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The City of Cedar Rapids will pay $10,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by a resident who claimed the selection process for a city board that reviews police conduct was prejudiced against white people. Kevin Wymore, a retiree, filed his lawsuit against the city in July 2022, after twice unsuccessfully applying to serve on the Citizen Review Board.
The board was created by the Cedar Rapids City Council in June 2020, as one of the seven proposals for change made by Advocates for Social Justice following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. The ordinance creating the nine-person board’s structure was passed in February 2021, and its first members were appointed in June of that year.
The original ordinance for the board, which is tasked with looking at relations between the Cedar Rapids Police Department and public, and particularly at the department’s treatment of people of color, required the board to “include a minimum of five voting members who identify as people of color.”
According to the lawsuit, Wymore considered that requirement to constitute an illegal quota system. In the lawsuit, he alleged the requirement that five voting members be people of color was the likely reason he had failed to gain a seat on the board.
Wymore was apparently so outraged by what he saw as officially sanctioned prejudice against white people that he engaged the services of the Kirkwood Institute to sue the city.
The Kirkwood Institute, led by attorney Alan Ostergren, is the state’s leading conservative public interest legal organization. Ostergren represented the Iowa Republican Party and the Trump campaign in the 2020 lawsuits that resulted in thousands of absentee ballot request forms sent by county auditors in Linn, Johnson and Woodbury being ruled invalid. Ostergren also represented Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks when her six-vote victory in 2020 was challenged. Last year, he represented the Republican voters who unsuccessfully tried to have Democrats Abby Finkenauer and Tom Miller’s names removed from the primary ballot. Ostergren also led Gov. Reynolds’ unsuccessful attempt to have the Iowa Supreme Court dissolve a four-year-old permanent injunction stopping a six-week abortion ban from going into effect.
The lawsuit filed by Wymore asked the court to declare that the ordinance violated the U.S. Constitution, and order the city to disband the Citizen Review Board.
The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge C.J. Williams of the Northern District of Iowa. Last October, Williams issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting Cedar Rapids from using its established procedure to select board members. Williams, a Trump appointee, said the process “assumes that a person with white skin is different from a person of color and unable to identify and address racial bias in policing like a person of color.” Williams, who is white and was presumably drawing on his own experience, said that “is a presumption based on bias.”
The city has since revised its ordinance, removing the reference to people of color. Instead, three members of the Citizen Review Board are to be selected from applicants who work for nonprofits focused on racial justice, three from volunteers at mental or physical health providers and three who are selected not based on either of those criteria. At least one member of the board must be an attorney.
Iowa Capital Dispatch reports that the $10,000 the city agreed to pay in the settlement will go to the Kirkwood Institute.
