Police union’s anti-Whipple campaign overstates the case against the mayor | Opinion
Did Mayor Brandon Whipple arguing with a cop over whether he could dispose of some mattresses completely shatter the morale of the entire Wichita Police Department, cause the department’s inability to fill more than 100 open positions on the force, and make an officer beat a teenager at a local roller rink?
If you listen to the Fraternal Order of Police it did.
My takeaway: The FOP needs to grow up and get real.
On Monday, the police union called a made-for-TV press conference to slam the mayor over his behavior at a community cleanup a year ago.
Whipple showed up in a firefighters union t-shirt, smoking a dollar-store stogie, towing a trailer full of trash. He drove into the parking lot through the wrong driveway, got yelled at, and called the city manager to complain that the officer, who didn’t initially recognize him, was rude and verbally abusive.
We’ll never really know what sparked the exchange because the officer didn’t turn on his body camera during the initial conflict, only capturing the mayor’s reaction.
The incident was ridiculous and there’s plenty of blame to go around.
But it’s the sort of incident that most people can laugh at — embarrassing for the mayor, sure, but not extraordinarily important in the grand scheme of things. It was not, as the FOP claims it to be, the downfall of Wichita civilization as we know it.
If you want to say the mayor acted poorly, you’ll get no argument from me. He did.
In his mind, he was standing up for the little people in town who get shouted at by police over some minor incident and can’t get a word in edgewise to explain or ask questions — an experience that I’ve had, and that you may have had as well. But Whipple handled it badly and left the overall impression that he expected special treatment because he’s mayor.
That’s on him.
But one of the cardinal rules of questioning someone else’s ethics is that you have to conduct yourself ethically, and the organizers of the FOP press conference missed the mark there.
One of their key talking points was that city rules prioritize low-income neighborhoods for community cleanups and according to them, the mayor was ineligible to participate.
“The rules for the cleanup, if you look at this, there’s categories,” said David Inkelaar, president of the Wichita FOP. “There’s very low income, low-to-moderate income, moderate and high. By the standards set forth for the cleanup, he’s out of the pay bracket. He makes over $100,000. He’s not allowed to dump his stuff regardless of if it was from his own home or if it was from a rental property. But yet he chose to violate those rules.”
That’s a blatant misrepresentation. There is no individual means-testing to dump at a community cleanup event — it’s where you live, not how much you make — and the rules prioritizing them for lower-income neighborhoods didn’t even exist when Whipple showed up with his mattresses in tow.
And it’s the worst kind of hyperbole to try to link the stupidity that was the mattress incident to a much more serious incident three months later, when a police officer went into full smackdown mode on a lightweight 16-year-old who punched him from behind during a fracas while he was working a side gig as security guard at the Roller City rink in south Wichita.
Yes, the FOP went there.
“It’s no wonder why the Roller City incident occurred,” said Casey Slaughter, the president of the Kansas state lodge of the FOP. “You have, in that case, someone disrespecting law enforcement, someone actively attacking law enforcement. Look no further than Mayor Whipple who did exactly the same thing at the neighborhood cleanup. He didn’t comply, he didn’t follow directions, he didn’t apologize and then he attacked the officer verbally and publicly for what the officer was doing just to do his job.”
I dealt with the roller-rink fight in some detail in an earlier column, so I won’t belabor all that went wrong there.
Suffice it to say that the officer had the youth pinned to the ground on his back, raised his fist above his head, and threw a downward haymaker that would have shattered the kid’s face and might very well have killed him if the kid didn’t slip the blow.
Whipple spoke out against that. The FOP thinks it’s acceptable.
At Monday’s press conference, a dozen Republican politicians from the state Legislature and County Commission shared the stage, clapping for the appropriate applause lines.
As political theater, it was first-rate. As governance, not so much.
Interestingly, there was no mention of the real issue that has separated the mayor from the FOP, which had endorsed him four years ago.
Relations between the mayor and FOP leaders soured after this newspaper revealed blatantly racist, homophobic and borderline sociopathic text messages that were circulated by and among members of the police SWAT team — including some supporting the “Three Percenters,” a militia movement advocating the armed overthrow of the United States government.
After the whole thing was swept under the City Hall rug, City Manager Robert Layton belatedly ordered some meaningful discipline — which the FOP continues to fight to this day.
So by all means, hold the mayor accountable for Mattressgate.
But the FOP has much to answer for as well. What Monday’s press conference showed was that the union can’t seem to grasp that it’s possible to be for police and against police abuse at the same time.
And that’s a shame.
