KCPD Memorial Lest We Forget
Honoring the Fallen
Chief
Lear B. Reed
May 31, 1900 - October 2, 1972
Kansas City Police Chief | 1939 - 1941

Lear Reed was a lawyer and former agent of the FBI, serving in the FBI's Kansas City division office. He received his law degree from Georgetown University and joined the FBI in 1925. Special Agent Reed had been assigned to the Union Station Massacre case and aided in running down Pretty Boy Floyd who was slain in Ohio, the Lindberg kidnaping, the Alvin Karpis case and the Kansas City voter fraud cases. He was offered the appointment of Chief of the Kansas City Police Department in July 1939 in a clandestine meeting with the newly created Board of Police Commissioners as the KCPD was brought back under state control. The Board of Police Commissioners, newly appointed by Governor Lloyd Crow Stark (1937-1941), consisted of prominent attorney Edgar Shook, Russel Greiner, Calvin Coolige, and Milton Schweiger. After consulting with Director Edgar Hoover, Lear ended his fourteen year career with the FBI and began his new mission as Kansas City chief of police to reorganize the police department's 679 member force to a more modern professional model after the ties to the Pendergast machine and it's corrupting ties were broken.

In his memoirs, Chief Reed recounts many offers of lavish bribes in the form of trips, money, and real estate tendered to dissuade him from his mission. In one instance Lear recounts a situation where one "promoter of nefarious operations" sampled his blackjack, losing some teeth and his hat between Lear's desk and the door after "firing the indignation of a country boy raised on honesty."

Under Reed's tenure efforts to modernize the police department included the establishment of a crime laboratory, improved training, and acquisition of modern radio equipment.

Chief Reed published a book about his experiences as chief of police during this turbulent era of the KCPD in a "gang-ridden, vice-controlled city" titled "Human Wolves" in 1941.

At his retirement in 1941, the Milwaukee Journal highlighted some of the changes made during Reed's tenure such as changing the police uniforms to military khaki. Changing Kansas City's wide open image by setting closing times for taverns, closing down race book shops, gambling dens and games that permeated shops and dotted almost every downtown block, and put an end to the wide open days in Kansas City and it's reputation as a gangster ridden town. He burned tarpaper shacks used to house hoodlums in the railroad yards. He incorporated a policy of fingerprinting all arrests. He organized youth clubs for children expressing the view point that crime begins in the high chair not the electric chair.

When Chief Reed announced his retirement in 1941, the Board of Police Commissioners expressed their desire to continue his reform policies and appointed Harold Anderson, 39, chief of police. Chief Anderson was a career policeman in whom Chief Reed expressed faith. Following his retirement in November 1941 when he accepted a position as auditor with Montgomery Ward in Chicago. He returned to Kansas City in 1948 to began the Lear Reed Insitute for Investigators. He later became editor for the Compton California Journal.

Chief Reed was a Freemason and served in both WWI and WWII retiring from Army service as a Lt Colonel. He was with the Department of State from 1952 to 1963 when he moved to Richmond. He died in 1972 and was survived by his wife, Bertha, his son, Dwight, and daughter, Gloria. Interred: Prospect Hill Cemetery, Front Royal, Virginia.

In 1940, Chief Reed resided with his family at 6830 Cherry Street.

Kansas City Police Memorial