The Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners on Monday said allegations made by a former police department lawyer that the department withheld public records were “not accurate.”
The statement comes months after KCPD’s former assistant general counsel Ryan McCarty laid out a plethora of alleged wrongdoing in a December letter in which he claimed the department’s general counsel closed records that should be available to the public under Missouri’s open records law.
“It is now clear that the former employee’s allegations are not accurate,” the police board, which oversees KCPD, said in its statement. “The allegations, which were written on falsified letterhead, are based on incomplete facts and misconstrue the KCPD’s practices.”
The board did not name McCarty in its statement or provide specific evidence of why the information was inaccurate.
But the board’s five members said the former employee “widely disseminated privileged and sensitive information in violation of the person’s ongoing ethical and other duties.”
Neither McCarty nor the attorney representing him could immediately be reached for comment.
Days after McCarty’s letter was made public, Mayor Quinton Lucas said he and other police board members agreed to hire a law firm to investigate the allegations.
The letter, written on what looked like KCPD letterhead, contained nearly 400 pages of email correspondence, internal KCPD documents and legal correspondence. The letter was sent by email to several officials and agencies, including the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office, members of the U.S. Department of Justice, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson and Lucas.
McCarty alleged Holly Dodge, KCPD’s general counsel who left the department earlier this year, hid evidence and closed documents that should be open by claiming they were part of an ongoing investigation. McCarty also said he heard top KCPD leaders propose that all emails be destroyed after 180 days.
McCarty said his concerns began shortly after he began at the department.
“Over the course of the ensuing six months, the red flags kept coming with seemingly accelerating rapidity,” he wrote. “The more I spoke up, the more I was shut out. The more I expressed concern about abuses, improprieties and illegalities, the more I was blackballed, ostracized and shunned.”
McCarty also claimed Dodge wrongly stepped in to choose which KCPD records to hand over to prosecutors in response to requests for material in criminal cases that could cast doubt on the credibility of witnesses, including officers. He called it the prosecutor’s job to decide what evidence is relevant in such requests, which are referred to in legal terms as Brady and Giglio material.
Defense attorneys called McCarty’s claims “very disturbing” because, if true, it meant prosecutors were not receiving full investigative files. Separately, Lucas said if the allegations were true, hundreds of criminal cases could be reopened.
On Monday, the police board said KCPD’s practices “have and continue” to meet its obligation to assist prosecutors in identifying Brady and Giglio information.
The board called it “an unusual step” for it to issue a statement about the allegations, but said it was doing so to “provide transparency to stakeholders, including the judiciary and others who are involved with the criminal justice system.”
Dodge left the police department in March and told The Star that she was now working at Lauber Municipal Law LLC in Lee’s Summit. She had joined the department in August 2021, and was appointed as KCPD’s top legal adviser months later.
At that time, KCPD spokesperson Sgt. Jacob Becchina said it’s not uncommon for the general counsel to change when a new police chief takes over. Stacey Graves took over as police chief in December.
Since then, Jenny Atterbury, who previously served as the department’s general counsel, has serving in that role on an interim basis until a permanent general counsel has been named.