urbanSTL

Woah............

The District of Columbia, with 632,000 people, had only 104 murders - and 12 of those were from the mass killing at the Navy Yard. (Source)

I've known it all along, but St. Louis........"We've got a (homicide) problem."

If D.C., which used to be the U.S. murder capital, has fewer homicides - even with a mass killing - than St. Louis...... something is terribly wrong. Sure D.C. has gentrified, but it still has a lot of poverty in corners of the city.

It seems to me St. Louis has to step up its policing. More officers with better training and higher pay = more quality boots on the ground and less crime. Side note: St. Louis doesn't need any more officers who are trigger-happy, civil rights abusers with low morale shooting up the place and committing crimes like the thugs they chase either.

Idea: I know for a fact that College Hill is sparsely populated and has a problem with poverty and drugs. This is not an indictment of everyone in the neighborhood, but it is a breeding ground for crime and drug activity. Imagine police temp trailers sitting right in the neighborhood. Criminals and gang-bangers would be likely to do their business elsewhere. Perhaps in "hot spot" areas like College Hill, Greater Ville and Fairground manned temporary police trailers could be put in the heart of the neighborhoods. The trailers could then be moved to other neighborhoods as warranted. Costly? Maybe. But crime is costing St. Louis a lot.

I like what the current Police Chief is doing and he seems to have great character, unlike Mokwa, but maybe it is time for city residents to tax themselves in order to get more highly-trained police officers and cameras around the city.

If DC can do it, why not St. Louis?

urban_dilettante wrote:^ again, i think it's a matter of resources. DC has a significantly wealthier tax base than STL.

I know. I previously alluded to the fact that cities like DC and NYC have more resources - especially in light of 9/11.

Still......My point is that St. Louis has to CREATE more resources FOR ITSELF even it means sunset taxing itself a little more short term, begging corporations and granting agencies for monies to help with policing costs, redirecting budget monies etc. etc. St. Louis has to become more creative than D.C. or NYC. Imagine what that stolen $500,000 from the Parks Department could have done.

St. Louis manages to find money for everything else, why not for more quality police officers? It's about priorities because St. Louis is being HAMMERED by these dismal numbers.

I'd say that the police have done an admirable job with the resources that have been given to them and crime is still at historic lows despite a falling population. Are there things that they could probably improve on and better strategies they could be implementing? Definitely. Could they use more funding? Definitely. Could they coordinate better and share resources with county police? Probably. Would unifying city and county help? Probably. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about policing to add anything specific.

But fundamentally why hasn't crime fallen more compared to the other cities? The other cities are gaining tons of population and gaining jobs (especially washington DC), while we are not gentrifying as fast as those cities.

Hence, we need to do things that will attract people back and more gentrification. Unfortunately the "urban clearance" and "parking-lotification" of the city in the 20th century have, in the final summation, likely have mixed results and maybe even more harm than good. A new stadium will not fix anything, especially with the sea of parking that will result. I'd probably give anything to return blocks upon blocks of empty and overgrown townhomes with some hope of salvage compared to the empty land that exists now. Its sad to see what other cities have done with their previously abandoned but intact districts that we can't do because the buildings are gone forever.

This is why I go back to higher education over and over. Its probably the only thing in this day and age that could rapidly and reliably boost the city's population of young people and optimize the use of plots of underused land. A big state college with 30k students developed over a decade or two would increase our population by 10% now, which is shocking. A population of 10% students? I'd be up for that. Remember that each student usually has 2 working adults somewhere else in the country supporting them and this money feeds into the local economy. These two other working adults would have to visit the city, which they likely would have have never seen, and maybe even eventually develop some attachment to and end up investing in themselves.

Even if northside regeneration builds huge new fancy developments in downtown west and midtown, who will live there? Demand is high for what we have but we will need many more people to keep things going. You're not going to convince the ones who moved out to west county easily. You will have to depend on transplants and students and other young people for at least a decade or two until the neighborhoods get going. And if you can't get enough of these people to stick, the quality will go down and we'll lose those areas again for another generation. Without creating new giant employers downtown (which is a possibility with healthy startups but never ever a guarantee), you need another reason for these type of people to be there. What is the easiest way to bring in transplants and fresh blood continuously? You guessed it, higher education.

Philly is another city that has seen a dramatic drop in homicides in '13:
http://www.phillypolice.com/about/crime-statistics/ (247 down from 331 in '12)

In general, Philly is one of two cities that I like to look at that maybe Saint Louis can learn some good things from.... despite a lot of work yet to do, it seems to be ahead of us in turning the tide on abandonment. The other is Minneapolis/St. Paul with their Midwest sensibilities. Philly does benefit somewhat from the coastal location but it still was/is an aged, struggling city with many of our same problems. I'm not sure what the Twin Cities benefits from but I'll have whatever their having.

^^ probably one of the main things in Minneapolis's favor is that the state capitol is so close. It is the center of political activity for the region and it is also the largest city in the upper midwest. It also has the distinction of being the closest the US has to a large cold weather "arctic" city.

Do you know what else is in Minneapolis's favor? The University of Minnesota is located there (like literally next to downtown), boosting its population by 50,000 students.

If the state capitol of Missouri had stayed in St. Louis or even St. Charles; or if St. Louis didn't have to fight for attention from Kansas City from its own state; or if Mizzou had been built in St. Louis; I'm sure history would have turned out very differently.

Re MPLS, it's not just that it has the U with its 50,000 students, there are approximately 60,000 more students in the principal cities of STP and MPLS alone, for a total student population of about 110,000, out of 680,000 in the cities proper, thus students are roughly 16% of the total population:
MPLS has at least 84,000 students, with students making up more than 21% of the total population.

Augsburg - 3800 students
MPLS Community and Technical College - 15,000 students
Dunwoody Tech - 1100
North Central University - 1300
Metropolitan State University - 11000
Minneapolis College of Art and Design - 650
St. Mary's University - probably 1000 grad students in TC campus

And if you add St. Paul, we also have:

Saint Catherine - 3500
Concordia - 2800
Hamline - 4900
MacAlester - 2000
Saint Paul College - 10000

In order for the same to be true of STL, the student population would need to be, AT MINIMUM, 65,000.

^ Good catch! I cut it from the MPLS list and forgot to paste - I used to bike past their DT MPLS campus so always lumped it into the wrong city.

So add St. Thomas to the St. Paul column, and you have 120k students, with St. Paul now having 36,000 students of 290,000 population, or about 12.5%. St. Louis would need at least 40,000 students to be at St. Paul's level, without adjusting up due to the lack of state gov in STL.

onecity wrote:St. Louis would need at least 40,000 students to be at St. Paul's level, without adjusting up due to the lack of state gov in STL.

Current enrollment:

SLU 14000
Wash U 14000
Harris Stowe 1900
SLCC Forest Park 7000
Aquinas Institute 200
Goldfarb Nursing 600
Chamberlain Nursing 1500
St Louis College of Pharmacy 1200
St. Louis College of Health Careers 200
Rankin Technical College 1700

Total 42,300 ... 13.3% of the city.

Plus Lindenwood and Webster downtown students. This counts all of Wash U, which straddles the city-county line.

If you count the metro area, it's about 170,000 ... 6.1% of the metro population.

^^
gc,
that case you site from College Hill appears to be an atypical one involving an innocent robbery victim as the shooter. I doubt that charges will be filed against the robbery victim/shooter, however if there are other co-robbers they may be charged with homicide as the death of their accomplice occurred during the commission of a felony. Anyway, an unusual case and from a statistical perspective it would be interesting to know if it shows up in the official homicide count.

Agreed. That guy who shot the dude trying to rob him, he won't be charged, and it won't be considered a homicide.
Just like the great TV show... That shooting is Justified.

^ May be a homicide if they arrest any accomplices and charge them with murder in addition to attempted robbery with possession of deadly weapon. (A less clear case recently was out in O'Fallon where a St. Chuck's prosecutor originally charged murder in a case involving a teen drug purchaser who iirc was run over by a pickup truck by the teen sellers. I believe that charge eventually was dropped.)

^ Agreed for the most part except for KC. It would be nice to even just be an hour's drive away from JC so more citizens could go to committee hearings held by the jokers. So maybe the effort should be to move it back to St. Chuck's. Go historical.

arch city wrote: Unfortunately, St. Louis has always had a high homicide rate. ALWAYS. Long before the population slide, gang activity was always problematic in the city from mobsters to the current street gangs.

Of course pre-WWII it was very violent across America's urban centers.... the Great Depression & Prohibition were particular scourges... but yes, Saint Louis has had its share of storied crime. I'm intrigued by the Luna Cafe on the Ill. side of the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge.... it was a gangster establishment back in the day and legend has it the closest Al Capone could come to Saint Louis w/o going back to Chicago in a wooden box. The prices were said to be so high that law-abiding folks couldn't afford it!

The Luna Cafe is still around and its cool neon sign rehabbed a few years back through a Route 66 grant program:
http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM1A ... l_Illinois. With the bridge, Mississippi River and those awesome water towers all nearby, it could be a cool setting for a movie.