By Roger Sims, rsims@linncountyjournal.com
PARKER – The Parker Police Department has been dissolved, at least temporarily, following a city council vote on Thursday, Feb. 13. A special meeting is expected to be scheduled by the end of the month for council members to hash out concerns about reinstating the department, but even if the council decides to do that, it could take longer to hire a new police chief or officer.
The city council will now try to answer the question of how much law enforcement presence a small town needs. However, it was apparent from the discussion following the council’s decision to dissolve the department that the effect would be immediate.
In a split vote on Thursday, Feb. 13, the Parker City Council voted 3-1 to dissolve the city’s police department pending reorganization. That move came a week after the council, again on a split 3-1 vote, ousted Cody Kiser as the city’s police chief in a special meeting on Feb. 6.
Council members Gary Earley, Kandice Higgins and new council member Joe Godfrey voted in favor of the dissolution measure. Kari Brandt opposed the measure, and Meranda Ellison was not present. Ellison was the sole vote against firing Kiser a week earlier, and Brandt was not at that special meeting.
During the discussion Thursday about disbanding the police force, Mayor Jason Webber told the council that two of the three remaining officers had already submitted their resignations earlier and he was certain that the remaining officer would resign following the vote to dissolve the department.
At the end of the meeting, Webber requested a 10-minute executive session to discuss non-elected personnel. When the council emerged from that closed-door session it voted unanimously to accept Kiser’s resignation, replacing a motion a week earlier to terminate his employment.
Council Member Gary Earley made the initial motion to put the police department “on hold” until the council had a chance to reorganize it. In the discussion that followed his motion, his motion did not receive a second. Earley said that the reports about crime made by Kiser and former police chief Craig Haley were misleading.
“We don’t need the police department right now,” Earley said. “We’ve got the sheriff’s department.”
“They’re not going to take care of any of the city ordinances,” Mayor Jason Webber said.
Earley suggested that a codes enforcement officer might be put in charge of enforcing city ordinances instead.
The councilman complained about equipment that has been paid for by Parker taxpayers and insisted that the city make sure that any equipment paid for by the city be returned.
Webber said that every officer who submitted their resignation had returned their equipment.
“We don’t have the crime the police department says we have here in town,” Earley said, adding that he had lived in the city for 40 years and never heard a complaint. “No citizen has ever complained about the crime that’s being committed here in Parker.
“I’m saying we don’t need the police department right now,” Earley said. “Let’s do the workshop and get things organized and get it right this time.”
Council Member Kandice Higgins agreed with Earley.
“We need to make sure we’re doing it correctly, we’re doing it where we can afford it, it’s not going to cost us almost $40,000 a year,” Higgins said, adding that included nearly $28,000 in salaries. “We cannot afford that as a city, period.”
“Ever since Craig Haley took the job, he’s been coming in here every month wanting us to buy something,” Earley said, adding that City Treasurer Kathy Harrison kept warning the council about its spending, but the police department didn’t seem to care. “You’d think it was a SWAT team they were trying to build up.”
Following more discussion and at the prompting of City Clerk Lisa Leach, who was trying to clear up the proposed motion presented by Earley and Higgins, Earley rephrased his motion to “dissolve” the department pending reorganization. The motion passed.
Over the course of the last couple of years, Haley, who is a supervisor with the Linn County Sheriff’s Office has requested the council approve numerous equipment purchases, including firearms, laptops, body armor, body cameras, computer programs for record keeping, and equipment for patrol vehicles.
However, Earley did not vote against those requests. He and Council Member Kandice Higgins have led the charge on rebuilding the police department, however, Higgins was absent for a majority of the meetings that were held in 2024.
Haley resigned his post as police chief on Oct. 31 last year, partly out of family concerns and partly because of his promotion in the sheriff’s office. He remained a part-time officer with the Parker department, however, as Kiser took over the chief post.
Council members say spending out of control
The tipping point may have come when Kiser requested to purchase a used Chevrolet Blazer with 50,000 to 100,000 miles on it for up to $25,000, less the $4,000 for a donated vehicle that was sold to the La Cygne Police Department.
The argument for the purchase was it was necessary to have a highway-worthy vehicle for Kiser when he was called in from home and when investigations led to travel out of town. The argument against the purchase was that he could drive his own vehicle to Parker and pickup up the patrol car. The council also questioned officers traveling up to Osawatomie to investigate the lead in a case.
Earley said the officers were “driving the heck” out of the current police vehicle including trips to their homes located in Hillsdale and Pleasanton.
Kiser and Haley have both maintained that the police department should be given a budget so that decisions could be made on purchases. However, the council has not come up with that budget, Kiser said.
A confrontation between Earley and Kiser during the December meeting likely accelerated the decline in the relationship between the council and the department. Earley’s attack on the department during the meeting drew a sharp response from Kiser, who at one point threatened that all of the officers would resign.
Following the meeting, the two men met outside to discuss differences.
In a text on Sunday, Feb. 16, Kiser said, “After the meeting, I asked Councilman Earley to speak with me in private, which he did. I addressed the inappropriate comments made by him in the meeting. Councilman Earley apologized and advised he allowed his frustration to get the best of him. I accepted Councilman Earley’s apology and we shook hands.
From Earley’s perspective, however, the exchange was more confrontational. He said that Kiser was clearly angry.
“It wasn’t a peaceful conversation,” Earley said. “He was upset with some of the things I said.”
Earley said that Kiser eventually calmed down and the two men shook hands, but he did still felt threatened by the exchange.
The discussion about money at each of the last three meetings included input from former council member Tim Griffin. Griffin maintains that the police department spending was out of control.
Griffin has pointed to information he received from the city that showed that salaries paid out in 2022 for police was just over $8,800. In 2023, salaries for officers increased to just over $17,000, and in 2024 that number increased to nearly $19,561.
At the Feb. 13 meeting, Griffin said the council was on the right track in re-evaluating the police department, saying that the council had overspent the city’s budget for nine out of 12 months in 2024 and had been operating beyond its income.
That was a claim refuted by the mayor. Webber in a Facebook post on Monday, Feb. 17, where he said the city had stayed within its budget in 2024. He said that there was no separate budget for the police department and that all of the city employee salaries were included under the salary line item.
“There is a lot of information being put out that the Police Department was over budget on hours, but the truth of the matter is that the PD didn’t have its own Salary Budget,” Webber’s post said. “Parker has only 1 Budget for Salaries and that is for all City Employees.”
He added that the city spent less than budgeted for all employees in 2024.
At the Feb. 13 meeting, Treasurer Harrison, said there was no budgetary crisis for the city of Parker
The challenge of keeping officers
While there have been complaints that the city of Parker didn’t need four police officers, finding a qualified part-time officer that can cover the 40 hours a month that Earley says he wants might be difficult.
All of Parker’s police officers had full-time jobs, most with the Linn County Sheriff’s Office, and multiple part-time officers were likely necessary to provide even the 40 hours a month coverage. Often the shifts of deputies change, making it difficult for a person with the necessary credentials to provide coverage.
It’s not just Parker, either.
Part of the problem is that younger officers, once they graduate from the Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center in Hutchinson, leave the jobs that don’t pay very well in small towns for more lucrative full-time posts in larger agencies. Mound City and Linn Valley are the exceptions to that challenge because their police chiefs and officers are older and more established in their communities.
La Cygne has run a help-wanted ad on its Facebook page for a full-time officer for months. The Pleasanton Police Department has openings.
But at the Feb. 13 meeting Earley maintained that Parker has had more police protection per capita than any other city in Linn County. He pointed to a time 40 years ago when the town’s marshal was sufficient, and nobody complained.
“We don’t need the police department now, we’ll just use the sheriff,” Earley said, adding that Parker should just rely on the sheriff’s patrols like the comparable-size towns of Prescott and Blue Mound for protection.
Linn County Sheriff James Akes attended the Feb. 6 special meeting. He was asked about how much protection his office could provide, and his response was that his deputies on patrol were instructed to visit each town in the county. However, there are only two patrol vehicles on duty at any time, day or night.
He pointed out that while his office would report to calls about crimes against property or persons if the local police were not on duty, his officers would not enforce any of the city’s ordinances or codes, including traffic stops. Akes, who earlier in his career was on the police department in Parker, also said that despite its small size, Parker was a fairly major traffic hub for regional traffic flowing into and out of Linn County from the northwest.
That included traffic from Garnett, Ottawa, as well as traffic going to and coming from Missouri. He said much the same was true about traffic going through the Blue Mound area.
Problems surface immediately following the vote
While that was a concern, though, there was a more immediate problem on Thursday after the vote to dissolve the department.
While Earley said that the codes enforcement officer could enforce city ordinances and city codes, City Attorney Geri Hartley pointed out that the council had never appointed a codes officer.
“You don’t have one, you don’t have law enforcement,” Hartley said. “So, as of today there is no one going enforce running stop signs, there’s no one to enforce violations of housing.”
Earley said that a codes officer would be taking violations to court and he was sure that Hartley will be there for that.
But Hartley said she wouldn’t be in court because there’s no police department.
“There’e nothing for me to do in court,” she said. “You’ve dissolved the police department. All tickets pending . . . are no longer pending. I can't have court when I don’t have a police officer providing testimony that these infractions occurred.”
Earlier in the meeting she said she wouldn’t be able to hold court in March because of a scheduling conflict and that cases would be pushed back to April. But after the vote to dissolve the department, she said the April meeting would not be needed either.
Earley said that the codes officer could testify, but Hartley pointed out that the city had not acted on a proposal by Devon Canada, codes officer for the city of La Cygne, to do codes inspections on a contract basis for Parker. Canada’s proposal to do case-by-case work for Parker has languished on the back burner with no decision from the council since Haley resigned last year.
With the dissolution of the police department at the Feb. 13 meeting, the next question was what to do with the equipment that had been purchased for the police. Earley suggested putting the current vehicle in the building that serves as City Hall, but City Clerk Lisa Leach said there was not enough room in the garage area to accommodate it because of the city maintenance equipment.
Earley said he wanted to have the maintenance equipment moved outside to make room for the vehicle.
Earley was adamant that the city purchase a safe that included gun storage area from Google for about $1,700. He said of the safes that Leach had received prices for he preferred that one because it took two people to open it.
Leach said there was no room in City Hall for the safe. And when there was a suggestion to find space in a file cabinet for the computers, cell phones and body cameras, Leach said her file cabinets were full as well.
Hartley pointed out the irony of Earley’s request for a safe.
“You just released the police department because there’s no crime in the city of Parker, and now you’re asking to secure property from theft,” she said.
Hartley suggested as alternative that the sheriff’s office might have room to store the firearms temporarily. She said it was likely it would be 60 to 90 days before the police department was resurrected.
Earley’s motion to purchase the safe did not receive a second.
The cost of modernization
During his tenure as police chief, Haley led the Parker council through a series of steps that upgraded the capability of the police department. Replacing outdated equipment or purchasing new equipment to bring the department into the 21st century was on his agenda.
Adding laptops to the patrol car, purchasing software that would link the Parker police to the same database used by the sheriff’s office, approving a five-year agreement to purchase two body cameras to protect the city against harassment claims and providing firearms for officers .
One of the agreements the city signed under Haley’s watch was the five-year lease of a couple of body cams, which came with tasers as part of an incentive package.
Haley, who also served as interim police chief for the city of La Cygne last year as that city’s council worked to replace its police chief, presented convincing arguments for the purchase of the equipment. However, additional requests were made almost monthly.
At the same time, Haley took on the task of being the codes officer for Parker during his time as police chief. He said that a substantial amount of the time he spent in Parker was spent enforcing city codes.
Aa a result of those efforts, the number of codes cases in municipal court increased substantially.
Kiser did not take on that added duty, and discussions began with the La Cygne’s code officer about covering Parker on a part-time basis.
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