Quinton Lucas said he thinks his city’s police department “is a colonial system”.
“I think it is anti-Black. I think it is anti-immigrant. I think it is anti-almost everything we stand for in terms of making sure that diverse populations in major cities have a voice in terms of navigating it,” the Kansas City mayor said.
In most cities, speaking this way about the local police would lose someone an election. But Kansas City’s political leaders have a problem that is unique among the nation’s large cities. They do not control the city’s police force. As a legal artifact of the civil war and a product of conservative Missouri politics, a state commission operates the Kansas City police department…