Many cities say yes to federal police help, but no to ‘occupation’

In the summer of 2020, President Trump sent federal agents to Kansas City, Missouri, as he blamed liberal mayors for a “shocking explosion” of “bloodshed.”

Mayor Quinton Lucas, a Democrat, bristled at the suggestion that local officials were to blame for his city’s spike in crime. And with distrust of law enforcement at a high after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis that year, he worried about how federal law enforcement officers would conduct themselves on the ground.

Yet over the next few months, Lucas came to endorse parts of the federal mission, named Operation Legend after a 4-year-old Kansas City boy who had been killed by a wayward bullet as he slept.