Ralph Yarl shooting digs up decades of police frustrations

The Kansas City crowd wanted justice.

Gathered by the hundreds in front of the federal courthouse in downtown Kansas City Tuesday afternoon, demonstrators chanted for justice for 16-year-old Ralph Yarl, a Black honors student shot at point-blank range last week by an 84-year-old white man after the teen mistakenly rang the doorbell of the wrong house.

They questioned why the shooter, Andrew Lester, was able to turn himself in on Tuesday, and why he was released without charges mere hours after the shooting took place—a decision made when police determined they couldn’t detain him citing a lack of sufficient evidence Lester had fired the shot—and why it took immense public pressure and the involvement of the White House to ultimately get police to issue charges. They expressed gratitude Yarl survived, and would not go down as another young Black victim of gunfire by a white perpetrator on what prosecutors said they believed was a potentially racially motivated incident.

But the crowd gathered in downtown Kansas City wanted more than “justice for Ralph,” as they chanted repeatedly throughout the Tuesday afternoon demonstration; they wanted justice for themselves. For many of those in attendance Tuesday, the public response to Yarl’s shooting was yet another symptom of years of frustration building against Missouri’s criminal justice system from people of color. To many, there was one system for them—and another for white people. And neither was given equal weight.

“The courthouses are not open to us,” Nimrod Chapel, president of the Missouri chapter of the NAACP, told rallygoers Tuesday. “Right now, they’re closed to people of color. If you sue somebody, or try to sue somebody, who harassed or discriminated, retaliated against you, said the wrong thing, touched you the wrong way… you can’t hold that person accountable.”

Time and Time Again

There have been overt examples, activists locally say—particularly those involving police shootings. Last summer, a judge ruled the mother of Ryan Stokes, an unarmed Black man killed by Kansas City police in 2013, could not file a lawsuit against the cop who did it, a decision that was met with frustration by many in the community.

The year before that, the Jackson County prosecutor declined to pursue charges against a police officer who killed Donnie Sanders, who was also unarmed when he was killed. And while some believe Lester should have been behind bars already, he was released on $20,000 bail shortly after turning himself in Tuesday, Yarl’s attorney said later that day, raising questions from some how much a Black life was worth.

Others cited examples of police neglect on issues facing the Black community, even during a regimen of what critics call “overpolicing” in predominantly Black areas of the city. When a number of Black women went missing in the area of Prospect Avenue last year, police allegedly told members of the community that it wasn’t actually happening, essentially leaving the community to fend for itself.

“This has been such a triggering moment for us because there have been many moments like this,” Amaia Cook, director of organizing with activist group Decarcerate KC, told Newsweek in an interview Wednesday morning. “Maybe not as big, but there have been many moments in Kansas City where people have been violently brutalized by the police or killed by the police. And, you know, we see these instances sort of being dismissed. This is such a unique incident that happened to really bring national attention to the injustices that happen within our police department, how the community feels ignored when they’re asking for justice. [What happened with Yarl] is not like it’s not an isolated incident. This is only brought the injustices that have been happening to a bigger focus.”

Small details in how the case was initially presented—a police statement depicting the shooter as being scared for his life when he opened fire on Yarl—have also attracted scrutiny following insistence by Yarl and his attorney that the teenager made no attempt to actually enter Lester’s home after ringing the doorbell.

Winifred Jamieson, a co-founder of the Kansas City Law Enforcement Accountability Project and a former public defender in the Kansas City area, told Newsweek they felt the explanation of Lester’s reasoning in firing the shot in local police’s probable cause statement published over the weekend read like a template for Lester to invoke the state’s “castle doctrine” in his legal defense—a law that allows people to legally fire upon someone in self-defense if they felt their life is in danger from an intruder on their property.

To some, the inclusion of that line appeared to suggest Lester was potentially a victim, while simultaneously downplaying the fact Yarl made no real attempt to enter his property. While a unique case, Jamieson said those facts appeared to fit cleanly within a long-established trend in Kansas City.

“We’ve become accustomed to Black death being acceptable,” Jamieson told Newsweek Tuesday afternoon.

While Lee Merritt—a civil rights attorney whose client list ranges from figures like DeAndre Harris to the family of Ahmaud Arbery—told reporters Wednesday he did not believe such a defense would ultimately be successful, he was cautiously optimistic in how he sized up the potential for Lester’s prosecution after his entry of a “not guilty” plea in Clay County Court on Wednesday.

“In American jurisprudence, it is difficult to convict a white man for shooting a black child,” he told reporters. “It should not be. So I hope this case turns the tide.”

Politics in Policing

The root of the issue, some say, is largely political, tinged by race and a divide between Republicans and Democrats that have left the policing of Kansas City subject to the whims of state legislators who don’t live there.

A liberal bastion in the state that was once considered one of the nation’s most segregated cities, Kansas City has been targeted by the Republican-controlled (and majority white) Missouri state legislature in recent years in a battle for control of the city’s police force, whom local leaders say they believe is largely unresponsive to their needs and concerns.

While the city suffers from some of the nation’s highest crime rates for a city of its size, activists say its punitive approach to law enforcement, paired with the state legislature’s laissez-faire approach to gun control, has only worked to make the area’s problems worse, while the Black community in Kansas City has had little ability to impact the conversation.

Some argue that’s by design, similar to similar pushes in conservative states that have predominantly centered around liberal cities like Jackson, Mississippi, where state lawmakers sought to create a separate police force in predominantly white neighborhoods surrounding the state capitol. Unlike many major metropolitan areas, funding for Kansas City’s police force is controlled by the state, leaving locals with little say in how the department operates, leaving the policing of the liberal city to the whims of a largely conservative (and white) body.

Last year marked a turning point in the battle for local control when Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas sparred with Republican state lawmakers over a ballot question they’d introduced during the 2022 elections to increase state funding for the city’s police force—which locals said came over unfounded allegations the administration was looking to “defund” the police.

Ultimately, the ballot question, which was put to a vote statewide, passed resoundingly—leaving the community feeling jilted by a state that does not resemble them politically.

“We are taxpaying citizens who do not have control of our government, do not have control of the bodies that we pay taxes to fund. That’s unacceptable,” Jamie Johnson, a Democrat in the Missouri State Legislature, told Newsweek. “We try to get people to buy into this notion that there’s a social contract, that our democracy is fragile and that we all have to participate.”

“But if I continue to participate but I’m not getting anything out of it and my needs are not being met, if my ideas are not being heard, if there are no solutions to the problems that I’m having,” she added, “What reason do I have to continue in that space to support that democracy?”