Wichita FOP asks Mayor Whipple to resign from police oversight task force, add union rep

The Wichita Fraternal Order of Police has called on Mayor Brandon Whipple to replace himself on a police oversight task force with a representative from the police union after he criticized an officer who blocked him from entering a city-sponsored neighborhood cleanup.

Whipple said the officer acted inappropriately and failed to activate his body camera until after he finished yelling.

“As a stakeholder, the Union requests a seat at the table on the Mayor’s committee and demands the Mayor be removed due to his obvious bias,” the FOP said in a written statement on Friday.

The request comes days after state and national police unions called on Whipple to apologize or resign.

“If the Mayor’s past claims of transparency are true the Union’s involvement shouldn’t be an issue,” the FOP statement said.

Whipple — who has dismissed criticism by police unions as a “political hit” aimed at blocking oversight of the Wichita Police Department — said he has no intention of stepping down from the task force he created and that he will not appoint someone from the FOP, which has been accused by two current and one former deputy chiefs of interfering in internal investigations and having undue influence on officer discipline.

“The people expect leadership from the mayor and City Council,” Whipple said. “And I intend to provide that.”

Whipple announced the oversight task force last month during a news conference about police missing evidence in homicides, rapes and other criminal cases. It has not held a meeting and it’s unclear who will be on the task force.

Council member Jeff Blubaugh withdrew from the task force on Tuesday, citing “anti-police bias” by Whipple and social media posts by some of his supporters. Blubaugh said he was offended by some of the posts that pointed to a $300,000 settlement the city paid out in 2013 after a Wichita police patrol car, driven by the same officer who stopped Whipple, killed a 12-year-old girl.

On Friday, the FOP asked Whipple to make Blubaugh chair of the oversight task force.

Last week, Whipple shared body cam footage from the Sept. 24 neighborhood cleanup with The Eagle. Officer Atlee Vogt, Whipple said, didn’t turn on the camera until after yelling at him for accidentally turning into the wrong entrance. Whipple said Vogt told him he couldn’t go to the back of the line and was no longer welcome at the event.

In the video, Whipple calls City Manager Robert Layton, telling him the officer doesn’t know who he is and that he’d like to file a complaint. He later dropped the complaint after speaking to former interim Chief Lem Moore.

Whipple has apologized for his role in the incident. But he said it should not distract from the need for additional oversight of the police department, which has come under intense scrutiny in recent months.

In March, The Eagle first reported that officers sent racist, homophobic and extremist text messages to each other. They received little or no discipline until after the public outcry following The Eagle’s story.

The city manager’s office put together a group to review the internal investigation and discipline. In its findings, the group called for a crackdown on racist police officers and criticized the inaction of former Chief Gordon Ramsay and his command staff. The city has since hired a top consulting firm to undertake a sweeping investigation into problems within the department.

The group also called for changes to the relationship between police leadership and the FOP, citing an inappropriate “framework that allowed police to investigate themselves within the bubble of their own perspective.”

“This framework also permitted the FOP to influence discipline recommendations at an inappropriate point in the process,” the group’s report said.

Three deputy chiefs who were criticized in the report — Jose Salcido, Chester Pinkston and former deputy chief Wanda Givens — claimed in a letter threatening to sue the city that they have been cast as scapegoats by officials.

They said in the letter that “on numerous occasions” Human Resources Director Chris Bezruki and the FOP thwarted police leadership’s attempts to root out “small pockets of corruption, sexism, homophobia, racism and violence operating within the Wichita Police Department and City of Wichita.”

The city has rebuffed those claims on Bezruki’s behalf.

The Fraternal Order of Police has denied any wrongdoing or undue influence on disciplinary decisions.