KCUR should know to spell it “restaurateur.”
Police stage 'chilling' raid on small Kansas newspaper, seizing computers (due to divorce conflict?)
…kinda like getting Al Capone on tax evasion. They’ll take what they can get.
Update. Some of the harmed parties are getting a settlement from the county.
If I’m reading the Sheriff’s Office’s apology correctly, it sounds like they’re saying ‘sorry it happened, but it wasn’t our fault, we were just following orders’.
That, and ‘if we weren’t so stupid, this wouldn’t have happened.’
It’s rather easy to lay blame on the guy who is no longer in town, the former police chief. Who, quite frankly, should shoulder most of the blame.
A documentary on this situation will be shown at the Sundance film festival next year.
Link to Kansas Reflector
While some of the remaining legal claims against the city and past and present officials have been settled or dismissed, some still remain, and a pretrial Zoom hearing is scheduled for Oct. 15…
Questions about [police chief] Cody’s conduct after the state launched an investigation of the raid led two special prosecutors to file a felony obstruction of justice charge against him in state district court, alleging that he persuaded a witness, the local restaurant owner, to withhold information from authorities. He pleaded not guilty, and a trial set for the end of this month has been postponed.
In other words, the taxpayers of this town are on the hook for the criminal actions of the police department.
Sounds sadly typical.
Zorn previously received $600,000 from the county, which settled various lawsuits over the raid for a collective $3 million last fall. The city has not yet settled lawsuits filed by newspaper publisher Eric Meyer and former city Councilwoman Ruth Herbel. Former reporter Deb Gruver settled with the city in 2024 for $235,000.Meyer said the settlements are a costly lesson for local leaders who tried to weaponize law enforcement against the newspaper.
No, actually, they are not a costly lesson at all for local leaders. The local leaders did not have to dip into their savings to pay the settlements. This cost them NOTHING.
But the citizens may have to go without some services to pay this debt.
Earlier settlements were mostly paid by insurance.
Insurance covers most of those funds, but the county must pay Meyer $50,000.
No idea about this latest payout, however.
Plus, even $50k is a huge chunk to the budgets of this county and town. Marion County has a population of less than 12,000, and the City of Marion has less than 2,000.
And then the town is presumably on the hook for the increased insurance premiums for years to come.
Their 2026 budget is $7.1 million, so less than a percent.
ETA actually the 50K and insurance coverage are the county, not the city. The city is getting hit with $1.085 million and has said they have “partial coverage.”
Also, there are still two outstanding suits against the city.
Where else would the city get the money to pay for the lawsuit? In any case, it’s not necessarily a bad thing if the citizens feel the pain of the judgement. They’re the ones who vote for the city leaders. Maybe feeling the pain of the payout will encourage them to vote for people who won’t create this kind of police department.
My sense of this is mostly voters don’t remember these lawsuits and payouts a few months later when the jurisdiction involved (city, school district, county) comes to them crying poor with a budget they can’t balance so they need to raise taxes. There might be some gadfly who will come to the public meetings to remind everyone, but who ever draws the line between the officeholder(s) who caused the lawsuits and the lack of current funds? I haven’t seen it, but I suppose it might happen sometimes.
In our town when we had to pay out $350k to a female police trainee who was sexually battered by a male officer in a meeting room full of cops, the reaction was mostly “Back the Blue!” and lots of unmentionable words used to describe the victim. Basically if you don’t want to have your butt and breasts grabbed by your colleagues and supervisors, what are you even doing in a police station?
And this is in a highly educated, affluent, politically purple part of a very liberal state.
People constantly underestimate how mindlessly most Americans back the police.
And the citizens of course rant against higher taxes, so the district ends up cutting services or the school district ends up chopping the music programs or some such. And so it goes.
Well surely you wouldn’t expect them to cut the football program?
Marion High School has 150 students, so I suspect it’s a barebones outfit. They do have a football team. I don’t know how many players you need to suit up, but I suspect anyone can walk on.
Rural Kansas schools are pretty spare. Marion isn’t as rural as many places I have spent time in in Kansas.
But municipal finance in Kansas is complicated. School districts are not financed as part of a county or city/town generally.
Correct. The local USD (Unified School District) is its own taxing entity, getting money through property tax, as well as money from the state. The shortfall (or surplus) of the city shouldn’t affect the school district.
So if the City of Marion has to pay much larger insurance premiums, it won’t result in the music or football program at the high school getting cut. It might result in city workers being laid off, but not teachers.
They had only 16 players listed on their roster last season, extremely barebones for 11-man football. Still, they finished with a 7-3 record.