Overland Park will participate in a pilot program with the Strong Cities Network designed to help communities prevent and combat hate, extremism, polarization and terrorism.
Last week, Assistant City Manager Bryan Dehner briefly discussed the city’s participation in the program — which got its start at the United Nations — at the Overland Park City Council’s Public Safety Committee meeting.
Money to support the city’s participation in the pilot comes from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The city has been putting the pieces together on the pilot program for the past year. City officials plan to soon release a survey seeking to gather information about residents’ experiences with hate, extremism and polarization that have threatened their safety.
“We are working to connect with anyone who has experienced hate or extremism to learn how to best support them. We hope this community can highlight blind spots to safety and inclusion so everyone can feel connected and safe in Overland Park,” Dehner said in an emailed statement to the Post.
What is the Strong Cities Network?
- The Strong Cities Network started in 2015 at the UN General Assembly.
- Today, it operates independently and has roughly 250 member communities around the globe.
- Overland Park is participating as a part of an invitational pilot setting up regional hub members in North America. The Strong Cities Network is also setting up regional hubs on other continents, as well.
- Other cities in the network include Kinston, North Carolina; Rochester, New York; Sofia in Bulgaria; the Mukaza Commune in Burundi; Victoria, Canada; and Lviv, Ukraine.
- According to the website, the goal is to help local governments with their efforts toward “preventing and responding to hate, extremism and [polarization].”
Johnson County community has seen hate-fueled incidents
Overland Park and the wider Johnson County communities have seen their share of hate-fueled tragedies, criminal acts and incidents over the years.
Most notably, three people — Bill Corporon, Reat Underwood and Terri LaManno — were murdered a decade ago outside two Jewish sites in Overland Park by a self-avowed and ultimately unrepentant white supremacist who spoke openly about his hate for Jewish people. In their memories, family members founded what is now SevenDays, a nonprofit that seeks to promote kindness primarily with youth programs and interfaith communication.
In another incident in 2017, two Indian men, Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani, were shot at an Olathe bar by a man who called them “terrorist” and used “an epithet disparaging persons of Middle Eastern descent,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Kuchibhotla died from his injuries. Madasani and a bystander who was trying to intervene were both shot but survived.
More recently last year, Blue Valley High School in Overland Park experienced multiple incidents of racist, homophobic and antisemitic vandalism on school property, including one that led to criminal charges filed against four teenagers.
Around the same time, a social media threat was made against Black students attending Bishop Miege High School, a private Catholic high school in Roeland Park.
Last year, a vendor at the Overland Park Farmers’ Market was also suspended after some of his antisemitic social media posts, including joking references to the Holocaust, came to light.
What’s next for Overland Park?
Dehner said the resident survey will be going out “in the coming weeks.”
Overland Park is also developing a local leadership group that will work on building relationships and holding dialogues. The goal, Dehner said in his email, will be to have voices from many different backgrounds and experiences in Overland Park within the leadership group.
The group is expected to create recommendations and ideas “that will allow Overland Park to continue to be a welcome place where all people feel safe.”
“We have plenty of room at the table. This group will be instrumental in having dialogues and building relationships,” Dehner said in the email.
Dehner said it will likely also include representatives from local school districts and universities and colleges with footprints in Johnson County, as well as organizations like the Youth Violence Prevention Center of Kansas, El Centro, various chambers of commerce, the Jewish Community Relations Bureau, both Johnson County chapters of the NAACP, the Islamic Center of Johnson County and SevenDays.
“Hopefully, this will give us more optics and ability to focus on things that are around us,” he said. “Everyone is going to benefit from the fruits of this labor.”
Additionally, Dehner told the committee that Overland Park will have a chance to learn from other members of the Strong Cities Network and their experiences with these issues, as well as an opportunity to share lessons from the city’s own experiences.
“Being able to take advantage of how this type of human behavior is being addressed in all corners of the world, what’s working, how do you build resilient communities, is something that we’re leaning into and trying to learn from them,” he said, noting that he expects the Strong Cities Network to become a resource for Overland Park.
Next steps:
- All of this will take time to put together, Dehner said.
- He predicted going back to the public safety committee in about a year with an update on the pilot and where Overland Park is in the process at that point.
Keep reading: 10 years after hate-fueled shootings in Johnson County, these survivors still live with the impacts
