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Kansas City police union boss says ‘defunding’ led to violent weekend. What defunding?

Four people have been killed since Friday in Kansas City. One person died and two others were hospitalized in a late-night triple shooting in the Westport entertainment district. The violence can be attributed to the “defunding” of the police department, the leader of the local police union said on Monday.

“Very sad weekend,” Brad Lemon, president of the Kansas City Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 99, wrote on Twitter Monday morning. “Multiple homicides and assaults, all while the patrol divisions had buyback positions available because of manpower shortages. This is what defunding the police looks like.”

It was a very sad weekend, but everything else Lemon said is false. The Kansas City Police Department has not lost as much as a wooden nickel from its yearly allotment of city funds. The department’s budget has increased steadily in recent years.

The pushback was immediate:

“No rational person would believe that a $262m 21-22 budget is ‘defunded’ but here we are,” Fourth District Councilman Eric Bunch wrote on Twitter Monday morning.

Mayor Quinton Lucas and the City Council have backtracked on every attempt to renegotiate the department’s budget, which currently stands at more than a quarter billion dollars.

Outgoing Police Chief Rick Smith has requested for more for next fiscal year. Smith will retire in March, and as we’ve said before and will again, he should leave sooner, for the sake of his department as well as of the city.

The number of homicides has increased each year but one since Smith became Chief in 2017.

Of course, it doesn’t help that Missouri gun laws just keep getting looser. And we all know it takes a comprehensive and communitywide approach to reduce violent crime. Community leaders and activists must work with elected leaders and law enforcement officials to do that.

But when the local police union boss says what’s not so, it puts additional strain on an already unnecessarily contentious relationship between the Kansas City Police Department and the people its officers work hard to serve.