Kansas City Police agree to pay $900,000 and apologize to Black teen wrongfully jailed for weeks

The Kansas City Police Department has agreed to pay $900,000 and apologize to a Black teenager who was arrested and detained for three weeks for a crime he didn’t commit.

The settlement would resolve a civil rights lawsuit brought by the family of Tyree Bell in 2017. The settlement needs to be approved by a federal judge, but that’s expected to be a formality.

Kansas City lawyer Arthur Benson, who represented Bell, said the case was not just one of mistaken identity or "walking while Black."

"It was a part of a national disgrace that has been allowed to persist among white police for forty years: cross-race identifications of Black males by white officers are often wrong," Benson said. "And they are often wrong because too many police departments do not train their officers that all Blacks do not look alike and how to make an eyewitness identification that is not tainted by racial stereotypes. Tyree Bell was a victim of the Kansas City Police Department’s failure to address this national outrage."