Wichita’s mayor gets another death threat. Let’s turn the political heat down a notch
In another sign of how polarized and crazy our politics have become, Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple has received his second death threat since taking office in 2020.
While local musician Meredith Dowty awaits trial on charges of threatening the mayor in October 2020, Whipple said that he and council member Brandon Johnson were targeted again Monday morning with what police are considering a credible threat.
The threat is that they’ll be marked for death if they appoint an outsider to head the Police Department, which is currently being supervised by interim chief Lem Moore, a 30-year department veteran.
Police are taking the threat seriously because it was relayed via a crime-reporting hotline that is, by design, untraceable to protect the identity of tipsters.
Whoever made the threat is believed to have had knowledge of that untraceability and acted deliberately to convey the threat while shielding their identity, Whipple said.
The issue involved in the Dowty case was an anti-COVID mask mandate. This time around, it’s the city’s search for a new police chief to replace former chief Gordon Ramsay.
The threat follows on the heels of a letter in which Ramsey warned the City Council about what he called a “troubled culture” at high levels of City Hall.
As the police department reels from disclosure of ugly racist and homophobic messages shared among members of the elite special weapons and tactics team, a committee of mostly City Hall insiders blamed light discipline in the case primarily on Ramsay and two deputy chiefs.
In Ramsay’s response letter, he charged that his efforts to deal with problem cops were intercepted by the human resources department and specifically its director, Chris Bezruki — which Bezruki denies.
No, Wichita hasn’t lost its collective mind.
But our public discourse and political rhetoric has become noticeably more heated and illogical in the past couple of years, and that takes its toll.
Social media sewage and even some public protests have hinted darkly at violent “solutions” to contemporary problems, both real and imagined.
We are not 10 days removed from a mass shooting in Buffalo that killed 10 people, mostly Black.
It was carried out by a gunman who believes in the “great replacement theory,” a racist and anti-Semitic creed postulating that immigration and domestic breeding patterns are contrived to gradually “replace” America’s Caucasian culture.
When ordinary citizens engage in overheated rhetoric and paint their opponents as evil personified, it inspires the lunatics among us to take matters into their own hands.
In this state, where anyone who can own a gun can carry it just about anywhere, anytime, for any reason, the danger is obvious.
You’d think we’d have learned a lesson 13 years ago from the last political assassination in Wichita, when extremist Scott Roeder was inspired by over-the-top anti-abortion rhetoric to gun down abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in his church.
It’s our right as American citizens and citizens of Wichita to disagree with city officials.
In this job, I do it all the time.
But while I think they may make a bad decision or get influenced by the wrong people from time to time, I always try to remind myself that council members are my fellow citizens trying to do what they think is best for our community.
We all need to try to remember that and take the tone down a notch, before we inspire the next delusional wannabe hero/patriot/martyr to do something we all regret.
This story was originally published May 23, 2022 at 8:11 PM.
