(C) Missouri Independent
This story was originally published by Missouri Independent and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Mercy for convicted ex-Kansas City cop will condone reckless policing in Missouri • Missouri Independent [1]
['Barbara Shelly', 'Peter Gariepy', 'Jeff Smith', 'Laura Schopp', 'More From Author', 'December', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline']
Date: 2024-12-09
Eric DeValkenaere is going to have his prison sentence commuted. The only suspense remaining is whether the ex-Kansas City cop convicted of murder in the death of a Black man will be back with his family for Christmas.
Gov. Mike Parson is on record saying that he “doesn’t like” the fact that DeValkenaere is serving a six-year sentence. Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe, who will succeed Parson on Jan. 13, has flatly vowed to free DeValkenaere if Parson doesn’t do it first.
With their support for the former officer, Missouri’s highest officeholders are placing the final stamp of approval on a poisonous false narrative that took hold soon after DeValkenaere shot 26-year-old Cameron Lamb five years ago as Lamb was sitting in his car on his own property.
In that narrative, DeValkenaere is the hero cop who saved another officer’s life, only to be targeted by the “woke” Jackson County prosecutor, Jean Peters Baker, who somehow managed to convince a grand jury, a circuit judge, three Missouri appeals judges, the entire Missouri Supreme Court and a federal judge to participate in an epic injustice.
The narrative was forged by the leadership of the Kansas City Police Department at the time of the shooting, and the union representing its officers. It has been adopted by some Republican lawmakers and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey.
None of it is accurate.
On the morning of Dec. 3, 2019, DeValkenaere responded to a request over his police radio to check out a driver who had been speeding through city streets. The driver, Lamb, had pulled his pickup truck into a driveway and was backing into a garage. DeValkenaere, who was not in a police uniform, knocked down a makeshift fence to enter the property. Nine seconds later he shot Lamb, who was sitting in his pickup and had just placed a phone call.
The chief of police at the time, Rick Smith, arrived on the scene and was captured on audio declaring that the “bad guy” was dead. Police officers raced to the home of Lamb’s ex-girlfriend and held the occupants there at gunpoint. Evidence at trial provided a convincing case that police planted a gun beside Lamb’s truck to support DeValkenaere’s contention that Lamb had pointed a gun at another police officer.
These actions portray a version of policing in which cops are armed occupiers, not keepers of the peace. If you think otherwise ask yourself if it would be acceptable for an officer to storm onto your property and shoot your family member with no evidence that the person presented a threat or had committed a crime beyond traffic infractions.
The answer is no. It is not acceptable in any neighborhood, under any circumstance.
Jackson County Judge J. Dale Youngs convicted DeValkenaere of second-degree involuntary manslaughter and armed criminal action. The officer had no legal right to enter Lamb’s property, he ruled, and the shooting was unconstitutional.
Since then, an appeals court panel has upheld the verdict. The Missouri Supreme Court refused to review the case. A federal judge ruled in a civil case that DeValkenaere violated Lamb’s constitutional rights.
But none of that matters in Missouri Republican political circles. In that world, the convicted cop is still the hero, the dead driver is still the bad guy, and the prosecutor seeking justice for Lamb is forever the villain.
If the Kansas City Police Department has enacted any constructive reforms after Lamb’s shooting, they haven’t been announced publicly. On the contrary, police appear to have reacted to DeValkenaere’s conviction with a disastrous passive-aggressive response.
The department is facing two civil lawsuits from citizens who separately claim that officers said they could not properly respond to calls for help because of an informal policy initiated after Youngs’ ruling. Because DeValkenaere got into trouble for entering a property without a warrant, a decision apparently was made inside the department to avoid that situation.
One of the lawsuits was filed by the family of a 24-year-old woman who made a distress call to 911 two months after DeValkenaere’s conviction. Two officers knocked on her door. No one answered and the officers departed without entering the house. About 12 hours later the woman was found murdered and her 4-year-old daughter severely injured.
In the other lawsuit, a resident says police cited the DeValkenaere case as the reason they refused to enter a neighbor’s house in 2022 after the man called to report seeing an intruder inside. He claims police harassed him because he complained about the incident on social media.
Lamb’s death and the fallout from DeValkenaere’s conviction solidified the deep mistrust of police that runs deep in Kansas City in the best of times. The appointment of a new police chief, Stacey Graves, in December 2022 created something of a fragile peace, which could shatter in a heartbeat.
I anticipate that an announcement from either Parson or Kehoe will come late some Friday afternoon, perhaps when the weather is bad, or when people are preoccupied with last-minute holiday details.
Some of Kansas City’s leaders have warned of unrest in the streets. I think a more likely outcome will be simmering hostilities for a very long time.
DeValkenaere’s freedom will come at the expense of constructive relationship-building and enlightened policing in Kansas City. That will be the ongoing story.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://missouriindependent.com/2024/12/09/mercy-for-convicted-ex-kansas-city-cop-will-condone-reckless-policing-in-missouri/
Published and (C) by Missouri Independent
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/missouriindependent/
