Our view: Trigger-happy, racist and homophobic police messages demand city action now

Intolerable.

That’s the word to describe what’s going on in the Wichita Police Department.

Documents released by the Citizens’ Review Board Tuesday show an incredible string of racist, homophobic and borderline sociopathic text messages and image shares among and around officers on the police SWAT team.

The records show officers sworn to protect the public lamenting that they don’t get to shoot more people more often; officers exulting over tasing and beating “stupid Mexicans,” profane implications that some officers and firefighters wanted to have homosexual relations with former Police Chief Gordon Ramsay and a joke about committing genocide against Muslims.

It’s a long string of almost unreadable ugliness.

In it two officers — a sheriffs’ sergeant who resigned under pressure and a WPD officer who’s still wearing a badge — declared affinity with the “Three Percenters,” a sub-cult of the right-wing militia movement.

“Threepers” advocate taking up arms against the government and figured prominently in a plot to kidnap and kill the governor of Michigan and the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The government of Canada has declared them a terrorist organization.

Bear in mind these revelations are in addition to what The Eagle has already reported about officers joking about “de-escalation” of crime situations by killing suspects, sharing a Photoshopped meme substituting a Black male sex worker for the police officer who killed George Floyd and a cartoon of Elmer Fudd hunting that included that well-known racial slur for Black people.

Let’s be clear here.

This isn’t about freedom of speech or the First Amendment, but the conduct of government agents who are paid to serve all people in this city with fairness and respect.

This isn’t about making cops comply with political correctness or Critical Race Theory or any other scare words that fanatics use to excuse such blatant misconduct.

What this is about is supposedly elite officers who shouldn’t be trusted with squirt guns, much less the most lethal weaponry Americans can lay hands on without joining the military.

It’s about the fact that instead of getting the pink slips they deserve, almost all these officers were let off easy with what City Hall calls “Non-Discipline Education/ Coaching & Mentoring.” It’s an open question what good anybody thought that would do, given that the officers involved have between 11 and 26 years on the force and their attitudes are probably pretty deeply ingrained by now.

It’s about a Police Department culture that is clannish and insular, a city Human Resources Department that overruled Ramsay’s attempts to rein in rogue officers and a politically powerful police union that apparently turns a blind eye to misconduct, and whose endorsement can make or break a City Council member’s career.

There’s cancer in the Wichita Police Department. The only questions left are how far it’s spread and what city leaders are going to do to stop it.

We know there are good and conscientious, even heroic, officers in the department. We would like to be able to assure the public that they’re the overwhelming majority.

But the revelations about the SWAT team offer only a momentary peek behind a giant curtain that the city’s put up to keep the public in the dark.

Wichita remains one of the few departments that never releases names of officers who shoot people. Even the Citizens’ Review Board can only look at disciplinary cases after they’re finalized and can’t get the names of officers who violate professional standards and basic human decency.

It’s time for a top-to-bottom investigation by an outside party with full access to information and a mandate to clean up this mess.

To help with that, City Hall needs to recruit a new police chief with experience at reforming entrenched bureaucracies and give him or her enough space and authority to do the job, no matter whose toes get stepped on.

This story was originally published April 7, 2022 at 7:08 AM.