The Kansas City PD Is Vying For the Title of America's Craziest Police Force
Which Kansas City, you ask? Both!
With reports of law enforcement violence and abuse being as common as they are these days, it’s always extra alarming when one police force rises above all others to dominate the headlines.
That never happens because things are getting better. One recent example that comes to mind immediately is when the Department of Justice had to fire off a letter to the Albuquerque PD a few years ago to ask them to please stop indiscriminately shooting people.
It seems like they declined that request, because all these years later, New Mexico still ranks #2 in police killings per capita.
The latest contestant on the insane police pageant stage is the Kansas City PD. Which Kansas City? Hey, why choose when we can talk about both?
Let’s start with the police in Kansas City, Kansas. While their various misdeeds and transgressions go back decades, it all really became big news in September, 2021.
Did you know Jay-Z has a philanthropic group called Team Roc that focuses on social justice issues?
Well he sure does, and through that group, he filed a lawsuit against the KCKPD to obtain documentation of complaints made against officers in recent years, claiming those requests had been denied when made through the usual channels.
Here’s a quote from the lawsuit:
“The KCKPD is entrusted by the public to help maintain peace in the community. Yet, for years, it appears that officers have abused their power and engaged in wrongdoing. To the extent that the KCKPD did not take any steps to remediate these issues, the public should have a right to know so they can organize and take appropriate steps to effect change.”
The lawsuit mentioned a few recent misconduct allegations that had managed to make their way to the public. Among them was two officers who helped a third cover up a car accident that probably would’ve resulted in DUI charges.
In another case, KCKPD officer was charged with trying to “knowingly hire a person selling sexual relations.” He was in uniform at the time.
Those are all relatively minor transgressions compared to the stuff that’s still to come in this article. Speaking of minors, there’s also a mention of KCKPD officers accused of sex crimes against children, but I wasn’t quite sure which incident they were referring to.
So that’s bad, and it gets much worse!
Team Roc followed up the lawsuit filing by taking out a full page ad in the Washington Post calling on the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the litany of allegations and formal complaints.
“The police and eyewitness reports of criminal behavior perpetrated by members of the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department, over the past several decades, are staggering. They detail graphic accounts of rape, murder, sex trafficking and corruption so rampant and so blatant, it would be shocking if even a single allegation were true.”
If you’re doing your own research, this is the point where things get a little confusing. A quick scan of recent headlines makes it seem like the Department of Justice has indeed recently opened the requested investigation into the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department that Team Roc requested.
But nope, that’s a completely separate investigation into the other Kansas City. The one in Missouri. The less unwieldy acronym-ed KCPD.
In that case, the DOJ is looking into civil rights violations by the Kansas City PD against black officers on the force. The feds started looking into it after a yearlong investigation by the Kansas City Star revealed multiple instances of black KCPD officers being subjected to obviously racist abuse at the hands of fellow cops.
One former officer the Kansas City Star spoke to described being a black cop on the KCPD like “being a mouse in a snake cage.” In the 15 years prior to the investigation, 18 black officers quit due to racist treatment received on the job.
That’s when the KCPD actually bothered to hire black cops. In a city where 30 percent of the residents are black, that same demographic only makes up 11 percent of the police department.
The Department of Justice already investigated unequal hiring practices within the KCPD back in 2009, but for some reason never released their findings. Whatever they found obviously didn’t compel anyone to do anything, because here they are investigating the situation all over again.
Now, you shouldn’t take the fact that the Feds opened an investigation into the other Kansas City as a sign that Team Roc’s efforts didn’t accomplish anything. Here’s another quote from that lawsuit:
“Roger Golubski framed an innocent black man for homicide that he didn’t commit when his mother refused to engage in further, non-consensual sex acts with him.”
Holy shit! Not only is all of that true, it just barely scratches the surface of the allegations that have been made against former KCKPD detective Roger Golubski. That creep retired in 2010, but an investigation was opened into his cop activities in 2017 after that innocent man he framed, Lamonte McIntyre, was finally exonerated and released.
The details of McIntyre’s ordeal are too long and detailed to share in full here, but it’s your typical crooked cop stuff. It is lazy, racist police work of the highest order, and it sent a man to prison for 23 years for a crime he did not commit.
What’s especially wild about the story is the part about Lamonte McIntyre’s mother, Rosie. She alleges she was raped by Golubski years prior and, when he demanded to make the sexual relationship permanent, she moved and changed her phone number to avoid him. It’s her belief that this is what motivated Golubski to frame her son.
If that doesn’t tell you enough about how much of a corrupt monster this guy was, please note that the investigators who finally got Lamonte McIntyre out of prison actually disagree with Rosie about Golubski’s motives. In their opinion, the two incidents were separate and he probably didn’t even remember Rosie McIntyre because he raped so many other women. Using his position as a detective to force black women to have sex with him was just a thing Roger Golubski is alleged to have done all the damn time.
After years of allegations and investigations, and hot on the heels of Team Roc’s lawsuit and full page ad in the Washington Post, Roger Golubski was finally arrested in September 2022. The charges center around the sexual assault and rape of two women between 1998 and 2002, but his crimes are likely far more extensive.
Case in point, a whole bunch of young black women have gone missing or been found murdered over the past few decades in Kansas City, and most of those cases remain unsolved. At least some of those women had connections to Golubski and the FBI seems to think they can pin at least one of those murders on him.
In a lawsuit filed by Rosie and Lamonte McIntyre, lawyers claimed they could bring forward 73 women who could speak to Golubski’s history and network of sexual abuse. In a recent deposition in that case, when questioned about allegations that he raped a women whose children he’d promised to help get out of legal trouble, he asserted his Fifth Amendment rights FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FIVE TIMES.
As disgusting as that is, it later came out that Golubski isn’t the only former KCKPD officer accused of abusing his position of power to force women into sex. There’s also William “Ed” Saunders. A woman named Natasha Hodge said in a 2014 affidavit that Saunders forced her to perform oral sex on him in a vacant crackhouse in Kansas City, Kansas in 1996.
Somehow, that story gets worse. Hodge actually went to the hospital and then to the police immediately after it happened. The detective she talked to said they weren’t surprised to hear of the allegations against Saunders because they’d heard similar allegations before. When they returned to the scene, police found the condom Hodge said Saunders wore during the assault right where she said it would be. All of the various evidence was gathered up and sent off to the District Attorney who, for reasons unknown, never bothered to file any charges against Saunders.
The further details in the cases of Saunders and Golubski both are so aggressively heinous that, instead of diving into them more, we should probably take a breather and head back across the bridge (?) to the Missouri side of town to talk about some more run of the mill incidents of crazed police violence.
Like the case of Kansas City police sergeant Matthew T. Neal. He plead guilty to felony assault charges recently on account of how he smashed a 15-year-old boy’s face in a fast food restaurant parking lot and then put his knee in the back of the kid’s head while he laid on the ground bleeding. The teen suffered broken teeth and bruising and gashes on his head, but was not arrested or cited for any crimes.
Neal is just one of several KCPD officers who are or will soon be on trial for various acts of violence. Like Matthew Brummett and Charles Prichard. They’re no longer with the force but are currently facing felony assault charges over their use of excessive force during the arrest of a transgender woman named Breona Hill.
Or how about Nicholas McQuillen? He’s facing assault charges after he was seen in a viral video absolutely flooding a father and his teenage daughter with pepper spray at a 2020 protest.
Another former KCPD detective, Eric DeValkenaere, was recently sentenced to six years in prison over the December, 2019 shooting of a black man named Cameron Lamb, who was committing the egregious crime of backing his pickup truck into his garage.
There’s also the case of 52-year-old Mark Wynn. He’s not a cop. He’s a disabled man who was denied access to his walker during a traffic stop seven years ago. Despite telling the cops who pulled him over that he had a spinal cord injury and needed help walking, he was ordered at gunpoint to exit his vehicle and walk backwards towards the cop car. He was then handcuffed behind his back and was ignored when he said he wasn’t able to stand in that position.
Sure enough, he fell, and the injuries he sustained in that fall confined him to a wheelchair or scooters when moving around ever since. It’s mentioned in this article that the settlement Wynn received, $250,000, was the largest the KCPD has paid out…since March.
That’s when the city agreed to pay $900,000 to Tyree Bell, a man who, at the age of 15, was wrongly arrested by Kansas City police and spent three weeks in juvenile detention over it. All police needed to do to exonerate Bell was look at their own dashcam footage, which showed he looked absolutely nothing like the suspect they were searching for when he was taken into custody.
So then that all brings us to the latest scandal enveloping police in Kansas City, Missouri. This one started last month when a community activist, Bishop Tony Caldwell, posted a video on TikTok about tips he’d received about young black women being targeted by a serial killer in one particular neighborhood in the Kansas City area. Local authorities were quick to respond with assurances that those claims were unverifiable and completely unfounded.
Nevertheless, a few weeks later, a 22-year-old woman in the exact area named in the video knocked on a stranger’s door and said she’d just escaped a month-long abduction. She was bruised, malnourished, had ligature marks around her wrists and ankles, and was wearing a dog collar.
She told police that a man named Timothy picked her up in the same area mentioned in that TikTok video. She showed them the home where the man kept her locked in a small room he’d built in the basement. She was able to escape when her captor left the home to take his child to school. Unfortunately, she said two other women were killed while she was being held there.
Police arrested Timothy M. Haslett the same day. So far, he’s been charged with assault, kidnapping, and rape charges. No murder charges yet, but he sure does sound like a serial killer who was targeting young black women in the exact area where residents were saying it was happening.
“That’s exactly what we were telling people. I’m just sorry that it took so long, but I’m grateful that she found a way out. I’m sorry people didn’t act on it sooner, and it’s absolutely tragic that the other young ladies didn’t make it. It’s horrible.” - Bishop Tony Caldwell
So, that’s what’s going on with the police in Kansas City! Sorry this wasn’t funnier. I promise next time we’ll talk about The Voice again or something.
Adam, do you happen to know if Golubski in particular but any (or all) of the other cops you highlighted were granted protection under Qualified Immunity?