A Kansas City, Missouri police officer has filed a lawsuit after allegedly being told to target minority neighborhoods in order to make his ticket quota.
Edward Williams — who is white and a 21-year veteran of the Kansas City Police Department — said he and other officers were told to “target minority citizens” and “go to minority neighborhoods to write tickets because of the belief that it would be easier to write multiple citations for every stop.”
The lawsuit also claims that Williams was constantly subjected to “racially inflammatory rhetoric” about Black people and told not to wear his department-issued body camera for two or three hours daily while the camera charged, a violation of KCPD policy.
The 44-year-old noted in the lawsuit that former police chief Rick Smith told him and other police officers that they would be demoted to work on an overnight shift if they did not fulfill ticket quotas of 100 drivers monthly.
Williams says that after he reported the discrimination to his supervisors, they failed to document or investigate the accusations. He also claimed he was retaliated against, and the lawsuit states that the KCPD violated the Missouri Human Rights Act by subjecting Williams to racist rhetoric “minority officers would have certainly reported.”
The lawsuit also states that Williams was told by a captain to be “ready to kill” and to only respond to calls from white neighborhoods because they pay their taxes. Williams claims in the complaint that the captain told Williams to “approach every car with the mindset to be ready to kill everybody in the car and only respond to calls in white neighborhoods.”
Williams’ lawyer Gerald Gray II said the racism within the department is systematic.
“I’ve come to hear these types of stories over and over again in regard to, you know, police misconduct,” he said. “And not just isolated to individual officers, but really kind of it being…
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