Jay-Z’s Team Roc Renews Call for Federal Investigation of Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department
Team Roc, the social justice arm of rap mogul Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, wrote an open letter, renewing its call to the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate an alleged pattern of corruption in the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department that targets communities of color.
“The DOJ’s continued inaction tells targeted minority communities held hostage to the whims of the carceral state that justice does not exist for them, that their lives do not matter,” NBC News cites the letter addressed to Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta.
Midwest Innocence Project, a nonprofit that advocates for wrongfully convicted people, cosigned the letter. The organizations told the DOJ that there’s plenty of evidence to warrant an investigation of the police department.
“In the 8 FBI investigations that were conducted in the early 1990s, there is significant evidence of depraved acts by KCKPD,” the letter stated.
The civil rights organizations said they obtained documents through a freedom of information request about federal investigations years ago that found scores of alleged civil rights violations by the Kansas City police. Agents also discovered numerous accusations of corruption and excessive force by about 200 officers. The FBI recommended prosecuting several officers to gain the cooperation of other corrupt cops, it said.
NBC said the incidents included an ex-Kanas City detective, Roger Golubski, who was indicted on charges of exploiting Black women for sex and framing people for crimes over his 30-year career.
In October, Team Roc took out a full-page ad in The Washington Post urging the DOJ to investigate the police department.
“The police and eyewitness reports of criminal behavior perpetrated by members of the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department, over the past several decades, are staggering,” the ad stated. “They detail graphic accounts of rape, murder, sex trafficking and corruption so rampant and so blatant, it would be shocking if even a single allegation were true.”
Gupta, who oversees DOJ’s civil litigating divisions, didn’t immediately respond to NBC’s request for comments.
“Whether or not an investigation is opened,” she told The Post in October, “we take all of the requests and information provided seriously. But we get a lot more requests” than the department is able to investigate.
