February 11, 2022
To the members of the Wichita City/Sedgwick County Committee investigating C.J. Lofton’s death:
The Kansas African American Affairs Commission supports your call for an independent investigation into the death of Cedric Lofton. We hope you successfully identify all of the ways people and systems failed C.J. so that neither the city, the community nor our state ever again awakens to news of a child dying in the care and custody of law enforcement.
We can appreciate the difficulty of the job ahead of you.
This tragedy traverses law enforcement, our fraying mental healthcare safety net programs, as well as our foster care system which continues to struggle.
In a situation with no easy answers, we do believe that there are some concrete steps we could take to narrow the likelihood of this happening again. We hope you can consider these ideas:
- We believe since the last chapter of this saga began with C.J. in a mental health crisis, we should consider as a state expanding Medicaid.
- We believe that had a skilled, mental health professional arrived at the scene with or instead of police, C.J. might still be alive.
- We also believe the “Stand Your Ground” laws that now shield the people who killed C.J. (according to the coroner report), should not now or ever apply to law enforcement.
If we can help in any way, please let us know.
We’d offer condolences, but C.J. didn’t belong only to Wichita or to Sedgwick County. We too, consider C.J. our own. He belonged to the village, and the village belonged to him. In that spirit, we hope we can find the answers we all so desperately seek, together.
Yours in the struggle,
Stacey Knoell, Executive Director of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission