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

[SummerMadness]

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.

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.