LOCAL CONTROL

The Missouri legislature is attempting to take away the rights of the voters in St. Louis to run their own local government. The Missouri NAACP supports the locally elected government officials in our State. The Governor and General Assembly should not override the voice of local voters by undermining the officials they elected.

NAACP TALKING POINTS

• State control of the local police blocks real accountability to the people the police are sworn to protect. In every city in the Country except Kansas City, the voters elect a local government that hires and oversees the local police force. This would take away any ability for the local elected officials to do the job they were elected to do - run the local government. The Mayor and Board of Aldermen would no longer be able to control the budget and policies or even choose the head of the local police department. All of these functions will be under a statewide board of unelected people appointed by the Governor. The ability of the local voters to make their voices heard will be diluted by the statewide vote for Governor. We have already seen this happen in Kansas City.
• These efforts single out the two areas in the State with meaningful concentrations of black and brown residents for control by the State government. It is impossible to ignore the clear racist motivations behind the move to block accountability of the KC and St. Louis Police Departments to the people they serve. St. Louis finally regained control of their police department a decade ago. The statute that gave control to the State Board of Police Commissioners in the first place was passed by Claiborne Fox Jackson, a pro-slavery Missouri governor who didn’t want St. Louis, which supported the Union, to have control of its own ammunition arsenal. The same racist thought process is in play today. Springfield has a very similar crime rate to Kansas City and it is still rising, but no one is talking about needing to take over their law enforcement agency. The state legislature doesn’t want a city with different political leanings and racial makeup than the Governor to be able to make decisions about how they govern.