City’s civil rights manager can’t tell whether Jazzy Jeff or P&L workers are telling the truth

We didn’t learn a lot from the report by Kansas City’s Human Relations Division on the tiff between DJ Jazzy Jeff and the folks running the Power & Light District.

Civil Rights Manager Mickey Dean couldn’t decipher who was telling the truth — Jazzy Jeff, who claimed he was booted for playing hip hop and rap, or P&L’s management, who claimed Jazzy Jeff was about to blow the P&L’s sound system during his June 6 concert.

Wait, we have a civil rights manager? Yep, Dean has

been on the job since 1991, and he has the power to investigate issues

just like this one.

Dean tells The Pitch that he really wanted to talk with Jazzy Jeff’s stage manager, a man named Darnell (whose last name Dean didn’t know), but no one in Jazzy Jeff’s crew would talk. 

“This stage manager is the one who told Jeff that the Power & Light

officials said, ‘We don’t want you to play rap,'” Dean says. “And from

what we were able to determine, this stage manager … was the only one who

was really in direct contact with the Power & Light people.

“Assuming that he [Darnell] said what everybody said he said, it still doesn’t tell us anything about who was telling the truth,” Dean says. “A lot of times in investigations we want some independent confirmation of one side or the other, and we just didn’t have that in this case.”

Dean did interview folks with P&L, who shared receipts showing a little less than $3,000 in damage to the sound system. His report mentions a lot of sound equipment techno talk of “limiters” and “drivers,” but the claim is that district staff couldn’t override Jazzy Jeff while the system was “redlining.”