KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI — Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas described the Kansas City Police Department as a "colonial system," escalating a public dispute with the state-controlled Board of Police Commissioners over funding, transparency, and local oversight. The city government of Kansas City does not control its police force; a state commission created during the Civil War era operates the department.

"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," Lucas said of the governance structure. The five-member Board of Police Commissioners — composed of four members appointed by the Republican governor and the mayor — hires or fires the police chief and more than 1,200 officers and controls the department's $364 million budget.

Lucas, who ran for mayor on a platform of crime reduction, is routinely outvoted by the four Republican commissioners. "We're currently in a huge fight right now where the police department said they were $2 or 3m short on funding," he said. "This year they were out of money, but at the same time, we learned that they had settled more than $11m in lawsuits."

Lucas said Kansas City taxpayers spend more on police than the state legislature's funding mandate requires. "And what you end up seeing often is this issue with transparency, an issue with accountability, and I think long term, a concern about who can actually make sure that there is a change for us," he said. He also said Missouri's permissive gun laws contribute to violence in the city.

A 2024 constitutional referendum in Missouri requires Kansas City to allocate at least 25 percent of its municipal budget to policing. Kansas City voters opposed the measure by a two-to-one margin, while Missouri voters statewide approved it by a 51 to 49 percent vote.

The dispute over police governance extends beyond Kansas City. In March 2024, Governor Mike Kehoe signed a bill returning the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department to state control and ending local mayoral oversight. The bill passed strictly along party lines in the Missouri legislature, which holds Republican supermajorities in both chambers.

Gwen Grant, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City, said "the relationship between Lucas and Governor Mike Parson was very strained, especially during the George Floyd era." Grant added: "I was leading an effort with the NAACP and other civil rights groups calling for the firing of then police chief Rick Smith."

In 2025, Kansas City ranked eighth among U.S. cities with populations over 100,000 for its homicide rate. The city's homicide rate rose 19 percent in 2020, returned to approximately its 2019 level in 2021, and increased by about 10 percent in 2022. A violence interruption program ended by Police Chief Rick Smith in 2017 was reinstituted in 2023.