Kansas City police target minority communities with illegal ticket quotas, lawsuit says

A 21-year veteran of the Kansas City, Mo., Police Department filed a lawsuit last month against the agency, alleging that he was forced to meet illegal ticket quotas and target minority communities.

The complaint came months after the Department of Justice announced an investigation into the police department’s employment practices and alleged discrimination against Black officers.

Edward Williams, a white man, alleges that over the last seven years the department has threatened to demote officers to the overnight shift if they didn’t fulfill ticket quotas.

“When I first was contacted in regards to this matter I had to look into it, because I didn’t know that ticket quotas were not legal,” Gerald Gray, Williams’s attorney, told Yahoo News.

Ticket quotas have been illegal in Missouri since August 2016. The law states: “No political subdivision or law enforcement agency shall have a policy requiring or encouraging an employee to issue a certain number of citations for traffic violations on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, or other quota basis.”

“But even with these laws in place, there’s either subtle or overt ticket quotas that are occurring all the time,” Jay Beeber, director of policy and research at the National Motorists Association, told Yahoo News.

According to Williams’s lawsuit, KCPD sergeants ranked officers by their ticket counts, and reprimanded officers with low ticket numbers by taking away their duties and benefits and giving them unsatisfactory marks on evaluations.

While ticket quotas are illegal in several states, Beeber says, they still exist behind closed doors because of the revenue they bring in.

“There are lots of examples around the country where a lot of [cities’] budget comes from tickets, and so for their officers, that’s their main job,” Beeber said.

In 2016, Kansas City police wrote approximately 18,000 traffic tickets each month. From 2021 to 2022, Kansas City’s budget included $6.6 million from traffic violations. The Kansas City Star reported that “a drop of 25% would cost the city more than $1.6 million in revenue.”

Other cities also use ticketing to fund their budgets. For instance, in Chicago, ticketing brought in nearly $264 million in 2016, adding up to about 7% of the city’s operating budget.

And experts say ticket quotas hit marginalized communities the hardest. “They are creating a huge financial burden in these communities,” Beeber said.

In Missouri, Black people make up only 11% of the population but they “are subjected to more than 42% of traffic stops. In contrast, white people in Missouri make up 80% of the state’s population and account for less than 25% of all traffic stops,” Tom Bastian, deputy director for communications for the ACLU of Missouri, told Yahoo News.

According to legal experts, Missourians have been concerned with bias in traffic enforcement for decades. In 2000, the state passed a law that created the annual Vehicle Stops Report to track disparities in who is pulled over by police.

In 2021, a report found that Black drivers were pulled over at a higher rate than white drivers. “Part of that is a socioeconomic thing; those neighborhoods tend to be poor,” Benjamin Easter, a Kansas City criminal defense lawyer, told Yahoo News. “And so people are going to have cars with more things wrong with them. They’re going to have more registration issues with their car, etc.”

But Easter says the root of the problem is that police in Kansas City aren’t accountable to the local residents. While most cities control their police departments, the KCPD is run by a five-member board of police commissioners, four of whom are appointed by the Missouri governor and one of whom is the mayor.

“This is just another strong case [for] why we need local control of the police here in Kansas City. The police chief and the local police are appointed by the state committee rather than a local entity,” Easter said.

Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves denied Williams’s allegations in a statement released on March 22.

“Our department is dedicated to policing that is both equitable and fair in all aspects of our duties. We do not direct enforcement activities based on demographics. We do direct traffic enforcement in high crash locations as well as citizen traffic complaint locations,” Graves said. “I find these allegations very concerning and will immediately ensure the Traffic Division is reminded to operate and enforce laws appropriately.”

But legal experts say ticket quotas are not uncommon in the U.S, and they doubt things will change anytime soon.

“I personally have a hard time believing that [illegal ticket quotas are] going to stop without some drastic change in leadership at the Kansas City Police Department,” Spencer Webster, a local attorney, told Yahoo News.

Williams is requesting a trial by jury and seeking multiple damages.