Burned out headlight? Wichita cops to give free repair vouchers instead of tickets
Instead of getting a ticket for a broken or burned-out vehicle light, some Wichita drivers may soon get a voucher for a free repair.
The Wichita Police Department in partnership with three local auto shops is launching the Lights On! initiative, which lets officers on traffic stops pass out repair vouchers for minor vehicle mechanical problems in lieu of citing drivers.
The program will be active in one ZIP code in Wichita to start: 67214, which covers most of the area between Broadway and Hillside from Douglas north to 21st Street.
Wichita is the first city outside of Minnesota to be part of the program that was started in 2017 by Minnesota-based MicroGrants.
During a news conference Tuesday at Urban League of Kansas, MicroGrants CEO Don Samuels praised Wichita.
“This is a city that has initiated and been very very enthusiastic about the program of all the cities in the United States,” Samuels said. ‘So this is an opportunity instead of saying ‘we stopped 25 Black people who had their lights on and we gave them tickets. Now we helped 25 black people yesterday.’ And so it just flips everything on its head and makes the community’s relationship with our minority communities and our low-income communities a better one because of the problem. Not a worse one because of the problem.”’
In the 67214 ZIP code, 44.7% of people are Black compared to 11.2% in all of Wichita, according to 2018 Census data estimated. The median income in the ZIP code is $24,100 compared to $50,867 in all of Wichita, the data shows.
Drivers with broken lights can receive a voucher, good for up to $250 to repair the light at one of three mechanic shops that agreed to do the work at a discounted price:
The vouchers are good for two weeks and only residents in that ZIP code will be eligible, police spokesman Officer Paul Cruz said. Cruz said police wrote 198 tickets for defective lights in the zip code in 2019.
With community donations, the police department hopes to expand the offer citywide in the coming months.
“As I said, we have been working on this for three years but it is particularly timely today because we want to have positive interactions with our community and we also want to be seen as helpers ... we don’t want to be seen as the oppressors of our community,” Police Chief Gordon Ramsay said. “We are here to help our community. This is a step and change in how we are policing with our community.”
Lights On!, a community-driven program aimed at healing the sometimes tense relationships between citizens and law enforcement agencies, was founded after the 2016 shooting death of Philando Castile by Minnesota police during a traffic stop “as a solution to a small problem that has a significant community impact,” Wichita police said in the news release.
The funds to start the Wichita initiative came from an anonymous donor, Cruz said. The WPD asked that donations to the program be made to lightsonus.org.
This story was originally published June 30, 2020 at 10:47 AM.
