Kansas City officials revealed spending priorities for the 2025-2026 fiscal year last week for its record-setting $2.5 billion city budget.
The proposed Kansas City Police Department budget is $343 million — a whopping $23 million higher than last year.
On KCUR's Up To Date, Mayor Quinton Lucas said that crime, traffic safety and slow 911 dispatcher wait times are among some of the city's biggest public safety concerns.
Lucas "hopes and prays" that the budget increase helps the department address the issues that Kansas City has faced "for ages." But, he believes Kansas City's lack of local control of its police department heavily impacts the department's responsiveness.
Kansas City is the largest city in the United States that does not locally manage its police department. Instead, the KCPD is run by state-controlled Board of Police Commissioners, the majority of whom are appointed by the governor. As mayor, Lucas is the fifth member.
"Our hope is that in affording the police department a budget, what we can ultimately get to is a number of officers (and) addressing those core issues that have faced us for a long time," Lucas said. "Am I optimistic of it, necessarily? Not really, but I think this is the system that we have ourselves in. I will continue to push as one police commissioner among five, in terms of saying, 'How can we be more responsive?'"
![From left: Kendyl Underwood, a 20-year-old St. Louis University student studying nursing, demonstrates in support of abortion rights on Friday, June 24, 2022, outside the Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri. “The only thing we can do is push back,” Underwood said. “It’s not democracy for [the Supreme Court] to pass this and we have to make that heard.”](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/2d92a05/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3000x1985+0+8/resize/260x172!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnpr.brightspotcdn.com%2Fdf%2Fd9%2F0785d3bb476d87884bab7ce7eec8%2F06242022-bm-pp-8a.JPG)
