Arrests at a Kansas City Public Library event show how the lines blur when off-duty police work private security

A patron and a library director face charges stemming from an event at the Kansas City Public Library in May.

Jeremy Rothe-Kushel, a documentarian and activist who lives in Lawrence, asked provocative questions of a diplomat, who had just concluded a talk about U.S. presidents’ attitudes toward Israel. 

Kansas City, Missouri, police say they arrested Rothe-Kushel because he was disruptive. And Steven Woolfolk, the library’s director of programming and marketing, is charged with interfering with that arrest.

Library officials say the arrests were unwarranted. R. Crosby Kemper III, the executive director of the library, says the police infringed upon Rothe-Kushel’s First Amendment rights, and he stands by Woolfolk, who tried to intervene as Rothe-Kushel was removed from the auditorium of the library’s Plaza Branch.

Earlier this month, a few days after Kemper went public with his frustration that the charges had not been dropped, the American Library Association released a statement commending Woolfolk for “defending a patron’s right to question and debate matters of public concern.”

The police say Rothe-Kushel was arrested because of his actions, not the content of his beliefs. “It was his behavior that was disrupting the flow of the event,” Capt. Stacey Graves, a police spokeswoman, says. 

But free speech is not the only issue at stake. The case also raises questions about the lines that blur when police officers exercise their powers while working for private employers.

Off-duty Kansas City police officers made the arrests at the May 9 event, a talk by Dennis Ross, an ambassador who has worked in the Middle East. A sergeant and two detectives were hired by the Truman Library Institute, which sponsored the event with the library and the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Kansas City.

The officers’ point of contact at the event was Blair Hawkins, the Jewish Community Foundation’s director of community security. The foundation hired Hawkins, a former Seattle police detective, after a white nationalist murdered three people in the parking lots of two Jewish facilities in Overland Park in 2014.

Hawkins was an assertive presence at the May 9 event. He requested that one of the off-duty officers search Rothe-Kushel and a friend before they entered the auditorium where Ross was speaking. During the question-and-answer period, he closed in on Rothe-Kushel, who was trying to extend his exchange with Ross. 

In the police’s version of events, Hawkins approached Rothe-Kushel and “advised him that he was done speaking and needed to leave.” 

A video of the incident recorded by Rothe-Kushel’s friend indicates a forceful “advising.” Rothe-Kushel is leaning into the microphone as two men in suits descend upon him, their arms extended. Hawkins is the first to arrive, and he grasps Rothe-Kushel by the arm. 

“Get your hands off me right now!” Rothe-Kushel yells.

Woolfolk tried to intervene as Hawkins and the other man removed Rothe-Kushel. Woolfolk says he was trying to de-escalate the situation. Police say he did the opposite.

“When an officer is effecting arrest, whether you agree with it or not, you cannot interfere with that arrest,” Graves says.

The Kansas City Public Library is experienced in managing public events. “This is what we do,” Kemper says.

Appearances by Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, and Gary Kasparov, the chess champion who has called Russian President Vladimir Putin a despot, have drawn vocal crowds. But Kemper says no one had to be physically removed at these events.

Patrons sometimes exhaust the patience of guest speakers and fellow audience members during the Q&A periods. In these situations, a library staff member may step in front of the microphone and say that it’s time to move to the next question. “They may mumble or grumble as they go,” Kemper says. “That’s happened a couple of times.”

Rarely, someone is asked to leave.

Kemper believes that Rothe-Kushel could have been managed with a suggestion that he step aside. 

Rothe-Kushel tells The Pitch that he plays a “press role” at public events and author appearances. He likes to ask about what he calls “controversial things,” and to document the response on video. 

On his YouTube page is a 2008 exchange with the late writer Christopher Hitchens. In it, Rothe-Kushel asks Hitchens when he’s going to stop pushing “that 9/11 lie of Bush’s and the neocons.” Hitchens, a wit and a troublemaker, responds: “The moment the checks stop coming.”

Rothe-Kushel says he hopes to assemble such encounters into a documentary, the working title of which is Uncoverage.

Rothe-Kushel lived in Los Angeles before moving to Lawrence. He says he has attended events at the Los Angeles Public Library and been told that his approach to the question-and-answer period was holding up the flow of the event. “That’s always worked,” he says.

The Ross talk was his first event at the Kansas City Public Library, and he went into it knowing that he’d already become a figure of suspicion.

Before entering the Plaza Branch, he was outside the library, eating a snack and talking with his friend Greg McCarron. One of the arresting officers, Sgt. Michael Satter, wrote in his incident report that Hawkins, the Jewish Community Foundation’s security chief, alerted him that two males sitting outside the library were “possible protestors.” At Hawkins’ urging, Satter searched Rothe-Kushel’s bag before he and McCarron entered the auditorium. 

Rothe-Kushel, who says Satter was polite and respectful during the search, first wondered if it was his beard that raised suspicion. “It could be sort of Islamic,” he says. “It could be Jewish Orthodox.” (Rothe-Kushel has also wondered whether he was flagged when he RSVP’d for the Ross event on the library’s website, using his name. “I’m on the public record with asking these questions that some public figures find uncomfortable, and I document whatever the response is for the public record,” he says.)

Rothe-Kushel and McCarron found seats inside and listened to Ross, who spoke for an hour. Rothe-Kushel was the first patron to reach a microphone. McCarron stood several feet behind Rothe-Kushel with a video camera.

Rothe-Kushel posed a lengthy question that included assertions about the United States and Israel utilizing terrorism. He mentioned an author who has a fringe theory about U.S. and Israeli intelligence forces executing the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Ross said the notion that Israel had anything to do with 9/11 was “outrageous.” When Rothe-Kushel persisted, Ross quoted the late American politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who is credited with saying, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

As the audience cheered Ross’ parry, Rothe-Kushel leaned forward to speak into the microphone.

The two men approached. 

Library staff had already cut off the microphone Rothe-Kushel was using, but he can be heard on McCarron’s video saying, “Do not touch me.” Then he yells for the men to take their hands off him.

Rothe-Kushel, who appears to flail at his handlers in the video, says he reacted instinctively to being touched by Hawkins. “I didn’t see him coming,” he says. “I didn’t hear him coming. All I know is, some guy is grabbing me really hard on my upper arm.”

A detective wearing plain clothes, Brent Parsons, assisted Hawkins in removing Rothe-Kushel from the auditorium. In his incident report, Parsons says he identified himself as a police officer and told Rothe-Kushel he was leaving. Rothe-Kushel, he says, “continued to actively resist his removal.”

Satter and the other detective were in a hallway when the commotion started. In his incident report, Satter writes that he could hear Hawkins advise on the radio that “someone needed to be removed.”

Woolfolk was standing near the microphone as Rothe-Kushel was being removed. Woolfolk says he intervened in Rothe-Kushel’s removal in an effort to keep the event calm. “What the question was doesn’t ever come into play for us,” Woolfolk says of the patron’s tense line of inquiry. “It wouldn’t matter what was asked. Everybody has the right to ask their questions.”

In the police version of events, however, Woolfolk was an impediment. Parsons reported that he tried to push Woolfolk in the chest with an open hand as Rothe-Kushel was being led away.

In his report, Satter says Hawkins directed his attention to Parsons as he tried to arrest Woolfolk. Satters assisted Parsons, delivering knee strikes to Woolfolk’s thigh during what Satters terms Woolfolk’s “active resistance.”

After they were arrested, Rothe-Kushel and Woolfolk sat in a police van and commiserated. Rothe-Kushel says Woolfolk described how challenging patrons at library events are typically handled: without force.

“I was like, ‘That definitely would have worked with me,’” Rothe-Kushel says.

Kemper says one of the reasons he waited to speak publicly about the arrests is that he did not want to appear insensitive to the Jewish Community Foundation’s concerns about security in the wake of the 2014 slayings. But behind the scenes, he has been talking since May 10.

He says he has had conversations about the arrests at the Ross event with Lauren Mattleman Hoopes, executive director of the Jewish Community Foundation, as well as with members of the foundation’s board. 

“In each one of these conversations, I said, ‘Look, I get why this happened. You guys were really nervous. All of us should have been a little bit more careful about the structure of events and whatnot,’ ” Kemper says. 

He says he has been disappointed with the foundation’s response — particularly with what he says is its failure to acknowledge that the team providing security was overzealous.

“I basically want it to go away, but I’m also kind of stunned that there’s no apology that’s come from Hawkins, from the JCF,” Kemper says.

The incident reports and video suggest that Hawkins had operational command of the off-duty officers at the Ross event. An academic who used to work in law enforcement says such an arrangement raises questions about the applicability of criminal liability for the individuals who interact with off-duty officers.

“That can be a huge problem because law enforcement officers can be put in the uncomfortable and questionable position of enforcing a private entity’s rules or decisions,” Seth Stoughton, an assistant law professor at the University of South Carolina, tells The Pitch.

Stoughton, who was a police officer in Tallahassee, Florida, recently wrote a paper about moonlighting cops, a nearly universal practice: Police agencies permit and even encourage officers to take off-duty work, he writes, in part because doing so increases police visibility in the community.

Stoughton, however, believes that moonlighting creates more complications than most departments are willing to admit. He points as an example to off-duty officers who are hired to provide security at political rallies. “Things get a little hairy when you have an officer who is a government agent who is not just responding to a call about a disturbance but is actually working for the private employer,” he says.

Stoughton says it’s entirely appropriate for an off-duty officer to arrest someone who is breaking the law. “But when you have the potential for officers to be enforcing private rules that do not rise to the level of a criminal violation, I think it raises some really troubling questions about what authority the officers are using and what authority the officers are portraying.”

The event at the Plaza library appears to fall into this gray area. As Rothe-Kushel was being arrested, he was told he was at a “private event” — an inaccurate description for a booking that took place in a public library, to which patrons metrowide had been invited.

Library officials say they had specified that no one was to be removed from the Ross event unless the person posed an imminent threat. Kemper, though, says he regrets that the Truman Institute acted as intermediary between the library and the Jewish Community Foundation. He says it was a “mistake” that the library did not communicate more directly with the foundation.

Last week, the Jewish Community Foundation released a statement expressing support for the First Amendment and saying it was “engaged in the matter to encourage a resolution that would be acceptable to all parties.” 

Woolfolk was treated for a knee injury after his arrest. (The library is paying a worker’s compensation claim.) He says he’s been offered a plea bargain that would carry the penalty of probation and community service.

“Plead guilty to being a librarian is kind of what it amounts to,” Kemper says. He adds that he supports Woolfolk in whatever he decides to do.

Rothe-Kushel says he was floated a deal for 30 hours of community service in exchange for releasing all parties from civil liability. Rothe-Kushel says he is open to releasing the library employees and the on-duty police officers. “But not the people who actually violated my rights, violated the constitution, violated the library,” he says. “That needs to be corrected.”