Was raid on Marion, Kansas, newspaper personal for the new police chief? | Opinion
The more we learn about the seizure of computers, cellphones and reporting materials during the widely and rightly condemned police raid on the newspaper in Marion, Kansas, the more it seems to have to do with the paper’s investigation into why the town’s brand new police chief, Gideon Cody, left his $115,000 a year job with the Kansas City Police Department to take a job that pays only about half that much.
Does it make sense to you that Cody acted like Eliot Ness driving through the front doors of one of the speakeasies that served Al Capone’s liquor in his flatbed truck with a snowplow mounted on the front — yes, Ness did that — in response to Marion restaurant owner Kari Newell’s complaint that a reporter had invaded her privacy by checking out a tip that was accurate, for a story that the paper didn’t even run?
(Newell accused a reporter of running an improper computer search on her, which the paper denies, because there was nothing illegal about finding out whether it was true that Newell had lost her license as the result of a DUI. As the world now knows, she had.)
Or, does it seem more likely that Newell’s complaint was just the pretext for the raid?
Bernie Rhodes, the lawyer for both the Marion County Record and The Star, says, “that sure looks like the case, that it was a pretext.” After all, Rhodes said, if Cody “seized everything, he’d find out what they had on him.”
After Cody became the local chief in June, Rhodes said, the paper received several confidential tips that he had left the KCPD in less than good standing. “Why does someone leave a $115,000 job to take a $65,000 job in the middle of Kansas after 24 years? He didn’t want his 25-year ring?”
In the course of investigating those claims, of course, the paper asked Cody for his account of the circumstances under which he’d left, so he knew the Record was working on a story about him.
He did not know who had talked to reporters about his time in Kansas City, though, or what exactly they had said, and now he almost certainly does.
And that, instead of Newell’s driving record, is the information that was illegally obtained.
Rhodes said Cody’s response to that inquiry from the paper was, “If you publish anything, I will sue you.”
No wonder Marion County Record editor Eric Meyer, whose 98-year-old mother Joan was literally scared to death by the raid, called it a show of “intimidation tactics.”
Somehow, after all Meyer has lost as the result of this overreach, he’s still thinking about his community, too, and told The Star that “what concerns me as a citizen is I hate the bad name that it’s giving Marion.”
Cody sees himself as the wronged party, and told The Star that if there were anything negative in his background, the Record would have already printed a story about it. “However, if they can muddy the water, make my credibility look bad, I totally get it. They’re gonna try to do everything they possibly can. But I was vetted.”
His own role in making himself look bad seems lost on him. In the interview, he wouldn’t answer a question about when and why he left the Kansas City Police Department. “I’m not going to have that conversation with you either,” he told a Star reporter.
But in a statement, Cody insisted that “when the rest of the story is available to the public, the judicial system that is being questioned will be vindicated.”
Unless journalists at the Record were doing something more nefarious than the news gathering that’s their job, and no one has even hinted that they were, then what the public will really see is such an outrageous abuse of power that it should make the Kansas Bureau of Investigation ashamed of its initial statement, which was that neither officials nor members of the media are “above the law.”
When it comes to the latter, has anyone ever suggested otherwise?
The problem here is that the only alleged crime was the kind of reporting that protects our democracy, and is explicitly protected by our constitution.
In this country, that’s not yet against the law.
