There's a handful of stories that lead me to distrust the police, and one of them was about a teenager being sexually harassed by a sheriff's deputy who kept pulling her over for no reason, and a police chief - who ran the DARE program - being a meth drug lord who was arresting his competition. Both were from downstate Missouri.

That whole region is fucked up. Did you know the Oklahoma Panhandle was a gift from Texas? The Missouri Compromise basically said no new slave states north of Tennessee and NC, so Texas chopped the top of their territory off and gave it to Oklahoma, which was already about 34 miles to far north.

I won't say "small town anywhere", that's probably not true. But also true of small town Tennessee.

"Everybody knew" the sheriff took kickbacks from the bootleggers (it was, and still is, a dry county), and probably quite a bit more. I mean, I knew, and I was a high school kid. He did eventually get busted roughly a decade after I left.

Cities have corruption too, of course. But the hypocritical gaslighting nonsense about how pure and clean small town life is horse shit.

Nothing in there is specific to Kansas, or really small town America. See if you haven't read it yet, the amazing Ferguson Report - extremely concise and readable for a government report - which collected testimony of corruption every which way and concluded with doing nothing and a full trust in the locals sorting it out for themselves. And then again and still higher scale, cities around the San Francisco Bay Area and all the way to San Francisco. The specifics vary greatly and creatively (?) but the overall theme is there.

Because small town Arkansas or Atlanta or Dublin are so much better in this regard? Is there any evidence that such shenanigans are more common in Kansas?

It is potentially bad in small town anywhere just dude to the low population, maybe one or no news source and etc. Lots of power in a few hands, little oversight.

Small town not far of me there were billboards up about how the local police are crooks and on and on. Someone really felt strongly about that topic.

The businessman who bought the billboards did an interview. Story was businessman supported the local police chief's election. Then business man's business partner was being investigated for selling drugs and the state police raided their business. Businessman called the local police police chief and told the chief to call off the cops. Police chief said he couldn't do that because he knew business guy and had to stay out of it.

Businessman got upset and bought a bunch of billboards about "corruption".

One man's corruption is another man's ethical choice.