Jay-Z appears to be sending the message that he is not all talk when it comes to his dedication to standing for social justice.
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Earlier this week, Team Roc, the Hip Hop icon’s social justice wing of his Roc Nation entertainment company, filed a lawsuit against the Kansas City Police Department and the Unified Government of Wyandotte County/Kansas City, Kansas, alleging that the city violated public records laws by failing to “timely produce” law enforcement records related to allegations of police abuse and misconduct spanning decades.
According to NBC News, Team Roc partnered up with the Midwest Innocence Project to file the lawsuit on Tuesday in Wyandotte County District Court. The suit essentially states that Kansas City officials have had a whole year to release documents related to complaints leveled at current and former detectives and officers since Roc Nation submitted a records request in November 2023 and it hasn’t done so.
“For decades, communities in Kansas City, Kansas — particularly minority and immigrant communities — have been subjected to an alarming pattern of abuse and other serious misconduct by the KCKPD,” the filing states. “Rather than promoting a culture of transparency and accountability, the KCKPD has a long history of turning a blind eye to (at best) and even covering up (if not worse) abusive and/or corrupt conduct by its officers.”
The suit insists that law enforcement and other city authorities have “stonewalled” the plaintiffs for almost a year and that those plaintiffs have found out the hard way that justice can be costly, and they’ve been paying the costs with no substantial return on their investments.
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From NBC:
As part of its request under the Kansas Open Records Act, the plaintiffs said they were initially charged $2,200 in fees, which they agreed to pay.
But to date, according to the plaintiffs, the 225 documents provided are mostly personnel locator records showing officer shifts and assignments and a smaller handful consisting of training materials and department policies. There has not been one document related to “any complaint or investigation into even a single instance of misconduct by any member of the KCKPD,” as requested, the suit says.
The city’s police force has come under scrutiny over allegations of corruption and civil rights violations in recent years. Activists have called for a broader federal investigation, particularly in light of the alleged abuses under former Kansas City police Det. Roger Golubski, who in September 2022 was charged with federal civil rights crimes after he was accused of exploiting Black women for sex and framing people for crimes they say they did not commit.
Team Roc’s managing director, Dania Diaz, told NBC that her team made 16 requests for personnel documents, and of those 16, they have only received three, and even those paltry requests weren’t delivered in a reasonable amount of time under the law.
“This filing is because human beings with badges have betrayed the public’s trust … That type of behavior must be held to a standard, Diaz said”
NBC noted that there are certain documents that are exempt from the law granting public requests for review. Those exemptions include “personnel information of public employees and criminal investigation records.” (So, basically, you can request info on crooked cops, as long as you don’t need info on crooked cops or info pertaining to criminal investigations of crooked cops. Maybe you can request their favorite color? IDK.) Regardless of the exemptions, plaintiffs claimed the unified government denied its request in “broad, undifferentiated strokes,” and “failed to distinguish between records relating to pending and closed investigations and failed to acknowledge that virtually all legitimate privacy concerns could be resolved through redactions.” They claim they were told that if they paid what they were instructed to pay, they would receive “extensive” and “voluminous” amounts of information, but, instead, they got the bare minimum, if that.
“More important, the Unified Government’s blanket assertion about ‘unfounded allegations’ is insufficient and reveals the heart of the problem when the public trust in law enforcement is broken,” the suit says. The lawsuit is requesting that a judge intervene and order all requested records to be produced within 30 days.
It’s almost as if the so-called “justice system” works damn hard to protect cops from accountability by throwing built-in hurdles at anyone seeking justice.