There is simply too much going on here to pretend there’s a way to succinctly sum up what’s led us to this point in our coverage. A small Kansas newspaper’s offices, the home of its 98-year-old owner (who died shortly after the raid), and the home of Marion vice mayor Ruth Herbel were all raided by the Marion County police, led by its new police chief, Gideon Cody, an apparent refugee seeking solid employment after having (allegedly) become a bit of a problem for the Kansas City Police Department.
I’ll try, but I’m going to crib from some of my previous notes. There’s Kari Newell, a local business person who was seeking a liquor license for a new business when her previous drunk-driving record became public. There’s County Attorney Joel Ensey, who claimed to have no knowledge of the raid until public records showed he actually knew plenty about it beforehand. There’s the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, which also disavowed all knowledge, until it became clear it had knowledge as well, at which point it began publicly condemning Chief Cody and his department. There’s the mayor who didn’t like his deputy mayor and seemed to be all too willing to indulge the police chief. There’s the judge who signed off on the search warrants without reading them and then tried to distance herself from actions — a judge who apparently had some drunk driving problems of her own. There are the communications Chief Cody made to Kari Newell, informing her he was going to raid the newspaper to shut down its coverage of her and, presumably, any further investigation into his law enforcement past. In the middle of all of this, there’s some bullshit computer crime charges, which were invoked despite the newspaper accessing driver record data legally through a third party.
Then there’s this, which opens up the court decision [PDF] finding (mostly) in favor of former Vice Mayor Ruth Herbel, who sued following the raid on her house that accompanied the PD’s raid of the newspaper and its owner’s house. It’s the sort of thing that might make one yearn for the relative innocence of big city corruption as it details exactly why a bunch of local officials and government employees may have conspired to intimidate their enemies (a newspaper and a deputy mayor not exactly fond of the mayor) into silence by sending out some guys with guns to rifle through their belongings and walk off with their electronics. If you thought this was nasty and convoluted before, buckle up:
Ruth has been politically active. She ran for city council in November 2019. She said she was “tired of the dishonesty in the city administration.” Ruth campaigned with [Mayor David] Mayfield on a platform of change and transparency. But Ruth and Mayfield began to clash after the election. The local paper reported that Ruth and Mayfield disagreed about city-council meetings. Ruth wanted freewheeling discussion, dissent, and debate. Mayfield seemed to want to act as a rubber stamp.
Ruth and Mayfield had several disputes. Mayfield once called her a “bitch” during an executive session. Mayfield began trying to control to whom Ruth could speak, how much she could speak, and on what topics. In November 2021, he required her to first raise concerns with the city administrator before raising them at meetings. He required her to give advance notice of any ordinances or policies she planned to mention. Mayfield had the city attorney send Ruth a letter warning her it could be illegal for her to speak to anyone interested in dealing with the city without full council approval. Mayfield forbade Ruth from contacting the Kansas League of Municipalities. Mayfield eventually forbade Ruth from contacting the city attorney. No other city council members had these restrictions.
Ruth frequently criticized Mayfield in the Marion County Record, which is the local paper. Ruth complained Mayfield was violating the city charter, handing out funds without authorization, giving raises to favored employees, holding illegal meetings, and disregarding procedure. The paper ran several stories detailing the tension between Ruth and Mayfield. The stories included comments by Ruth that upset Mayfield. In July 2022, Mayfield and the city council passed an ordinance over Ruth’s dissent. Ruth organized a referendum against the ordinance. She spent her own money on signs and advertising that criticized the ordinance. In December 2022, voters rejected Mayfield’s ordinance by an overwhelming margin. The paper described it as a personal defeat for Mayfield.
About a month after the failed vote, Mayfield’s wife filed a petition to recall Ruth from her position on the city council. Mayfield was a sponsor of the petition. Mayfield’s wife promoted the removal petition on Facebook, which Mayfield re-posted. The recall petition failed because there weren’t enough signatures collected.
In June 2023, Mayfield ordered the city administrator to make all city council members sign an acknowledgment that they held their office on an at-will basis, even though they were elected. Ruth crossed out the “at-will” language before signing.
That’s kind of a lot. And that explains why the mayor and his supporters in the city council would have been perfectly fine with supporting raids of the newspaper and Ruth Herbel’s home. But to do that, you need the assistance of law enforcement. Well, it seems Gideon Cody and his business-owning, drunk-driving friend were close enough they were able to collaborate on other forms of intimidation.
Cody’s appointment as police chief immediately introduced a new level of antagonism.
Mayfield decided to hire Cody despite Cody’s troubled history. Cody took the oath of office before the city council had a chance to formally vote on hiring him.
Cody immediately showed hostility toward the media. He declined interview requests with the paper and stopped providing weekly activity reports to the paper. The paper published that he had discontinued the practice. Cody also told the city administrator not to provide the paper with the pay scale for officers.
Cody’s view of the media was shared by others in Mayfield’s administration. By the end of July 2023, the city administrator told Mayfield they should cease all communication with the paper. Mayfield shared posts on Facebook calling journalists the “real villains in America.”
From there, it just descends into full-blown corrupt insanity — the sort of thing you wish was relegated to works of fiction.
[Mayor] Mayfield instructed Cody to open an investigation into his administration’s critics. Cody reached out to KDOR [the TV station website where the paper had verified the DUI info], and Mayfield and Cody both reached out to [Kari] Newell to warn her that Ruth knew about her suspended license. Mayfield and Cody claimed that Ruth would oppose Newell’s catering license because of the DUI, even though Ruth’s concerns were just about eligibility.
Cody told Newell that someone had stolen the letter from her mailbox. He didn’t have any factual basis for this. Newell said he was wrong, and Cody, again without factual basis, said someone had stolen her identity. Cody told Newell that the paper had shared her driving record with Ruth even though Cody knew [Pam] Maag [another town resident] had given the letter to both Ruth and the paper.
Mayfield told Newell that the only way to stop Ruth and get her removed from the city council was to have her arrested and charged with a crime. Mayfield and Cody decided it was a crime for Ruth “to merely possess a screenshot of a screenshot of a letter detailing information posted publicly to Facebook.”
There’s so much more in there, including the cooperation and guidance of the local sheriff, who felt his office would be embarrassed if it became public it had allowed Newell to not only drive, but operate a catering business (presumably involving driving commercially-licensed vehicles) without a valid license. Working with Chief Cody and the mayor, computer crime charges were whipped up and a warrant request handed to a judge — one that carefully omitted every single fact that would have shown no accused of any crime had actually committed these crimes.
There’s a lot to take in here and I encourage you to read the entire decision to fully comprehend the sheer amount of deliberate misconduct engaged in by multiple government officials. The upshot of the decision is this, though: most of the claims survive. Several parties are dismissed, but — most importantly — the ones still on the hook are Chief Cody and his Marion PD underlings. The city itself isn’t allowed to escape the lawsuit either, thanks to the mayor’s overt involvement and complicity in these horrendous civil rights violations. The lawsuit will move forward, with Ruth Herbel continuing to be represented by the Institute of Justice.
This is an extremely ugly chapter in American law enforcement history. Unfortunately, it’s one of several and it certainly won’t be the last time the government abuses its power to silence people it doesn’t like, including journalists who are given the utmost in First Amendment protections when it comes to handling issues of public interest. But hopefully this will cause the next would-be Chief Cody/Mayor David Mayfield to pause before deciding the communities they’re supposed to be serving are fiefdoms they can control through intimidation and unlawful actions.