Racist Mayor: Quinton Lucas
Fourth in a series.
By Joseph Klein
Editor’s note: This is the fourth part in Frontpage Mag’s new series on Racist Mayors. (See previous parts below this article). Stay tuned for more installments.
Kansas City, like other cities across America, experienced violent riots last year following George Floyd’s death. During the first three nights of so-called “protesting,” businesses were looted and vandalized. Crowds hurled rocks at police and engaged in arson of a police car. The Kansas City Police Department (KCPD) said that a couple of hundred police officers were injured as they tried to restore law and order, including one officer who suffered a lacerated liver. Just days later, however, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and police chief Rick Smith knelt with protesters.
On June 5, 2020, Black Lives Matter-led protesters converged on City Hall and demanded specific changes within the police department. Mayor Lucas attended the rally. Instead of pledging to root out the few bad apples in the Kansas City Police Department, if any, while defending the vast majority of good cops, Mayor Lucas parroted the Black Lives Matter “systemic racism” mantra. “This ain’t about one officer in Kansas City. What is it about? The foundation is rotten, with what we’re dealing with,” Mayor Lucas said.
At the end of the rally, as reported by KMBC 9, Mayor Lucas proceeded to sign what KMBC 9 described in its headline as a “list of changes Black Lives Matter leaders want to see made in Kansas City.” This is what leftwing progressive racism looks like.
Last August, Mayor Lucas took the opportunity to display his leftwing progressive racism once again. He demanded that a long-serving white councilwoman and lifetime Kansas City resident, Teresa Loar, take an “implicit bias” training course and apologize following a contentious exchange she engaged in with a black councilwoman, Melissa Robinson. Councilwoman Robinson accused Councilwoman Loar of being a racist. The two had sparred over an issue involving the proposed privatization of animal control, which had nothing to do with race. Moreover, Loar did not say anything that could be fairly characterized as a racial slur. But Robinson, an avid supporter of Black Lives Matter, chose to turn the exchange into a manufactured racial drama, in which Mayor Lucas played his part as the political correctness enforcer against so-called “implicit” racial bias.
Councilwoman Loar decided to comply with Lucas’s demands to help restore some harmony to the City Council. She took the “implicit bias” training course and apologized. But that wasn’t enough for Robinson. She refused to accept Loar’s apology. Then Robinson and her two white progressive allies on the City Council, who are members of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chaired by Loar, set out to stage an apparent coup against Loar’s leadership. They used the race card to attack Loar’s stance on the controversial awarding of an airport contract. Robinson and her two comrades demanded that Mayor Lucas remove Loar as chairwoman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, threatening to boycott committee meetings and prevent a quorum if Mayor Lucas did not comply.
Lucas decided to remove Loar as chairwoman, at least temporarily, and appointed himself as the interim chairman of the committee. Lucas again played the enforcer role in this second manufactured racial drama staged primarily by Councilwoman Robinson against Loar since August 1, 2019, the date when both Robinson and Lucas assumed their present offices.
Lucas and Robinson, by the way, teamed up very early during their parallel terms with the adoption of Robinson’s City Council racial equity resolution. It required an assessment of internal policies and procedures that “ensure racial equity is a core element of Kansas City, led by the City Manager, Mayor and Council, in collaboration with the Kansas City Health Department and other relevant parties.”
In July 2020, shortly before Mayor Lucas ordered Councilwoman Loar to take a special “implicit bias” class as a result of her quarrel with Councilwoman Robinson, Robinson sponsored an “implicit bias” training resolution. It mandated the development and implementation of a plan to provide “implicit bias” training to all Kansas City government employees. Poor Councilwoman Loar became Mayor Lucas’s guinea pig in this leftwing progressive racism exercise.
Kansas City is reportedly the sixth most-dangerous city in the country, according to FBI statistics. There was a record 178 homicides in 2020 alone. Yet Mayor Lucas has remained all in with the race-obsessed, anti-white, neo-Marxist Black Lives Matter agenda. This agenda includes huge cuts in Kansas City’s police budget as well as more minority community control over police hiring, firing, disciplinary actions, budgets, and policies.
In May 2021, Kansas City’s leftist leaning City Council jammed through two ordinances based on Mayor Lucas’s plan to reallocate $42 million of the city’s police department budget to something called the “Community Services and Prevention Fund.” These monies are intended to be used for “community engagement, outreach, intervention, and other public services,” instead of real policing to catch dangerous criminals and take them off the streets.
Lucas’s co-leftist progressive racist, City Councilwoman Melissa Robinson, heartily endorsed Lucas’s plan. “Imagine if the majority of homicide victims in this city were white,” she tweeted. “Would we be this laissez-faire about holding entities accountable for the role they play in public safety? Would our theory of change be to increase investing with diminishing returns?”
Lucas is trying to maneuver around the State of Missouri’s control of the Kansas City Police Department under the auspices of the state’s Police Board of Commissioners. The state board consists of the governor’s appointees plus the Kansas City mayor himself. Contrary to Lucas’s attempt to characterize the state board as a continuing legacy of the Jim Crow era, it was reinstated in 1939 after seven years of rampant corruption when Kansas City’s police department was run locally.
Mayor Lucas defended the police funding reallocation ordinances against the critics by playing the race card. Lucas said that maybe his critics “don’t actually want to say that we can trust a—well, I’ll just say it—a black mayor, blacks on the city council, progressives on the city council, progressive whites, in terms of what we’re looking to do.”
Lucas is right about not trusting progressives, who have managed to mess up every city in the country they have taken charge of. But Lucas displayed his own racism by automatically attributing racism to his opponents who happened to be white. Lucas’s allies in Black Lives Matter KC did the same thing when they tweeted that the Police Board of Commissioners’ plan to file a lawsuit challenging the reallocation ordinances “garnered huge applause from the lynch mob.” (Emphasis added)
Republican state lawmakers pushed back against the reckless police department budget reallocation engineered by Mayor Lucas and the City Council, threatening to call a special session of the state legislature to undo it. On June 2, 2021, Lucas joined his fellow radical mayor of St. Louis, Tishaura O. Jones, who had also made cuts to her city’s police department budget, in a letter protesting what they called the legislators’ “grandstanding.”
The mayors’ joint letter blamed the rising crime rates in their cities on “poverty, lack of mental health services, housing instability, and more,” implying that the lack of adequate funding to combat these social ills was the root cause of violent crime. The two leftwing mayors failed to blame the individuals who have actually committed the crimes. They want to rob law enforcement of the resources needed to stop the criminals in order to fund pie-in-the sky racially preferential social justice programs. “Both of us have committed to visiting each other’s respective cities to speak with those most affected by disinvestment—primarily in traditionally minority neighborhoods,” the mayors wrote.
Add Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas to the growing rogues’ gallery of big-city Democratic mayors consumed by their own brand of modern-day racism.