Kansas City Police Target Minority Communities With Illegal Ticket Quotas, Lawsuit Says

By Jayla Withfield-

The com­plaint comes months after the Justice Department announced an inves­ti­ga­tion into the police depart­men­t’s employ­ment practices.

A 21-year vet­er­an of the Kansas City, Mo., Police Department filed a law­suit last month against the agency, alleg­ing that he was forced to meet ille­gal tick­et quo­tas and tar­get minor­i­ty com­mu­ni­ties. The com­plaint came months after the Department of Justice announced an inves­ti­ga­tion into the police department’s employ­ment prac­tices and alleged dis­crim­i­na­tion against Black offi­cers. Edward Williams, a white man, alleges that over the last sev­en years, the depart­ment has threat­ened to demote offi­cers to the overnight shift if they didn’t ful­fill tick­et quo­tas. “When I first was con­tact­ed in regards to this mat­ter, I had to look into it, because I didn’t know that tick­et quo­tas were not legal,” Gerald Gray, Williams’s attor­ney, told Yahoo News. Ticket quo­tas have been ille­gal in Missouri since August 2016. The law states: “No polit­i­cal sub­di­vi­sion or law enforce­ment agency shall have a pol­i­cy requir­ing or encour­ag­ing an employ­ee to issue a cer­tain num­ber of cita­tions for traf­fic vio­la­tions on a dai­ly, week­ly, month­ly, quar­ter­ly, year­ly, or anoth­er quo­ta basis.” “But even with these laws in place, there’s either sub­tle or overt tick­et quo­tas that are occur­ring all the time,” Jay Beeber, direc­tor of pol­i­cy and research at the National Motorists Association, told Yahoo News.

According to Williams’s law­suit, KCPD sergeants ranked offi­cers by their tick­et counts and rep­ri­mand­ed offi­cers with low tick­et num­bers by tak­ing away their duties and ben­e­fits and giv­ing them unsat­is­fac­to­ry marks on eval­u­a­tions. While tick­et quo­tas are ille­gal in sev­er­al states, Beeber says, they still exist behind closed doors because of the rev­enue they bring in. “There are lots of exam­ples around the coun­try where a lot of [cities’] bud­get comes from tick­ets, and so for their offi­cers, that’s their main job,” Beeber said. In 2016, Kansas City police wrote approx­i­mate­ly 18,000 traf­fic tick­ets each month. From 2021 to 2022, Kansas City’s bud­get includ­ed $6.6 mil­lion from traf­fic vio­la­tions. The Kansas City Star report­ed that “a drop of 25% would cost the city more than $1.6 mil­lion in rev­enue.” Other cities also use tick­et­ing to fund their bud­gets. For instance, in Chicago, tick­et­ing brought in near­ly $264 mil­lion in 2016, adding up to about 7% of the city’s oper­at­ing bud­get. And experts say tick­et quo­tas hit mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties the hard­est. “They are cre­at­ing a huge finan­cial bur­den in these com­mu­ni­ties,” Beeber said.

In Missouri, Black peo­ple make up only 11% of the pop­u­la­tion, but they “are sub­ject­ed to more than 42% of traf­fic stops. In con­trast, white peo­ple in Missouri make up 80% of the state’s pop­u­la­tion and account for less than 25% of all traf­fic stops,” Tom Bastian, deputy direc­tor for com­mu­ni­ca­tions for the ACLU of Missouri, told Yahoo News. According to legal experts, Missourians have been con­cerned with bias in traf­fic enforce­ment for decades. In 2000, the state passed a law that cre­at­ed the annu­al Vehicle Stops Report to track dis­par­i­ties in who is pulled over by police. In 2021, a report found that Black dri­vers were pulled over at a high­er rate than white dri­vers. “Part of that is a socioe­co­nom­ic thing; those neigh­bor­hoods tend to be poor,” Benjamin Easter, a Kansas City crim­i­nal defense lawyer, told Yahoo News. “And so peo­ple are going to have cars with more things wrong with them. They’re going to have more reg­is­tra­tion issues with their car, etc.”

But Easter says the root of the prob­lem is that police in Kansas City aren’t account­able to the local res­i­dents. While most cities con­trol their police depart­ments, the KCPD is run by a five-mem­ber board of police com­mis­sion­ers, four of whom are appoint­ed by the Missouri gov­er­nor and one of whom is the may­or. “This is just anoth­er strong case [for] why we need local con­trol of the police here in Kansas City. The police chief and the local police are appoint­ed by the state com­mit­tee rather than a local enti­ty,” Easter said. Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves denied Williams’s alle­ga­tions in a state­ment released on March 22. “Our depart­ment is ded­i­cat­ed to polic­ing that is both equi­table and fair in all aspects of our duties. We do not direct enforce­ment activ­i­ties based on demo­graph­ics. We do direct traf­fic enforce­ment in high crash loca­tions as well as cit­i­zen traf­fic com­plaint loca­tions,” Graves said. “I find these alle­ga­tions very con­cern­ing and will imme­di­ate­ly ensure the Traffic Division is remind­ed to oper­ate and enforce laws appro­pri­ate­ly.” But legal experts say tick­et quo­tas are not uncom­mon in the U.S., and they doubt things will change any­time soon. “I per­son­al­ly have a hard time believ­ing that [ille­gal tick­et quo­tas are] going to stop with­out some dras­tic change in lead­er­ship at the Kansas City Police Department,” Spencer Webster, a local attor­ney, told Yahoo News. Williams is request­ing a tri­al by jury and seek­ing mul­ti­ple damages.