Filing a complaint over police racial profiling in Kansas? Don’t expect much

When two Lenexa siblings, 17 and 11 years old, were stopped for speeding at Metcalf Avenue and Interstate 435 in Overland Park, both were questioned by police.

Then they were put in handcuffs, their mother said.

“They searched my 11 year old as if he were a grown man,” she wrote in a complaint to the state. “The only reason my children were treated as so is because WE ARE BLACK!!”

Her racial profiling complaint was one of 592 made to Kansas law enforcement agencies and the Kansas Attorney General’s office in the past five years.

But like most of the other cases, the complaint was not substantiated — a result that critics say is not only hard to believe, but raises questions about the state’s nearly 20-year effort to combat racial profiling.

Despite the passage of two laws to address the issue, The Star found that Kansas’ system of tracking racial profiling complaints is ineffective, opaque and deeply flawed — from incomplete data collection to redacted records to agencies simply not participating.

“In terms of actually creating transparency and accountability, you would be hard-pressed to create a more useless system,” said Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Kansas.

A recent investigation by The Star showed that secrecy is pervasive in the Sunflower State. The state’s handling of racial profiling complaints is another example.

Even though the Kansas attorney general collects data from almost every law enforcement agency in the state, his office does not analyze the reports and no longer investigates complaints. The reports posted on the attorney general’s website do not offer any narrative detail of complaints, nor do they list the names of officers involved or the residents who complained.

Rep. J.R. Claeys, a conservative Republican legislator from Salina and chairman of the transportation and public safety committee, said the attorney general’s office should analyze the reports and make those results available to the public.

“So many things in Kansas government are not databased and they become transparency issues. … That is a common complaint across many agencies in the state,” Claeys said.

“It seems we go out of our way to make things difficult.”

Ramon Gonzalez has a unique perspective on law enforcement and racial profiling. He is a retired Republican legislator who served from 2010 to 2016, and has been chief of police in Perry, a small town between Topeka and Lawrence, since the 1980s.

He was surprised to hear that Kansas police had not agreed with any citizen who had complained of unfair treatment over the past five years, according to the reports filed with the state. Six percent of the cases were listed as “open.”

“The odds,” he said. “If you have a citizen that complains … the responsibility of the department is to investigate and determine an outcome based on facts, which includes interviewing the complainant, the officer and reviewing video.”

The current report is pretty basic, Gonzalez said, and would be more beneficial to both law enforcement and the public if it included more information, like a narrative of the event, as long as it doesn’t become too cumbersome for officers.

That no complaints have been confirmed is a “huge red flag” that the system doesn’t work, said Ngozi Ndulue, senior director of criminal justice programs for the NAACP headquarters.

“The message that people get when they see that is there’s almost no likelihood their complaint will be sustained — that this is not a process that works, that law enforcement is not concerned with protecting them from racial profiling, and it’s a waste of their time and effort to go through this process.”

Legislation faulted

Lawmakers began debating the need to do something about racial profiling in 2000 and passed a law in 2006 that made the practice illegal. Five years later, the Legislature passed another law that was intended to strengthen the previous measure.

Instead, it weakened it, said Sen. David Haley, a Kansas City, Kan., Democrat who introduced both pieces of legislation.

“I’m disheartened that we have meaningless legislation on the books that actually does not advance the cause of social transparency and equal representation under law,” said Haley, an African American who said he has experienced biased policing firsthand.

According to the NAACP, 30 states, including Kansas, have at least one anti-racial profiling law.

For years, proponents have been trying to get past the first hurdle of addressing biased-based policing in Kansas: Meaningful data collection.

“If a complaint is found in favor of the person who complains, our police departments would have to say racial profiling exists,” said Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau, a Wichita Democrat.

“Without that data collection, you can’t prove that you don’t stop people of color more.”

The goal was to establish a racial profiling law modeled after Missouri’s, which has collected traffic stop demographic data since 2000 and has proven that African Americans in Missouri are stopped by police disproportionately.

But the 2011 Kansas bill was watered down, proponents say — weakened by provisions supported by law enforcement, who said the data collection would be too cumbersome. The law requires agencies to fill out an annual report of racial profiling complaints and submit it to the attorney general’s office.

Rep. Gail Finney, a Wichita Democrat, said racial profiling is hard for someone to believe if they haven’t experienced it themselves.

“I would like to see the statute strengthened, with more analysis and with traffic stop demographics,” she said. “It would be nice if there was some type of database or place where citizens can view that information, a narrative with all of the complaints. Otherwise what’s the point of collecting it?

“Without a strong statute, without accountability, we’ll have the same problems over and over again.”

Reports not filed

Despite requirements by state law, not all of the roughly 435 agencies that are supposed to submit annual police bias reports to the state do it; nearly 75 didn’t in 2017. Even if there are no bias complaints, agencies are still supposed to file annual reports.

But there’s no penalty if they don’t — 361 agencies submitted a report in 2017, 45 fewer than the year before.

That’s a problem, said Kubic with the ACLU of Kansas.

“It’s very challenging to say anyone takes it seriously when there are no repercussions for not filing the report,” Kubic said.

And the report itself, even when filed, is “one of the least useful reports I’ve ever seen,” Kubic said.

“All it says is if there was a complaint and the disposition. If there were 20 complaints about the same individual, you wouldn’t know. There’s no race of the person, race of the officer and no way to discern a pattern from the report itself. … You would have to consciously design something to make it more useless than what we have right now.”

The reports also do not contain any narrative or summary of events.

“The fact that we don’t know anything about the complaint creates an environment of suspiciousness,” Kubic said.

“This comes at a time when there is a sense in the country that police community relations are at a low, and the way to fix that is not to keep things secret. The way to fix that is through greater acts of transparency and direct engagement with those communities. The entire system that exists right now runs completely contrary to those values.”

Gonzalez, the Perry police chief and former legislator, suggested that the Kansas Commission on Peace Officers’ Standards and Training (CPOST) work with the attorney general’s office to do random samplings on cases. And that law enforcement groups like the Kansas Association of Chiefs of Police look at the issue.

He likes the idea of a central point for complaint collection — if it’s done right.

“If you have an agency with excessive amounts of complaints and zero are validated, you might want to look at what’s going on,” Gonzalez said.

But can law enforcement agencies fairly evaluate their own officers?

“I really believe that independent organizations would do a much better job of overseeing law enforcement on issues like this,” said Finney, the Wichita lawmaker. “It’s unfortunate that we can’t get more transparency on it. …

“As an African American female, mother of sons, they have experienced it, I have experienced it, my husband has experienced it, a lot of people I know. Usually it’s our word against theirs.”

But Gary Steed, executive director of CPOST, said that oftentimes local agencies are in a better position to investigate their cases.

“They know the officers, have direct access to their records and their performance, they know their own policies and procedures and if an officer has violated those,” Steed said.

“It’s a difficult complaint to prove. Often you have to prove what is in the officer’s mind or his intent and that’s difficult to do.”

Redacted reports

When a man in Wichita pulled over by police asked why, he said he was told that it was under the Patriot Act to make sure he was “not with terrorism.”

And when a black man driving on U.S. 83 through southwest Kansas was stopped by a Kansas Highway Patrol trooper for speeding, he was forced to wake up his 4-year-old white stepdaughter in the backseat. The officer wanted to question her about whether the man was really her stepdad.

“I just want justice served,” the man wrote.

But you’ll never know who these men are since the attorney general’s office routinely redacts the names of people who complain directly to its office about police bias, as well as their contact information and the police officer’s name. The Star only was able to obtain some narrative information from the reports through an open records request.

“Release of such personal information is not of legitimate concern to the public,” wrote Cheryl Whelan, assistant attorney general and director of Open Government Training and Compliance for the office.

Ndulue, with the NAACP, disagrees. There are simple ways to balance privacy and the public interest, she said, like adding a checkbox to the report so a complainant can keep their name from being publicly available.

“That would protect individual privacy but allow for follow-up and more transparency,” she said.

Officers’ names should not be redacted, she said.

“Privacy on the part of the public servant while supposedly serving the public? No,” Ndulue said. “This is not a personnel record. This is a statement about the way they were doing their public-facing job.”

The attorney general’s office defended the system, saying in effect that a little bit of information is better than none.

“While these reports are limited in the scope of information the law requires them to collect, making them publicly available places information about racial and other biased-based policing into the public realm,” wrote Attorney General Derek Schmidt in a prepared statement.

“That information can form the basis for discussion and further inquiry by government organizations, lawmakers, law enforcement leaders, members of the public, advocacy groups, private citizens, or media organizations.”

When the Legislature enacted the Racial and Other Bias-Based Policing statute in 2011, it did not provide any funding for the office to carry out its new statutory duties, said Jennifer Montgomery, public information officer for the attorney general’s office. So the office applied for and received a federal grant to fund an investigator position.

Federal funding eventually ran out. So in May, the attorney general’s office decided to change procedures. It now reviews the reports, but does not investigate before forwarding them to CPOST.

In 2012, two bills were introduced in the Legislature that would have expanded the attorney general’s responsibility to collect and analyze the data, but neither of those proposals advanced out of committee, Montgomery said.

“The way that the AG decides not to compile it, without any analysis, is surprising and really seems a lot less transparent than a lot of states with these reporting requirements,” Ndulue said.

Ultimately, if an agency or state chooses to collect data, it has a responsibility to analyze it and make it useful, said Samuel Walker, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska-Omaha who studies police accountability.

“If you’re in the business of handling citizen complaints, you have to handle it right: Get detailed information and have staff that investigate and have proper procedures. If it’s lip service that they will accept complaints, but they’re not doing it right, what’s the point?”