A Stronger, Safer County: Proudly Endorsed by the FOP

The Kansas City Missouri Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge #99, and the West Central Missouri Regional Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge #50, have jointly endorsed my campaign for Platte County Presiding Commissioner. It is an honor I do not take lightly, and I want to tell you why it matters and what it says about the kind of commissioner I intend to be.

The FOP is the largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers in the world. More than 7,700 members are here in Missouri, more than 377,000 nationwide, across more than 2,200 lodges. When they decide to put their name behind a candidate, they are not making a political statement. They are telling their neighbors who they trust to have their back. As the FOP wrote in their letter to me, no one knows the dangers and the difficulties faced by today’s police officers better than another officer, and no one knows police officers better than the FOP. I am grateful they decided that the person worth backing in this race is me.

This is the second regional first-responder organization to endorse my campaign this month. IAFF Local 42, representing more than 1,800 Greater Kansas City firefighters, EMTs, and paramedics, endorsed this campaign unanimously earlier in July. Firefighters and police work under very different pressures, but they look at candidates through the same lens. Both organizations, independently, reached the same conclusion. I take that seriously.

Why the FOP backed this campaign

My campaign has always rested on the same premise. Platte County government has two core missions funded by general revenue, public safety and public infrastructure, and the county’s job is to be brilliant at the basics. Fund those two missions fully, execute on them well, and stay focused on them, before we spend a dollar on anything ancillary. If you have read anything else I have written, you have read that. I do not soften it, and I do not walk it back.

For public safety, that means the county has to support the effort to attract, retain, equip, train, and support the men and women who actually do the job. Not as buzzwords. As a standard. Compensation that reflects the danger and the responsibility of the work. Equipment that is not a decade behind. Training that is real. And when the news is bad and the pressure is on, an elected commission that stands next to its officers instead of ducking for cover. That is what officers deserve, and that is what I will provide.

The other half of the same job

Here is the piece too many candidates never talk about. You can hire the right officers, train them well, equip them properly, and put them on the street, and still watch the whole system fall apart at the courthouse. There is nothing more demoralizing to an officer, or more disrespectful to a victim, than an arrest that goes nowhere because the prosecuting office does not have the staffing to carry it.

An arrest that does not lead to accountability is a revolving door. That revolving door tells every bad actor in Platte County exactly what they can get away with, and it tells every officer that the risk they took was for nothing. I refuse to let that be the story here.

So I have made a commitment, and I will keep making it every day of this race. I will fully fund the Platte County Sheriff’s Office. And in the same breath, in the same budget cycle, I will fully fund the Platte County Prosecutor’s Office. They are not two competing line items. They are two halves of the same job. The officer makes the arrest. The prosecutor holds the person accountable. Neither half works without the other. Both get funded.

The Sheriff, the cities, and the family who called for help

There is another structural reality that gets ignored too often in this race. Day-to-day policing in Platte County is not done by the Sheriff alone. It is done by our municipal police departments, in Tracy, Parkville, Platte City, Riverside, Weston, to a name a few. Each of those cities funds its own department, out of its own budget, alongside the Sheriff at the county level.

That separation is sometimes used as an excuse for the county to treat municipal policing as somebody else’s problem. It is not somebody else’s problem. Whether the badge on the door says Sheriff or a city patch makes no difference to the family who called for help. What matters is that the response is professional, fast, and there.

There is only so much revenue that can be generated in this region. Every decision the county makes to pull revenue off the table for tangential spending, or to hand tax dollars to private interests that were never part of the county’s mission, is a decision that weakens the ability of our cities to keep their departments strong. That is how you end up with a constant drain of officers to other jurisdictions. That is how good cops get recruited away. I will not put our municipal partners in that position. My job at the county is to make sure both the Sheriff and the cities have what they need.

Thank you

To every officer represented by Lodge #99 and Lodge #50, thank you. Thank you for your service, thank you for the risks you take on behalf of strangers every day, and thank you for the confidence you have placed in me.  I will not let you down.