swept up using an everyday broom and dustpan.

Some say this approach to your Ring camera is wasteful. This is true. It would have been more efficient never to install this device at all. But perhaps you moved into a home that already has one. Or perhaps you were momentarily afflicted with an episode of irrational terror, which has now passed. Either way you need to get the thing off. Whatever waste is produced is, at this point, unavoidable.

Others say that this action is destructive. This is an error. What is destructive is the insidious belief that the world outside your front door is to be treated with suspicion; that every passerby is a potential threat; that every neighbor is a potential enemy; that every human interaction must be stored and cataloged as evidence of possible crime. This attitude is destructive of good will, of brotherhood, of peace, of love. This is the attitude of the Gestapo. This is the attitude of the paranoid lunatic. This is totalitarianism creeping into your home disguised as safety.

One swift stroke of that claw hammer will fix all that.

I get it. People are worried that they may be victims of a home invasion. Is your dad Charles Lindbergh? If not, you will not be kidnapped as you sleep. I guarantee it. In fact, I am so confident of this that I am willing to bet one thousand dollars, right now, that it won’t happen to you. That’s how I got the big vault of gold I have: positive thinking, and basic statistical literacy.

But what if someone steals your Amazon package off your front steps? Well, what if they do? I guess you would have to get a refund. I guess you might suffer an extremely minor inconvenience. I guess it could be an opportunity to reflect on the painful predations of poverty under capitalism, which creates economic desires, renders people unable to satisfy them, and then taunts them with constant visions of abundance in which they cannot share. True, it is a tragedy of unimaginably small proportions that someone has stolen your box of paper towels. Would you let them steal your optimism, as well?

Your front door is equipped with a lock. If you are fretful about what may be coming towards you, engage it. That will prevent anyone from entering your home without your permission. Your front door is equipped with a peephole. If you are fretful about who might be standing there, look through it and see. I think you’ll find that the use of these existing items solves the problems that you have been tricked into imagining that you have. No panopticon is necessary.

Crime. “Crime.” “Crime!” It is a conceptual delivery system for an unhappy life of fear. Reject it as a category of being. Reject it as an intellectually coherent object. Reject it as a lens with which to view the world. Life is a series of surprising events, some bad and some delightful. The unfolding of these events makes up the wondrous parade of life itself. Defining this entire parade by the theoretical possibility of a small handful of negative outliers does not guarantee you peace of mind. Rather, it guarantees the opposite: an unceasing focus on the worst, a needless hypervigilance bleeding into anxiety. Thrown into this disordered state, you find yourself easy prey for those who would invent solutions to this imagined problem that they themselves have conjured. The mask of safety hides the sallow face of the predator.

You want to point a freaking camera at every postal worker and cookie-selling Girl Scout and dinner party attendee that approaches your door? What is this, a house, or a prison? It is plainly crazy. It is far afield from reasonable. Its normalization is evidence of a latent societal sickness. We don’t point cameras at our friends. We don’t leer suspiciously at our neighbors. We don’t assail humanity with an accusatory spotlight. These things are not okay.

The only people who deserve such brutal treatment are those who have, through their actions, proven that they harbor you ill will. For example: the people who try to sell you Ring cameras. Go ahead and point the cameras at them. They are certainly not to be trusted.

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Kansas City’s police department is one of the deadliest in America. Researchers estimate KCPD kills people at a rate more than seven times higher than some departments, and a national Police Scorecard ranks it 495th out of 500 agencies—an almost failing grade in every category from accountability to use of force.

Yet on Jan. 31, 2026, Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves sent a department-wide memo warning of a budget emergency. The Kansas City Police Department, she wrote, would need to implement “drastic cost-reduction measures” to ensure “basic services can continue to be supported.”

The memo ordered an immediate suspension of overtime, a freeze on professional staff hiring, and a halt to equipment purchases. City leaders, including Mayor Quinton Lucas, learned about the cuts from news reports. The Board of Police Commissioners had met just days earlier. The crisis was never mentioned.

(Critics have long argued that departments use overtime as a pressure valve for understaffing that drives up costs while putting exhausted officers on the street rather than investing in non-police responders.)

A high-level source within KCPD told FOX4 the situation is “significant.”

But here is what the memo did not say: KCPD received $343 million this fiscal year, which runs from July 1 to June 30, a 7.6% increase from the previous year. 

The department’s adopted budget explicitly notes that increases were needed for “legal fees, workers’ compensation, settlements.” In October, KCPD requested $417 million for next year, a $74 million increase that includes $7.5 million specifically earmarked for lawsuit settlements.

The department that cannot afford “basic services” continues to employ Officer Blayne Newton, who has killed three people, shot a teenager in the head, body-slammed a nine months pregnant Black woman, and cost Kansas City taxpayers millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements.

The Numbers They Hope You Never Compare

During budget hearings last spring, KCPD officials told the City Council that $3.5 million would be sufficient for legal settlements this fiscal year. The council approved the department’s $343 million budget.

Two months later, the Board of Police Commissioners announced $18.1 million in lawsuit settlements: $14 million to Ricky Kidd, who spent 23 years in prison for being framed for a murder he did not commit, and $4.1 million to the family of Cameron Lamb, killed by Officer Eric DeValkenaere in 2019 (the first white cop in KCPD’s over 150+ year history to be convicted for killing a Black person).

“It makes anyone who’s sitting here in government-land say, ‘What the hell are we doing here?'” Mayor Lucas told The Beacon in 2025, after the Board quietly approved $18.1 million in settlements—five times what KCPD had told the Council it would need. 

The budget for police settlements alone is more than fourteen times the entire budget for REACH (Responding with Empathetic Alternatives and Community Health), the city’s only pre-arrest diversion program that sends trained responders instead of armed officers to calls involving mental health crises, substance abuse, and homelessness.

REACH received $1.26 million.

It took over a year of organizing led by Decarcerate KC and community leaders and a mass grassroots campaign to receive the $1.26 million to pass the REACH ordinance. According to advocates, that was not enough to meet projected costs.

When Mayor Lucas introduced the REACH legislation, he noted “that is a lot cheaper than a $317 million budget for enforcement or a $200 million jail.” He pointed to Tallahassee, where a similar program diverted over 1,000 people in three years. Only 6% were rearrested.

The Cost of Keeping Blayne Newton

On March 12, 2020, Officer Blayne Newton shot and killed Donnie Sanders during a traffic stop. Sanders was unarmed.

Later that year, video surfaced of Newton body-slamming and kneeling on the back of Deja Stallings, a Black woman who was nine months pregnant. She was hospitalized. Her baby was born in distress. Activists staged a 30-day occupation of city hall calling for Newton’s firing in 2020.

In 2019, Newton was one of three officers who used a Taser and repeatedly punched a teenager. The city paid $325,000 to settle that case.

On June 9, 2023, Newton fired sixteen rounds into a minivan at the intersection of 31st Street and Van Brunt Boulevard.

He killed Kristen Fairchild, 42, and Marcel Nelson, 42. He shot Jaden Thorns, a teenager, in the head. Thorns survived.

“Blayne Newton is a serial killer,” Steve Young, an organizer with the Kansas City Law Enforcement Accountability Project, told The Kansas City Star. “There are officers who don’t discharge their weapons their entire careers. He’s now responsible for three deaths and two assaults that we know of.”

In Nov. 2025, a Jackson County judge approved a $3.5 million wrongful death settlement for the 2023 shooting. In 2024, the city settled a lawsuit for $65,000 after a Kansas woman, Bermeeka Mitchell, a Black woman in her 50s, accused Officer Blayne Newton of assault at a Platte County Walmart while he was working off-duty but in full KCPD uniform. The KCPD’s Office of Community Complaints sustained her allegations of excessive force.

In Jan. 2026, Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson announced she would not file criminal charges against Newton for the 2023 shooting despite expressing “serious and ongoing concerns about his pattern of behavior.” In 2024, former prosecutor Jean Peters Baker publicly urged the department to fire him as a danger to public safety.

As of this writing, Officer Blayne Newton remains employed by KCPD. He works in the patrol bureau.

Chief Graves has refused to fire him.

“Shocked”

Councilman Johnathan Duncan was not informed of the budget crisis before Graves sent her memo. He learned about it from news reports, like everyone else.

Duncan pointed to the department’s recent purchases and budget realities:

“This budget cycle KCPD received $350 million dollars. Additionally, the department has purchased drones, ATVs, a military bomb vehicle, and a $2.1 million dollar mobile command center. To date, Chief Graves has refused to fire violent Officer Blayne Newton who has cost the City millions in lawsuits. KCPD does not need a bigger budget; they need better accountability.”

Duncan requested that Chief Graves appear before the full City Council to explain how the department is running out of money.

The Toys They Can Afford

KCPD officials have noted that some of the department’s recent high-profile purchases, including drones, ATVs, a bomb and arson command vehicle, and a mobile command post bus, were funded by the Police Foundation of Kansas City, not the department’s annual budget.

The Police Foundation of Kansas City is funded almost entirely by tax-deductible contributions (corporations, wealthy donors, events), with contributions in the $550K–$1.4M per year in recent 990s.

This raises an obvious question that local media has failed to ask: If the Police Foundation has millions of private dollars to funnel into drones and armored bomb vehicles, why is that money not being used to cover the “essential” items the department now claims it cannot afford?

In Nov. 2025, the City Council approved $500,000 in public money to purchase more drones for KCPD. That money will be paired with a Police Foundation match. The department already has nine drones, funded by $600,000 from the Foundation earlier that year.

The bomb and arson command vehicle cost approximately $750,000.

The mobile command center cost $2.1 million.

Drones and militarized command vehicles are part of a growing ‘drones as first responders’ and tactical surveillance infrastructure, deployed not only for rare emergencies but for everyday policing and, soon, mass events. Police Foundation leaders have said the drone fleet will be deployed heavily to areas expecting an influx of visitors during the 2026 World Cup.

Meanwhile, the Housing Trust Fund, which creates and preserves affordable housing for Kansas Citians struggling with housing costs or experiencing homelessness, receives $12.5 million annually. The fund’s money is running out. It has no continuous, stable funding source after 2026.

The Colonial Structure

Kansas City is the only major city in the United States that does not have local control of its police department.

This arrangement is not an accident of history. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Missouri’s Democrat-controlled legislature passed a bill to seize control of KCPD from local voters. The bill’s supporters sought to limit civil rights gains during Reconstruction; its opponents included a Radical Republican abolitionist and several other Republicans from across the state.

Police departments at the time were often established to control freed slaves and prevent labor organizing. In the decades following the war, Kansas City’s Black population grew from 190 in 1860 to 8,100 by 1880. Democrats were working to limit Black voters’ power at the ballot box. Removing the police department from city voters’ control served that goal.

The system was briefly suspended during the Pendergast era, then reinstated in 1939 under segregationist Governor Lloyd Crow Stark. Three decades later, police officers killed six Black people during the 1968 uprising following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. None were armed. No charges were filed. The Mayor’s Commission on Civil Disorders recommended returning the department to local control, arguing a local board would have “greater awareness” of the community.

The recommendation was ignored.

“This is a backwards colonial system that undermines the voices of Kansas Citians, particularly minority voices, because there aren’t many cities where a lot of minorities get elected,” Mayor Lucas said in 2022. “And I think that this is a sign, again, of how the state tries to subjugate the people of Kansas City.”

Today, the Kansas City Police Department is governed by the Board of Police Commissioners, a five-member body. Four members are appointed by the Missouri Governor. The fifth seat is held by the Mayor. The City Council has no authority over department policy, hiring, or discipline. It can only write the checks.

In Aug. 2024, Missouri voters statewide passed Amendment 4, requiring Kansas City to spend at least 25% of its general revenue on the police department, up from 20%. Voters in the Kansas City portion of Jackson County rejected the measure by 61%. It did not matter. The rest of the state decided for them.

“The fact that we do not manage KCPD leaves us in an untenable position,” Councilman Duncan 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.”

This year, public safety accounts for 72.7% of the city’s General Fund. KCPD receives more money than any other department. And yet the city cannot fire a single officer. Cannot reform a single policy. Cannot demand accountability for a single dollar.

St. Louis police used to operate under the same state-controlled structure. When St. Louis won back local control in 2012, it didn’t erase police violence overnight. But it put policy and discipline under locally elected officials, not an unelected state board.

Kansas City remains a colony. The people who live here foot the bill for a police department they do not control, while a governor-appointed board and an unaccountable bureaucracy decide how that money is spent and who is protected.

The Pattern

Every year, the cycle repeats. KCPD warns of danger. Violence persists. The department demands more money. The city pays. Violence persists. KCPD demands more money.

In 2024, the city approved a 30% increase in starting salaries for police officers, from $50,000 to $65,000, and boosted the department’s budget to $320.8 million.

In 2025, the department received $343 million, a 7.6% increase from the prior fiscal year. The budget document explicitly states that increases were needed for “legal fees, workers’ compensation, settlements.”

For 2026-27, KCPD is requesting $417 million, a 22% increase. The request includes $7.5 million specifically for lawsuit settlements. It includes funding to raise starting officer salaries to $70,000.

And the plan, according to Chief Graves, is to ask city leaders for 50 more officers in the new budget.

“The Grading Curve”

In 2021, the Police Scorecard, a nationwide law enforcement accountability project from Campaign Zero, ranked the Kansas City Police Department 495th out of 500 of the largest law enforcement agencies in the country. Only Chicago, Oklahoma City, and a handful of others scored worse.

The scorecard measured departments on use of force, accountability, arrests for low-level offenses, and community outcomes. KCPD’s rate of killing civilians was higher than 97% of U.S. police departments. Black residents were 4.3 times as likely to be killed by Kansas City police as white residents. Out of 1,059 civilian complaints of police misconduct from 2016-2019, only 3% were ruled in favor of civilians.

A separate peer-reviewed study published in 2024 found that Kansas City PD was the second deadliest police department in the nation, behind only St. Louis Metro PD. Researchers estimated that under average conditions, KCPD would kill 10.04 people per million residents annually. The least deadly departments in the study killed 1.37 people per million.

In what other profession can you receive the equivalent of an F, year after year, and continue to get a raise?

A 2024 survey found that Missouri teachers spend an average of $1,300 of their own money on school supplies each year, the fifth-highest in the country. More than 90% of teachers in the region reach into their own pockets to purchase classroom necessities.

What Safety Actually Costs

Consider what Kansas City could have purchased with the money spent paying for police violence. The $18.1 million in settlements announced last year could have funded the REACH program for more than fourteen years. It could have added $18.1 million to the Housing Trust Fund, creating hundreds of additional affordable housing units.

It could have funded mental health crisis response, substance abuse treatment, violence intervention programs, youth employment, or any of the proven strategies that actually reduce harm.

Instead, it went to families whose loved ones were wrongfully convicted, falsely imprisoned, and killed by the very institution that claims to keep us safe.

The Question We Must Ask

The question is not how KCPD ran over budget. The question is why we continue to fund an institution that generates more harm than it prevents, then charges us for the “privilege.”

Every dollar spent settling lawsuits for Blayne Newton’s violence is a dollar stolen from mental health services, from housing, from education, from the material conditions that actually produce safety. Every year, this department exploits our desperation for safety to hold us hostage, demanding more money that should be going to life-affirming services.

KCPD does not have a budget problem. It has an accountability problem. It has a violence problem. And as long as Missouri’s colonial control structure remains in place, Kansas City will continue paying the bill.

Chief Graves is expected to appear before the City Council during the budget session this Thursday. We will be there.

The Kansas City Defender is a 6x award-winning abolitionist media organization. Support our work at kansascitydefender.com.

The post KCPD Holds Taxpayers Hostage While Shielding a Killer in Blue appeared first on The Kansas City Defender.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids of Johnson County is drawing criticism from local advocates after she bucked her party’s positions on two key immigration-related issues in recent weeks.

Davids this week was one of just 21 Democrats in the U.S. House who voted in favor of a bill temporarily extending funding for the Department of Homeland Security, amid the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown in Minnesota.

At the same time, Davids is one of an increasingly small group of House Democrats who have not signed on to a resolution calling for the impeachment of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

Davids said she voted for the funding package on Tuesday to “avert a prolonged government shutdown and deliver critical investments Kansans rely on,” including spending on roads and aviation infrastructure in Johnson County.

The measure funds several federal departments, including Transportation, Education, and Housing and Urban Development, through the end of the year, but only gives Homeland Security two weeks of funding.

In an emailed statement to the Post, she said DHS “must be subject to strong oversight, transparency, and accountability,” and that the funding bill this week clears the way for Congressional negotiators to hammer out reforms for Immigration and Customs Enforcement that many in her party, as well as advocates locally and around the country, are calling for. 

Democratic leaders on Wednesday laid out their list of “guardrails” for ICE that they want instituted in order for a longer-term DHS funding measure to pass after the current one expires on Feb. 13.

Those demands include barring immigration agents from wearing masks, and requiring them to both wear body cameras and get judicial warrants to enter private property, and barring operations near sensitive locations like schools and churches.

“My vote gives Congress more time to negotiate meaningful ICE reforms,” Davids said this week. “I’ll keep working across the aisle to ensure our laws reflect both our values and our responsibility to keep communities safe and families secure.”

“Beyond disappointed”

 

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Still, advocates in Johnson County who have been critical of the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement said they hope Davids will do more to hold the White House and DHS accountable.

Moti Rieber, a local rabbi and executive director of Kansas Interfaith Action, said the recent funding bill was the “one point of pressure” Democrats had for trying to force concessions from the Trump administration.

“A major American city is under siege by a militarized, brutal ICE agency, unconstrained by the law and answerable only to the President and Kristi Noem,” Rieber said in emailed comments to the Post. “By approving this latest DHS funding, Rep. Davids guarantees that the chaos will continue. I am beyond disappointed that she has refused to use her leverage in this situation.”

Jana Sullivan-Peterson, a community organizer with Heartland Mission Indivisible in northeastern Johnson County, said “our community overwhelmingly supports allowing DHS funding to lapse on February 13 unless meaningful accountability measures are put in place.” 

In an emailed statement to the Post, Sullivan-Peterson noted, specifically, her group’s support for policies like mandatory body cameras for immigration agents and “an end to sweeping patrols in favor of truly targeted arrests.” 

“These are not extreme demands — they are basic safeguards that reflect our values around civil liberties, transparency, and community safety. We are disappointed that Rep. Davids voted to extend DHS funding without these protections attached,” Sullivan-Peterson wrote in her statement to the Post.

“We hope Rep. Davids will use the coming weeks to engage directly with her constituents and, on February 13, vote in alignment with the clear priorities of the voters she represents,” she added, noting the date the current DHS funding is set to expire. 

Davids not on board with impeaching Noem

At the same time, Davids has not joined most other House Democrats in signing on to a resolution, first filed last month by Illinois Rep. Robin Kelly, calling for the impeachment of DHS Secretary Noem.

As of Thursday, 187 of the 214 Democrats in the U.S. House had signed on as cosponsors of the impeachment measure, including Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Kansas City, Missouri.

Pressure on Noem has ramped up, particularly in the past few weeks, following the killings by federal agents of two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis.

Polling increasingly shows Americans souring on the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement amid the ongoing conflict in Minnesota.

An NPR/PBS/Marist poll conducted in the final week of January showed 65% of respondents said ICE has “gone too far” in its immigration enforcement operations.

Another poll conducted by left-leaning think tank Data for Progress showed a majority of respondents (52%) think Noem should be impeached.

On Wednesday, border czar Tom Homan announced the Trump administration would reduce its force of federal agents in Minnesota by 700, or by about 25%. Still, 2,000 officers remain in the Twin Cities, as enforcement operations continue. 

Davids called the killings of Good and Pretti “horrific” and said that Congress has a duty to “seek justice and transparency.”

“I support efforts to ensure accountability and oversight. Something has to change, and that means all options should be on the table,” she said in a statement emailed to the Post.

But she suggested that impeachment was an unrealistic avenue to pursue.

“I’m also realistic about the political make-up of Congress. While an impeachment vote against the Secretary likely isn’t going to pass, we should keep pursuing meaningful ways to make sure accountability actually happens,” Davids said. “That means demanding full transparency, independent investigations, and real consequences for misconduct — not political spin or lies — so that no family ever has to endure this kind of loss again.”

Again, Rieber said Davids is not doing enough to hold the Trump administration accountable.

“The resolution calling for the impeachment of Sec. Noem may be mostly symbolic, but it sends the important message that officials can and will be held accountable,” he said in his statement to the Post. “Rep. Davids is passing on an opportunity to deliver a strong moral message against ICE chaos and in support of our immigrant neighbors. But since she voted for the DHS funding also, maybe it’s a moral message she doesn’t really agree with.”

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