Activist Arrested on Charge of Stealing His Own Ride
McMillan is grateful that the KCPD didn’t make more egregious mistakes, but the fact that he was arrested for stealing his own car is still troublesome.
McMillan, a well-known community activist who has worked for Move-UP and now directs cleaning crews to pick up litter along Prospect Avenue for the Kansas City Crime Commission, was returning home around 11 p.m. on Friday, September 28. He saw flashing lights behind him as he was driving along Hardesty and 9th Street, so he pulled over. The officer took a long time to come to McMillan’s window, so McMillan got his license and registration ready. Then the officer got out of his car, unholstered his firearm and yelled for McMillan to put his hands in view and get out of his van, a flat-blue 1996 Dodge Caravan.
“If my hands are up, it’s hard to get out of the car,” McMillan says. “I very delicately had to undo my seatbelt and get out… I stood there like, here we go again, my worst nightmare. You’re stuck out there at their mercy, and that’s a dangerous place to be.”
The officer told McMillan he was driving a stolen vehicle, and that he should get on the ground to be handcuffed.
As a matter of fact, McMillan’s car was stolen – from him, the Sunday before Father’s Day. The police recovered it a week later, from behind a housing development five miles from McMillan’s home. When McMillan signed the paperwork to get his car back and retrieved it from the city tow lot, he assumed the case would be cleared from the police’s computers.
He would have liked to explain all this to Officer Kevin Colhour, but Colhour wasn’t having any of it.
“When an officer and I can communicate, we have no problem,” McMillan says. “But I get Robocop, and he’s relying on his computer like it’s DNA or something. He coulda killed me.… He was adamant that his computer was correct.”
Colhour, by then joined by other officers, loaded McMillan in the back of a white police van, but moved him after McMillan started coughing and they noticed that the exhaust fumes from the tailpipe were leaking into the back chamber.
McMillan was driven to the KCPD headquarters at 12th and Locust and dumped into a holding cell where a dozen other men slept on a concrete floor. Eventually, he was notified that he was being charged – with a traffic ticket he had failed to pay in 2001. When McMillan asked about the stolen car, he was informed that detectives had realized that they’d arrested the same person who had reported the car stolen.
“There was no apology, nothing,” McMillan says. “They got me on this old ticket, so that justified it all for them.”
By now it was early Saturday morning. McMillan tried to reach several friends to help him get out of jail, but no one answered the jail’s collect calls. Finally McMillan got ahold of a friend who agreed to go to an ATM and withdraw $243 to pay off the 2001 ticket. The friend picked him up, but he couldn’t take him home – McMillan’s house keys and his van were at the city tow lot, which doesn’t open until 9 a.m. At 9, the tow lot staffer wouldn’t allow McMillan to get his van until he showed her his registration – which was, of course, in the glove compartment of his van. She wouldn’t let him open his van to show her the registration without his title. A few more trips and $145 later, McMillan was back in action – a full 12 hours after he was detained the night before.
McMillan finally made it home Saturday, collapsed on his couch and hit the “play” button on his answering machine. There were two messages from the KCPD, both telling him that they’d recovered his stolen vehicle.
KCPD spokesman Captain Rich Lockhart says he doesn’t think stolen car mix-ups like McMillan’s happen very often. “More commonly it’s going to happen if someone gets their car back and forgets to tell us and they get stopped,” he says.
McMillan plans to speak in front of the Board of Police Commissioners to address his concerns about officers’ computer records not being updated. He also wants to speak with them about more open means of communication on the streets.
“I understand they got these young bucks jumping out of cars with guns and these rolling gun battles,” McMillan says. “With the whole level of the black male encounter with police this summer, I don’t blame them for being cautious and securing the situation. But once I’m secured, if I’m not arguing, and they’re like, ‘Shut up,’ I have a problem with not being able to communicate.” – Nadia Pflaum
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