Edward Williams, a Kansas City Police Department traffic cop, filed the employment discrimination lawsuit Monday in Jackson County Circuit Court. In it, he says police leaders are disobeying the law by continuing to encourage officers to meet ticket goals in the traffic unit as part of their measured performance.
Williams says he was punished for raising complaints with his commanders over the so-called ticket quotas and “potentially racially discriminatory” policing practices in predominantly Black and other racial minority neighborhoods.
Williams, who says he has been with the department 21 years, complained to KCPD’s human resources department about a supervisor’s alleged directive “to go to minority neighborhoods to write tickets because of the belief that it would be easier to write multiple citations for every stop,” the lawsuit says.