Missouri voters are split — and fully a third aren’t sure — about whether its largest cities should be able to control their own police departments.
The Midwest Newsroom partnered with Emerson College Polling to conduct surveys of registered voters Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska between Sept. 26 and Oct. 2. The sample size was 1,000 persons in each state, with a margin of error of + or – 3% and a 95% confidence level.
About 35% of Missouri voters polled said they support the police force being placed under a board appointed by the governor, as Kansas City's department is. A narrow 1 percentage point less, 34%, said they believe local police departments should be overseen by the mayor’s office.
The remaining 31% said they were unsure or had no opinion.
Kansas City is the only U.S. city that doesn’t have local control of its police force. Instead, it’s run by the Board of Police Commissioners, whose four members are appointed by the governor and the mayor automatically taking the fifth seat.
Former Mayor Sly James, who created a blue-ribbon police governance committee in 2013 that ultimately recommended against state supervision, said he wasn’t surprised by the results. The issue is “viewed differently based on your ‘relationship’ with police generally and this department specifically,” he said.
James supports giving control of the force to local officials because, he said, when the state has the power, the public they serve can’t hold police accountable.
“Although I do not in any way denigrate those who serve on the Board of Police Commissioners, they were not elected by the people the police department is sworn to serve and protect,” he said. “Therefore, the public pays for but lacks any real voice about how they are to be policed.”
Board members were made aware of the poll but ultimately didn’t comment. The Kansas City Police Department deferred comment to the board.
Statewide, voters have leaned toward support for police, including in August when a ballot measure that required Kansas City to increase its minimum police funding narrowly passed.
Statewide voters had approved an identical funding threshold by a higher margin in 2022, but the Missouri Supreme Court sent it back to voters ruling that language saying it had no financial impact was misleading. The August redo saw several counties flip from voting for a higher police funding threshold to voting against it, but the state as a whole passed it with 51% of the vote.
St. Louis won back control of its police force in 2013 through a statewide vote, though Republican state lawmakers continue to try to place the power back with the state. Last session, the Missouri House passed a bill that would have placed St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department under a board consisting of gubernatorial appointees and the mayor. It later failed in the Senate.
Historians and advocates connect the lack of local control to Missouri's slave-state past. State control of the two largest police departments is a vestige of the Civil War, when the state seized the two forces to, in part, control the weapons arsenals.
