Yeah, this is a major problem, and it obviously is not just Kansas City. In San Francisco the useless SFPD completely stopped writing traffic tickets, gradually over the last 20 years. They were writing > 14000 per month as recently as 2014 and this was below 500 per month for years until recent reforms brought it up slightly. The problem is that the police are self-selecting members of the tinted-dodge-charger club and do not perceive traffic laws as real laws. This ties in more generally to the fact that every single individual member of law enforcement throughout the United States needs to be closely scrutinized by psychologists.
Uh, no. They stopped because they were being punished for pulling over ethnically disproportionate numbers of drivers. This is likely due to several factors but the end result was making traffic stops a politically sensitive area, so they just pulled back.