Councilman who just stepped down sent lewd photo, urged suicide, impersonated officer
A former Bonner Springs city councilman charged with several misdemeanors admits posing as an undercover officer to get into a concert — and, in another incident, urging an acquaintance to kill himself. He also acknowledges sending that acquaintance a lewd photo.
Yet after ending his four-year term earlier this month, Jordan Mackey said in an interview that he’s not done running for political office. And why not? Wyandotte County voters rewarded repeat abuser and arrestee Aaron Coleman with a seat in the Kansas House last year.
If a president can pay off a porn star with no loss in support, what’s disqualifying, anyway?
Mackey, who is 35, regrets what he calls multiple acts of immature stupidity, yet believes his multiple prosecutions must be politically motivated against him as “a Republican Christian male” in heavily Democratic Wyandotte County.
Among other offenses, he’s charged with false impersonation of a law enforcement officer for trying to enter a Machine Gun Kelly concert as a plainclothes officer last Oct. 3. A court affidavit says Mackey handed a private security guard his city council business card and claimed he was working the concert for police, which a department official denied on the spot. After then buying a ticket, the affidavit says Jordan later approached the police chief inside the concert and said, “I had to try.”
“It was a joke,” Mackey said. “I didn’t do anything wrong. It was stupid what I did, but it wasn’t stupid to the degree to have me prosecuted by a district attorney.”
Bonner Springs police didn’t see the humor. “We take all complaints of impersonating an officer seriously,” Major Chris Nicholson wrote in an email. “We investigated the complaint and forwarded our case and affidavit to the Wyandotte County DA’s office. The DA’s office decided to charge Mackey based on our investigation.”
A separate incident, for which he is charged with harassment against a Colorado man, was considerably more serious.
The man, a friend of Mackey’s girlfriend, allegedly told her via phone that he was suicidal. But it was Mackey who responded, on his girlfriend’s phone, that the man should go ahead and kill himself.
He also admits electronically sending the man a photo of what police describe in a court affidavit as “the backside of his scrotum.”
Mackey claims he was angered by lewd videos the man had sent his girlfriend, and that he sent him the indecent photo as a “macho” way of telling the man to leave his girlfriend alone. “I was raised in a Christian home,” Mackey says. “I always protect the women in my life.”
Maybe don’t try and drag Christianity into this? And as for protecting women, Mackey admits that one woman in his life asked for a police escort while she was moving out of his home — and even then, he was arrested for grabbing her. Just to get his keys, he says.
Mackey acknowledges urging the suicidal man to end his life, but excuses that inexcusable behavior by saying he didn’t think the man was serious. “It was more of a dialogue,” he says. “It wasn’t me dictating to him.”
Thank goodness for that. Obviously, this person should hold no office again. But the larger point here is that this is what happens when voters choose to support candidates they haven’t properly vetted.
Next time you see his name on the ballot, you can’t say you don’t know.
