Coming up three months since the deadly Chiefs parade.
But what’s changed?
And controversy over the multimillion dollar fund to help victims.
How come not one dime has been disbursed?
Plus, with alarm over school shootings, Kansas and Missouri looking to use a new AI system to detect guns before they get close to our kids.
But at what price?
And should athletes stick to playing sports and ditch talking about politics?
Chiefs kick out Harrison backup making national news for slamming the president during his commencement address.
As a group, you witnessed firsthand how bad leaders who don’t stay in their lane can have a negative impact on society and Frank White has finally reached out to the royals and the chiefs.
But what was their response?
It’s all straight ahead on Weekend Review.
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Thank you.
Hello and welcome.
I’m Nick Haines.
Glad to have you with us again as we try to make sense of the week’s most impactful and confusing local news stories.
Hopping on board the Week in Review Best this week from the anchor desk at KMBC 9News, Chris Ketz from behind the microphone at KCMO Talk Radio 95.7 FM.
Pete Mundo from our newsroom, Flatland KC Mary Sanchez and tracking the region’s top political stories for KCUR news Brian Ellison.
Now, three months ago this week, Kansas City was making global news.
Gentlemen, the parade has ended.
A deadly shooting at the Chiefs parade outside of Union Station prompted calls for change.
But were they just idle words?
Chris Kats, is anything different?
Are we well and truly back to business as usual?
That’s a great question.
They add up.
They’ve had a St Patrick’s Day parade.
Yes.
And at the station, we’re going to be doing it.
And those were all things that at the time of the shooting, we all wondered and we all looked into our crystal balls and wondered if if any of those events would be different.
And and granted, I think you saw more security at a lot of these events, specifically the St Patrick’s Day parade.
But life has gone on.
Have we seen any change other than perhaps Starlight Theater last week announcing they’re now going to do clear bags to go and see any show?
Well, I would say the change in terms of state law, local law.
Not really.
But when it comes to prosecution, there has been a lot of attention from the prosecutor’s office on these cases.
They have, seemingly because of the high profile nature of them, taken them more seriously, more aggressively than some of their lower level cases.
And I think for a lot of us in Jackson County who have been watching from afar with that office, that’s a welcomed welcome situation.
Did we see any change, Mary?
I think in community attitude and awareness of a lot of things, I think people realize now just, you know, how many guns are out there and that it’s often just something very, very minor that can set off a dispute that will end in gunfire, that can harm a lot of people.
That’s a bit of a shift.
We also have in our newsroom, didn’t we conversation about location and whether people now, when unwilling to go to certain places as a result of the story, but now they have just kind of verified certain places who’s going to be there, that sort of thing.
I think there’s a lot more understanding about the long term effects of trauma.
And we’re, you know, even just seeing that footage for some people is going to be a little triggering.
Missouri lawmakers wrapping up the session on Friday.
It’s going to be the end of that year.
Did they pass any gun laws, pass any bills to boost violence prevention program, mental health, conflict resolution?
No.
It was made clear within hours of the shooting, actually, lawmakers were already taking to microphones to say we cannot take advantage of this situation to to take away people’s Second Amendment rights.
You know what I think did change in some small way is that it put another set of faces on a problem that is actually a national ongoing problem.
But of course, we’ve had faces attached to this problem before.
We had that in Sandy Hook.
We had that in the Orlando nightclub shooting.
We’ve we have another set of faces, but it has not had legislative impact.
FOX Fall, by the way, had an interesting story this week about the Casey Strong fund that was set up to collect community donations for the victims and their families after that parade shooting, nearly $2 million was raised.
But guess how much has gone to the 20 people who was shot?
And the family of the Johnson County woman who died?
Not a single dollar of nearly 2 million raised has been disbursed.
Of that $1.8 million raised, not a dime has left the United Way Bank account yet not one penny has gone out.
What are they waiting for?
Is there a problem?
The rest of us are not aware of, Chris?
I think there’s just a process that that everybody is having to go through to make sure that the people who have applied for this sort of help are, in fact, entitled to this sort of help.
I think that I think the dollars will start flowing here fairly soon, but it has been only, what, three months?
So I cut them a little bit of slack.
But but it is something that’s worth watching.
It’s because of the amount of money involved.
T shirts absolutely giving in.
I mean, will they be disappointed seeing that story, Mary?
I, I don’t think they should be.
I think it should be a story that should be followed.
But it is also part of the nature of trauma and gun violence.
You store bullets in your body.
You don’t know if someone’s going to have to have another surgery passing out, who has insurance, who may have lost a job, who five months from now may start struggling mental health wise and end up in a situation where they need more help.
It’s just going to take a little bit more time to be fair.
You know, if you read the fine print of that, that go fund me and the things that United Way has said, not all of that money necessarily is for victims, direct payments.
Some of it will go to anti-violence programs and other community impact programs.
This is one of the things that happens when you give money to a Go Fund Me campaign.
You lose the ability to control how your money is spent.
You’re trusting whoever is administering that fund, which in this case is United Way.
It will be important, I think, for journalists and others to keep an eye on how that money is being spent and how much is actually going to the victims that people thought they were giving their money to.
While there’s been no appetite in either legislature to add further restrictions to gun ownership, Kansas and Missouri lawmakers pressed forward this year to fund a new air system they say could stop school shootings before they happen.
The program is called Zero Whys.
Here’s a clip from one of the videos the company showed to Kansas lawmakers.
So when a shooter walks off and they take out a weapon, zero, our system will pick that weapon up before sending out alerts to local staff security and the local nine on one center to get the alert for first responders.
It takes about 3 seconds from the time a gun enters the frame of a camera to the time and alert descent.
Already, artificial intelligence is being viewed in very negative, scary ways these days.
Is this one of the upsides of A.I.?
Absolutely.
I mean, this is great.
You know, you take away the broader conversation.
Everyone wants to have the black and white conversation about guns and what role does guns play in all this.
But if you’re talking about prevention, this is an outstanding tool.
I know this is something that I don’t know why any parent will be against using A.I.
in this way in a child school.
If you strip away the black and white 35,000 foot view of what the debate always is while at school, shootings are still relatively rare.
All parents and grandparents have an anxiety over this issue.
So why did Governor Laura Kelly this week veto this instead of providing the funding for that pilot program to make this happen?
Yeah, there has been fairly bipartisan support for this kind of technology.
However, the one company, the one that you showed the video from Zero has hired a number of lobbyists and lobbyists for lobbyists in Topeka.
And the legislation that passed the legislature was written in such a way that that contract could only be awarded to that one company.
There are other companies doing this work, but that one company was the only one that would have met those criteria.
Governor Kelly said that amounted to a no bid contract.
She vetoed that portion of the funding legislation.
There still could be support for this kind of technology, but it won’t be limited to that.
But Missouri also passed money for this.
Missouri passed money including that language that limits it to that one company.
But we haven’t had the governor sign the budget yet.
It might be a line item veto, but schools would be on the hook for millions and lots of fees on a monthly basis to make this happen at a time when they’re already struggling with the classrooms and how much resources they have.
Absolutely.
So that would be a question of just resources and funding.
But, you know, it could be a tool that could help law enforcement, that could help schools.
It does also shift away a little bit how gun violence really does affect schools.
And that’s a little bit problematic just in terms of conversation.
It’s generally not like what was shown on the video.
Gun violence in schools happens at the football game.
Afterwards, in the parking lot, something happened in a neighborhood and then it’s brought into the school, perhaps even by a parent.
You know, some gamblers before they get to the schoolhouse door, perhaps it depends on where they are or where they’re carrying it.
This is a system that and it speaking is by far the oldest person at this table.
And this may be not the oldest and this may be this may be a generational reaction more than anything else.
But but there’s you’re right.
There’s so much about air that we don’t know.
And while on the surface, this sounds like an exciting development that could be incredibly positive on so many levels.
There’s a lot about, especially in this application, that as a parent, I’d like to know more about.
All right.
Now, for a second week, life in Kansas City was disrupted, but what some are calling a cyber attack on city hall, the mayor refusing to use that term, but frustrated residents know something is seriously wrong from contractors who can’t get building permits to water customers who can’t go online to pay their bills.
Something happened.
I don’t know what happened.
You can’t even do it on the they have a kiosk that you can buy everything and the computer system seems to be completely shut down after saying absolutely nothing about the issue.
The mayor finally held a news conference this week, but did we really learn anything new?
Last week, the city became aware of suspicious activity on our IT network.
In response, we proactively shut down parts of the network to secure our systems.
This proactive measure resulted in outages to certain operations, but was necessary to help protect the security and integrity of our systems and to allow us to further our investigation into the cause and potential impact of the issue.
Wow.
That was an awful lot of words to say.
Nothing.
The mayor won’t use the term cyber attack or ransomware attacks.
They won’t pass his lips, but does acknowledge the city has experienced, quote, suspicious activity.
What’s really the difference, Pete?
I’m not clear.
I had him on my show Thursday and followed up on this.
To me, the bigger question is, while they figure out the cyber attack side, what does it mean for the Kansas City resident?
He did say there’s a grace period here to pay your bills.
They’ll give you 30 days to figure this whole thing out.
And to me, that’s the most important thing right now.
Until we get a handle on what exactly is going on.
Why so nervous about saying the word cyber attack?
A ransomware attack?
I mean, I can only speculate just like the rest of us.
And we did speculate just last week that maybe all of these non words actually means there’s been a cyber attack or they’re in negotiations for ransom.
I will say that that I’m sure that if they are in negotiations of some kind with someone who’s who is holding the city’s website hostage, then they sure don’t want to be talking about it.
And that would explain it.
I have no information about that.
Well, six weeks after the stadium tax went down in flames at the ballot box, Jackson County executive Frank White says he’s finally reached out to the teams.
He sent them a letter and he got a response.
But much like the computer disruption at city Hall, he’s refusing to say what the chiefs, the royals told him.
I don’t know the contents of the letter.
Is that something you’re willing to share with us?
Not not not at this time, but I’m willing to share.
But we we just got the email this morning and we have had a chance to sit down and and and work through it and see what the next steps are.
So we have to guess here.
Did they say, take a hike?
Let’s do lunch dates.
Did they say, Mr. White, whatever you need.
Did we get an answer to that?
We did get an answered.
We did get an answer.
And John Sherman apparently said to Frank White in an email response that the team welcomed a proposal from the county.
But on Monday, Frank White said he had only heard from the chiefs and not the royals.
It was Troy Scholey, the county administrator, who came out on Wednesday and said, and I’m going to read the word for word, the an email was sent and it was received, but the email went to Frank White’s general account.
The general account gets a lot of stuff, thousands of emails.
Somebody has to go through it.
They don’t go through it on a daily basis because they’re doing other stuff and we try to track it and that’s where we caught it.
So it was said it just wasn’t.
It just wasn’t read and received either way.
So then this is like again, this, this is like the City Hall cyber.
This is classic Jackson County.
This is Jackson County in a nutshell.
This is why these negotiations for the better part of 18 months have been in part such an absolute mess.
You have the owner of the team saying, let’s talk.
And by the way, it was let’s get lunch at Gates.
But you’re paying Frank White.
That’s what he said.
And you don’t even get the email for a week and a half.
I mean, this is business one on one stuff.
And the county leadership is incapable of executing it.
Now, if this wasn’t complicated enough already, it could get even more complicated soon, believe it or not, As lawmakers wrap up the session in Missouri, no state money has been provided to help keep the chiefs and royals in town, and Governor Parson leaves office in just a few months.
Meanwhile, the main Republican candidates seeking to replace him have been downright hostile to the idea of funding sports stadiums.
Here are the words of candidate Bill Heigl, who’s also a state senator.
I know of no path in the Missouri Senate where we’re going to do any public funding of sports stadiums.
It would be, quote, resisted vociferously and extensively.
So where does that leave the Chiefs and Royals?
Brian Ogle has never resisted anything in any way other than vociferously and extensively.
No, here’s here’s the reality.
I think there will be state money discussed in the future for keeping the chiefs and potentially the royals in Missouri.
But this year, in an election year, Governor Parson unwilling to push for that in his last year in office, it was not it was not going to happen.
We I think we knew that from the time Parson said.
Let’s wait to see how the election turns out.
I think that proposal will be back, Senator.
I won’t be in the in the Senate anymore and we’ll see what happens.
But he could be governor.
I mean, he’s polling third right now.
I’m just saying he’s running.
But it’s really there’s only one guy running in the governor’s race on the Republican side that I think is even open to this.
And that’s my hope.
He’s was very instrumental in the World Cup here.
He’s worked very well with the Kansas City Sports Commission.
He’s more interested in that kind of business at the state level.
Jay Ashcroft has said no way, no how.
For him, I go, it said, no way, no how.
So Kehoe is probably the team’s best hope to get some kind of state funding going.
Should athletes stick to playing sports and quit talking politics?
Cheapskate Harrison.
But keep making national news this week for slamming President Biden during his commencement address at Benedictine College in Atchison.
As a group, you witnessed firsthand how bad leaders who don’t stay in their lane can have a negative impact on society.
Our own nation is led by a man who publicly and proudly proclaims his Catholic faith, but at the same time is delusional enough to make the sign of the cross during a pro-abortion rally.
But they’re also found time to reference Pride Month as an example of the deadly sins and irritated some women’s groups by arguing that one of the most important titles for a woman is homemaker.
I don’t know if he was trying to make a massive media splash with his remarks, but is it fair to say Chris Catty, he got more attention this week that Travis Kelce and Patrick Mahomes combined just for this week, and that’s saying something?
Yes.
Okay.
I had a chance to talk to a couple of members of the staff up there this past week.
The college didn’t have an advanced text of Harrison, but his remarks.
So this caught the college and its hierarchy by surprise as well, which also begs the question.
Okay, if you’re surprised by hearing what you’re hearing at that moment, and I’m assuming that there was some sort of discussion that happened afterwards, does the college issue some sort of a statement to try to create some distance between between the statement of the college?
And as we sit here?
That hasn’t happened yet.
Is it time to have commencement speakers sign an agreement in advance of making any speeches to say they won’t discuss anything controversial?
Pete?
I mean, that’s up to the college, right?
I mean, especially in this case, it’s a private university.
I mean, it’s like pro Catholic man gives Catholic speech at Catholic college more 11.
I mean, that that’s that’s what this is.
The controversy is certainly not what people have turned it into.
And if a college does not want somebody saying certain things in their commencement speech, then you know what?
Make a deal.
Do exactly what you’re talking about.
We want you to talk about X, Y, and Z and not A, B and C, And if that didn’t happen, then, you know, that’s on the college.
You, Brian, we’re doing the commencement speech, the commencement event for you and Casey this week, reading out thousands of names.
This happens.
Is it time for a moratorium on these commencement speeches?
I mean, I’m sure the students would be perfectly happy.
That may be true.
Um, Casey’s commencement speech, as you should know, lasts about 5 minutes.
So there was nothing controversial was said, to my knowledge.
Look, I think Harrison Becker’s speech, as Pete said, was was consistent with things he has said before in interviews and on social media.
He was addressing a a Catholic university or a Catholic college.
There is one wrinkle, though, that I think is important.
He is a public figure.
He he may not have chosen to be a public figure, but he is the kicker on a Super Bowl winning team.
There are going to be repercussions and ramifications when you say those things.
Just as anyone who says things in public might face repercussion from their employer or from the people who are their potential customers, which essentially the whole Kansas City area is for a for an athlete.
He he is he is getting some feet, some pushback.
I would argue that the pushback he is receiving is probably less painful to him than his comments were to certain groups that he might have been targeting, for example, LGBTQ people who who were called sinful in comments that were being played over and over and over again on on television and radio.
And it wouldn’t surprise me to the next time that Harrison Butler lines up for a 55 yard field goal to win the football game at Arrowhead, there might be a few more boos before the kick, but as soon as he makes it, they’ll be just as many tears as they would have married.
And people will forget about the story by by the start of the season.
I it will recede.
I think, again, particularly to Brian’s points, the people who were targeted in a negative way will remember this.
Will they remember it in a way that really matters down the line?
No.
And it also just shows like good sports management, like I wonder who is his agent?
You know, I guarantee you, Patrick Mahomes has been groomed since he was in middle school and he does have some of the best sports agents in his team that surround him.
The things that you say publicly, what you step out on, what you don’t.
He knows where to go, where not to go.
The one thing I’ll just say, though, is it’s only one side of the political equation where you are allowed to go up to a certain point on the line.
On the other side, it seems like you go as far as you want and there are no ramifications.
We’re only talking about one guy with more traditional beliefs who’s told, hey, you crossed the line based on media opinion and social media.
Well, but I mean, let’s be clear, though.
There are there are folks on the other side of the political spectrum who also paid a price and had ramifications.
Colin Kaepernick comes to mind, you know, kneeling during the national anthem.
He suffered, I think, very tangible career consequences if he fell for it, for not, quote, staying in his lap.
The NFL, by the way, distanced itself from from the comments in comments on Wednesday of this week and said that does not reflect the league’s.
But it’s like anything else if you are good enough you get exceptions Harrison Booker could get cut tomorrow.
He’s got a job.
Colin Kaepernick didn’t get a job because he was a backup quarterback at that point.
You’ve got guys in the NFL who beat women, who beat kids and they get jobs because they’re good enough.
If you are good enough, you will get a pass.
And that’s how this goes in the NFL.
And if you’re a man, though, think about women in women’s sports.
You know how women are judged in sports.
It’s still something that I think society is becoming more fair.
Brandi Chastain got a whole deal out of, you know, ripping her shirt off in the 98 World Cup.
So I think it’s working out okay for some people.
And Caitlin Clark is a massive star right now.
One of the other big stories of the week is that Missouri lawmakers are crossing the finish line.
The session ends tonight, which puts us in a pickle on this program because we don’t know what lawmakers will do at the last minute.
But we do know they spent what seemed like 96.5% of their time this week debating a proposal that would make it harder for voters to amend the Constitution at the ballot box.
In fact, the debate got quite snippy.
You know, we have one of the longest sessions of any legislature anywhere in the country.
Why not do it today?
Well, three fourths of our time is spent listening to you, Senator.
I know you’re trying to get things done.
You know what I mean?
But I’ll be honest with you.
I should have been done in January and February.
Too ridiculous to have this happening at the end of the session.
Brian, if this was the number one priority for Republicans this year and they controlled both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office, why does this get so hard to get across the finish line?
You think this would have been a slam dunk?
That is the question that even Republicans are asking.
It has happened now more than once.
The reality is that there is an intractable conflict between Republican factions in the Senate, the Freedom Caucus, the more conservative group of Republicans up against the House, the Senate leadership.
We don’t know exactly as we are recording this, how that filibuster that we know the filibuster ended.
We don’t know how initiative petition reform will turn out.
What we do know is that the proposal to add the so-called ballot Candy and create a more confusing item on the ballot does not appear headed for four Missouri ballots this year.
I think everyone’s to blame here in part on the Republican side of the aisle.
I mean, Governor Parson is upset, understandably, but he is the governor.
He can, you know, try to sway his team, so to speak, in the right direction.
And that takes leadership.
And he has kind of allowed this Senate body to kind of fight amongst themselves.
But it’s like parenting sometimes dad’s got to come in and, you know, snap the whip a little bit and he has chosen not to do it.
And this is the result.
When you put a program like this together every week, you can’t get to every story grabbing the headlines.
What was the big local story?
We missed?
Kansas in the national news spotlight, too, as we mark the 70th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown versus the Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas.
It would end legal segregation in America’s schools.
The Topeka School at the center of the case is now an historic site run by the National Park Service.
This weekend, more than 100 former students and teachers will return to commemorate the 1954 ruling and reflect on how much real change has taken place since.
Are you taking your life into your own hands when you travel through downtown on 8670?
The busy stretch has just been added to the list of America’s deadliest highways, with the third most traffic deaths per mile of any road in the country.
The gasoline era comes to an end at Kansas City’s GM plant starting in November.
Workers at the Fairfax facility will stop making the Chevy Malibu and begin building strictly electric vehicles.
It’s National Police Week, but the city of Merriam is making headlines for blocking the thin Blue Line flag from its annual Flags of Freedom display.
A Kansas mayor abruptly resigns after crashing his car through the front window of a liquor store.
The mayor of Manhattan says his brakes didn’t work.
He’s been arrested on DUI charges.
And Lynnwood police insist no one suffered from any serious illnesses after eating at the Hurford house, a town center plaza.
The suspect in the case tested negative for any infectious diseases.
And Mary Sanchez, did you pick one of those stories or something completely different?
I would go with Brown v board just because it has a huge significance for the nation, but particularly for this area, because Kansas City did have one of the longest and most expensive desegregation cases ever.
There’s also a lot of new data, though, that is showing kind of just long term, the 70 years out from Brown v Board, a lot of suburban districts where there are predominantly white, those are becoming more and more diverse, which we see even in this area.
But school districts that have a predominantly Latino and black are actually seeing a lot of resegregation.
And that’s something that really we need to start talking about going forward and figuring out how do we make this promise of brown shirt.
I would go back to the Missouri legislature in this final week of the session and show that there are times that the legislature can act in bipartisan ways.
The Missouri House, in this final week of the session passed the fray.
That’s a tax on hospitals and pharmacies and other groups that raises money to pay for income or health care for low income Missourians.
The Medicaid, the expanded Medicaid program that funding stream for health care for Missourians was secured on a bipartisan basis.
I’m going to dovetail off of what Mary talked about, the Brown versus Board of Ed.
And if you’re if you find yourself in Topeka and some time, there’s a wonderful historic site and museum there, which really does a terrific job documenting what was and where we are now, It’s well worth your time.
Well, I’m going to play off of the national police Week, the story of Marion.
But just broadly speaking, I think that the narrative has started to shift.
We’ve obviously lost officers in the Kansas City area over the last 12 months.
And I think that after a long four years for law enforcement, the tide is turning.
The pendulum is swinging back towards the middle on how we view law enforcement, which is where it needs to be.
And I think it’s been a slow, slow progress.
But we’re getting in the right direction to get that conversation back to where it should be.
And on that, we will say our week has been reviewed courtesy of Mary Sanchez from the Kansas City PBS NEWSROOM Flatland and from the anchor desk at Channel nine, Chris Katz heard weekdays from 6 to 10 on 95.7 FM, KCMO Talk Radio Pete Mundo and slightly lower down the dial at 89.3.
Brian Allison from KC one News.
A quick note There will be no show for the next couple of weeks as we head into our membership drive that helps fund our work right here.
We’ll see you on the flip side of that.
I’m Nick Haynes from all of us here at Kansas City, PBS.
Be well.
Keep calm and carry on.
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