urbanSTL

I don't know if I ever heard from my colleagues and family in West County that the CWE and Downtown weren't rough to begin with. I was warned in 2008 not to move to the CWE because I would get mugged and robbed, and when I moved to south St. Louis in 2010 I was warned I would get burglarized. IMHO, the perception has consistently been one of danger rather than a lull and an uptick with recent high-profile crimes.

I think it's easy to show a decline in homicide when you start at 2008, as St. Louis had its highest homicide rate since 1995 that year. Homicide rate is a highly variable number, just as are the specific crimes mentioned in that report. Targeting specific types of crime isn't necessarily the best solution to tackle the broader problem of crime (although it makes for better news reports).

The total index crime rate is a bit more of a success story though, as in 2011 it's roughly the same as it was in the mid-1960s; it's been a pretty steady decline since about mid-2004. At no point since the 1960s has the index crime rate steadily declined by as much as it has since 2004, either. In other words, St. Louis had its best several years in crime since the Kennedy administration if you're taking the big picture.

A couple years back I compiled most of the crime data on this table on Wikipedia using FBI crime reports:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_S ... ime_trends

It makes me wonder what the heck happened around here in 1962 and 1963; it's like a crime bomb went off.

The point of those stats, according to the bottom of the screen, is to show what crime did in St. Louis under Police Chief Dan Isom's tenure. I think he was a good chief, and I hope they replace him adequately.

rawest1 wrote:The point of those stats, according to the bottom of the screen, is to show what crime did in St. Louis under Police Chief Dan Isom's tenure. I think he was a good chief, and I hope they replace him adequately.

I agree wholeheartedly with everything you said, I just don't know if it's the best way to characterize crime fighting in the city by pulling out statistics on specific crimes. The bigger picture of both violent and property index crime still supports Isom (who played a vital role in the revitalization of public perception of the force and in crime-fighting initiatives both before and during his tenure as chief) in tandem with the revitalization efforts targeting areas like South Grand, the Grove, etc., that had formerly been highly problematic in terms of crime.

That's not to say that those places don't have crime issues now, or that crime is down everywhere in the city. The issues with crime in Dogtown and elsewhere can be attributed (at least so I've heard at neighborhood meetings) to the efforts in higher crime areas pushing criminal activity to less patrolled areas that traditionally had lower crime rates.

Also note that the statistics cited were not per resident. That is, when considering crimes per person in the city, the decreases would be less.

^ Huh, I often think the opposite, that our civic leaders and elected officials do not do enough to contest the bogus rankings or promote a better understanding of crime statistics. Of course if they do they're accused of not doing anything substantive to battle crime.