Things a Kansas City cop can do and not get fired

Having written extensively about the saga of fired Kansas City police officer Danny Holmes (who yesterday won a $6.5 million judgment against the police board), I wasn’t surprised by much of the information presented in Jackson County Circuit Judge David Byrn’s courtroom.

But Lyle Gregory, Holmes’ attorney, did manage to surprise me by unearthing examples of “alleged misconduct” by KCPD employees who were not fired for their offenses. He used these as evidence to show the jury that Holmes was punished more harshly than usual by the KCPD’s powers-that-be.

Among the offenses for which officers were not fired, according to Gregory’s documents:

Allowing a crime scene to be contaminated. On April 5, 2007, an officer “responded to the scene of a reported suicide, failed to recognize that it might be a suicide, failed to properly process the crime scene by causing a box of bullets, a gun case, and two wine glasses to be recovered per KCPD policy, and then left the scene prior to the Medical Examiners Office arriving to remove the body. By the time the officer was sent back to the scene to process the scene, it had been contaminated.”