New Wichita diversity board takes steps to turn street protest ideas into laws
A group of about 25 Wichitans took the first steps Thursday toward moving racial and social justice issues from street protests to City Hall action.
“If you look on Facebook right now, everybody’s saying Black lives matter, your life matters, my life matters,” said the Rev. Dr. Kevin Graham, a member of the fledgling Council on Diversity, Inclusion and Civil Rights at City Hall. “But things will not change until policies change, behaviors change, and laws change . . . I’d like to get some legislation out of this.”
NAACP activist LaWanda DeShazer, said City Hall is the place to start setting the stage for diversity.
“The bottom line is, can we get jobs, can we make money, can we support our families? That’s how I think diversity really comes to play,” DeShazer said. “If the city sets the example, everybody else will follow.”
Mayor Brandon Whipple, a former state legislator who put together and co-chairs the council, said it may reach outside the city and if necessary, work to change state law.
He said he has all the phone numbers of Democratic legislators and diversity council member Dalton Glasscock, chairman of the Sedgwick County Republican Party, has all the contacts of GOP lawmakers.
The council was born out of the local street protests in the wake of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, who died after a police officer knelt on his neck for more that eight minutes while restraining him in a case over the alleged passing of a counterfeit $20 bill. Video of the incident has been viewed by millions of Americans and has sparked weeks of protest across America.
Davontae Harris, a Wichita South High School graduate who now plays defensive back for the NFL Denver Broncos, suggested a good place to start on reform might be advocating for a law to stop officers with misconduct issues in one department from simply moving to another and starting over.
“Here in Colorado I’ve gotten together with my teammates and we have gotten with the local ACLU and we already passed a bill that created a different structure on how the police officers are reviewed,” he said. “If they have like multiple issues from doing stuff going on, they can’t go to a different police force and work for them.”
Whipple called the council the most diverse committee in city history and the introductions included members of the Black, Latino, Asian-American, Arab-American, LGBTQ and disability communities, Christians, Jews and Muslims.
Whipple divided the three tasks of the council into discreet components.
Diversity means all persons get a seat at the decision-making table, inclusion means they can feel welcome there and civil rights is more about altering the legal structure to prohibit discrimination, he said.
He’s said he’s leaving it up to the group to decide how to address those components, whether to break into subcommittees to deal with them all at once or possibly tackle each in turn.
He said 150 people applied to be on the council and he hopes to spread the work across the entire group, not just the 25 appointees.
Members are currently appointed for a three-month term, but Whipple said it will extend beyond that, possibly for as long as he’s mayor.
“We’re not going to solve this in three months,” he said. “We are in this for the long haul.”
This story was originally published June 18, 2020 at 2:24 PM.
