St. Louis Post-Dispatch. March 29, 2024.
Editorial: State bid to control city police is a partisan stunt based on a false narrative
To borrow from Ronald Reagan’s classic line about intrusive government: The 10 most terrifying words in the English language for St. Louisans should be, We’re from the Missouri Legislature, and we’re here to help.
When the state’s Republican-controlled General Assembly isn’t exacerbating St. Louis’ violent crime problem by ensuring its streets are flooded with unrestricted guns, it’s working to take control of the municipal police department on the argument that (wait for it!) there’s too much violent crime in the city.
The Missouri House this week gave initial approval to a measure that would effectively put St. Louis’ police force under the control of Missouri’s governor, as it was for a century and a half starting in the Civil War era. Republican legislators have attempted multiple times to regain that state control since the city took it over in 2013.
Not only is this bid a violation of the conservative principle of local control of government, but it’s based on a false narrative. Violent crime, including homicide, is actually down in the city in recent years, with last year among the most dramatic reductions ever. Crime is still the city’s biggest problem (by a long shot), but it’s moving in the right direction.
The state’s takeover of St. Louis police in 1861 was a maneuver by Missouri’s secessionist governor at the time, Claiborne Jackson, who wanted control of the Unionist city’s arsenal as he embarked on his unsuccessful bid to make Missouri a Confederate state.
Missouri voters ended the arrangement by overwhelmingly voting in 2012 to approve a ballot referendum returning control of St. Louis police to the city’s mayor.
Republican attempts to resume state control have since been based in part on the argument that city control risks politicization of policing decisions.
That’s undoubtedly true, but it would still be true under the latest legislation. The only difference would be that the power would ultimately rest with state politicians based more than 100 miles away — and often in different ideological universes.
The current legislation would put the police department under a board of commissioners made up of St. Louis’ mayor and four appointees from Missouri’s governor.
Given the current political dynamics of this state, that would effectively guarantee Republican control over policing in this overwhelmingly Democratic city for the foreseeable future. Pardon us for suspecting that’s the whole point.
As the Post-Dispatch’s Alyse Pfeil reported this week, the sponsor, state Rep. Brad Christ, R-south St. Louis County, argues that the police department “has been decimated” by Mayor’s Tishaura O. Jones’ administration, “which in turn has decimated St. Louis city with crime.”
The reality is more complicated. We have long criticized Jones for de-emphasizing adequate police staffing and have pressed for the city to fill the chronic vacancies on the force. But market realities are the biggest part of the problem — jobs of all kinds are harder and more expensive to fill than in past economies. And the administration has recently upped police pay in seeking to hire more cops.
Crime does indeed remain the crisis that drives most other crises here. St. Louis’ homicide rate last year — 158 killings, or about 56 per 100,000 city residents — among the highest in the U.S.
But that’s not a situation that started with local control of the police. And in fact, last year’s homicide rate, unacceptable as it is, is still the lowest per capita (and the lowest in actual numbers) since 2014.
Also, it’s far lower than it was during the peak in national crime in the early 1990s, when there were more than 200 murders annually for several straight years and rates approaching 70 per 100,000. The state was effectively in charge of the city police department during that entire stretch.
Meanwhile, Kansas City — which currently has the only major municipal police force under state control anywhere in America — saw an unprecedented surge of homicides last year.
In short, legislative Republicans who argue they can do a better job overseeing St. Louis’ police force from Jefferson City than Democrats can from City Hall simply have no consistent data to back that up.
If Jones and her allies want to short-circuit this and future attempted takeovers by the state, the most effective way to do it is to continue bringing down crime numbers. That requires more police, better-paid police and support for policing from the top down in city government.
And if suburban and rural Republican legislators really want to help St. Louis (not at all a given these days), they could start by allowing enforcement of firearms restrictions in the city like a concealed-carry permit requirement, which Jones and others have long lobbied for. Rather than trying to commandeer St. Louis’ police for political reasons, how about giving them the tools they need to stop the shooting before it starts?
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