Kansas City police should drop officers’ daily parking ticket quotas, auditor says
Kansas City Auditor Doug Jones recommended to Kansas City Police Chief Rick Smith that the department remove from its policies daily goals for issuing parking tickets.
In a March 24 memo to Smith, Jones said the auditor’s office discovered that the KCPD parking control unit had a daily goal for its officers to write 75 citations total.
“This written policy appears to conflict with Missouri state law prohibiting policies that establish daily ticket goals,” Jones’ memo said.
Missouri law says no city or law enforcement agency can have policies that set quotas for issuing citations.
“We recommend the police chief remove all references to goals for issuance of citations from the Parking Control Unit’s written policies and guidelines,” Jones’ memo said.
Smith told Jones by email that day that the department would fix its policies.
“I very much appreciate this coming to light,” Smith responded. “I will send the memo onto our Traffic Unit for updating. After our virtual meeting we immediately made the correction.”
Jones’ discovery came up as the Kansas City Auditor’s Office was evaluating the police department’s enforcement of parking in downtown Kansas City.
The audit, which was released earlier this month, found that the KCPD is not meeting the minimum staffing of parking control officers downtown.
A 2018 agreement between City Hall and the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners to increase parking enforcement downtown called for the police department to have at least 10 parking control officers covering downtown. In January 2021, the audit found KCPD had only two parking control officers assigned to downtown.
City Hall wanted to beef up its parking enforcement downtown now that more people live or work in the city’s core, resulting in more demand for parking spots.
City leaders want people who stay downtown for several hours a day to park their cars in parking garages. That would free up on-street parking spots, which City Hall wants to make available for people making shorter trips downtown to visit businesses.
Enforcing shorter time limits for on-street parking was a chief method for realizing that goal, resulting in the City Hall’s agreement with police that 10 full-time parking control employees devote their attention to downtown. The city agreed to pay for those employees out of the parking garage fund.
“The Police Department’s parking enforcement strategies do not align with transportation goals the city is trying to achieve,” the audit said.
The board of police commissioners briefly discussed the audit during its regular meeting on Tuesday.
Karl Oakman, deputy chief for KCPD, said from 2018 until the end of 2020, the lowest number of parking control officers it had was nine. This year, the number of parking control officers fell to six, he said, because several left for other job opportunities.
Oakman acknowledged that those numbers of parking control officers were citywide but the majority work downtown. Oakman said the department is preparing a detailed response to the audit’s findings.
The audit recommended that Kansas City manager Brian Platt consider having a civilian department at City Hall carry out parking enforcement, or outsource it altogether. Platt, in a written response to the audit, agreed that parking enforcement could be taken up by the city’s public works department.
