urbanSTL

framer wrote:Another letter in the Post today pointing out the absurdness of blaming everyone except those directly responsible:

http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/ma ... 1180e.html

Two days before Grice's murder, Monica Shaw, 54, was fatally shot while she was out for a walk the night of Sept. 12 in the 400 block of North Sarah Street in the Central West End. Shaw, who lived in the 4100 block of Enright Avenue, appeared to be the target of a robbery before she was shot to death.

Xavier Perkins, 18, of O'Fallon, was charged Sept. 17 with first-degree murder, attempted robbery and armed criminal action in Shaw's killing, according to court documents. He is being held in jail without bail.

Perkins was arrested and charged after a witness who was with him the night of the murder came forward. The individual told police he saw Perkins shoot Shaw after she refused to give him her belongings, court documents show. The witness also told police that he and several others, including Perkins, were driving to a nearby residence to purchase marijuana when Perkins allegedly shot Shaw.

KIRKWOOD, MO. - Police are investigating after an attempted car theft at a Kirkwood, Missouri, gas station ended in an exchange of gunfire.

The incident happened at the QuikTrip on the 9900 block of Big Bend Boulevard near Interstate 44 late Friday night.

STLrainbow wrote:With 160 homicides through October, the city has 8 fewer (or 5%) than this time last year; however, unless we see another "quiet" period for the next two months there's a decent chance we'll match last year's total of 188 and wind up with yet another annual increase.

http://www.slmpd.org/images/Homicide_St ... ebsite.pdf

goat314 wrote:I think it's kind of a chicken-egg thing. On one hand, the lack of economic development and educational opportunities in the city of St. Louis causes many of these problems, but these problems are also a major deterrent to most people (regardless of race, socioeconomic standing etc.) from living or doing business in the city. I think we need real reform in St. Louis on so many levels or these problems will continue to harm the quality of life and perception of the city as a whole, which has real life consequences.

Obviously, stop and frisk is a very sticky subject. For one, it will almost certainly be used to harass any black male of a certain age, whether they are a "criminal" or not. This alone makes it dangerous. The fact is we "DO" have some racist police officers and they "WOULD" use it as an excuse to harass any and every black male they come across, which is why it was met with so much backlash in NYC. On the other hand, we simply cant let the criminal element run rampant and wild throughout the city of St. Louis and region. White people are up in arms when an "innocent" white person gets beat up by a black "mob", just like black folks are up in arms when an "unarmed" black man gets gunned down by a white "cop". The fact remains, the majority of people murdered, robbed, and assaulted in the city of St. Louis live in impoverished, Afro-American neighborhoods and were likely involved in illegal activity. What is truly sad is that there are open air drug markets, rolling gun battles, armed robberies, etc. throughout the city of St. Louis everyday and somehow the police can never catch the perpetrators. The people who suffer the most are the children who get hit by stray bullets, the family that is forced to leave North St. Louis because they are constantly getting their house broken into, the elderly person who is scared to walk to church because gangbangers are hanging on the corners, and the people who are trapped in food deserts because no grocery store will open in a neighborhood with open air drug markets. How do we continue to let this happen in St. Louis? Many cities are starting to clean up their act, some even "blacker" and "poorer" than St. Louis. It truly is a shame. Everybody talks about Chicago, but if we had their murder rate we would have about 50 murders/year, if they had ours they would have about 1500 murders/year.

Then, a hard look at the trade-off between privacy and safety. In 2004, when casualties in Iraq were rising due to roadside bombs, Ross McNutt and his team came up with an idea. With a small plane and a 44 mega-pixel camera, they figured out how to watch an entire city all at once, all day long. Whenever a bomb detonated, they could zoom onto that spot and then, because this eye in the sky had been there all along, they could scroll back in time and see - literally see - who planted it. After the war, Ross McNutt retired from the Air Force, and brought this technology back home with him. Manoush Zomorodi and Alex Goldmark from the podcast “Note to Self” give us the lowdown on Ross’s unique brand of persistent surveillance, from Juarez, Mexico to Dayton, Ohio. Then, once we realize what we can do, we wonder whether we should.

joelo wrote:

STLrainbow wrote:With 160 homicides through October, the city has 8 fewer (or 5%) than this time last year; however, unless we see another "quiet" period for the next two months there's a decent chance we'll match last year's total of 188 and wind up with yet another annual increase.

http://www.slmpd.org/images/Homicide_St ... ebsite.pdf

Unless it starts getting cold soon we'll probably exceed that number

urban_dilettante wrote:St. Louis needs this:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/watching-you-watching-me/ (second half of episode starting around the 36 minute mark)

Synopsis:

Then, a hard look at the trade-off between privacy and safety. In 2004, when casualties in Iraq were rising due to roadside bombs, Ross McNutt and his team came up with an idea. With a small plane and a 44 mega-pixel camera, they figured out how to watch an entire city all at once, all day long. Whenever a bomb detonated, they could zoom onto that spot and then, because this eye in the sky had been there all along, they could scroll back in time and see - literally see - who planted it. After the war, Ross McNutt retired from the Air Force, and brought this technology back home with him. Manoush Zomorodi and Alex Goldmark from the podcast “Note to Self” give us the lowdown on Ross’s unique brand of persistent surveillance, from Juarez, Mexico to Dayton, Ohio. Then, once we realize what we can do, we wonder whether we should.

WaPo story:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... story.html

urban_dilettante wrote:^ i really don't see how surveillance precludes tackling the systemic problems. like any other tool there's potential for misuse, but personally i think the pros far outweigh the cons at this point in time. we've got people being mugged, beaten, and murdered pretty frequently on city streets. drive-by gun battles are way more common than they should be. clearly there's a strong drug-trafficking presence in St. Louis. i'm not saying such surveillance should be permanent, but something needs to be done in the meantime while we're working on the institutional problems.

framer wrote:^Not to mention out-of-date "Temporary" License Tags. I know it's a minor matter, but I'm amazed how many of these I see every day; sometimes many months old. Again, people know that the police won't stop them for it, so why bother getting your car properly inspected and licensed?

jsbru wrote: I'm in favor of stop and frisk. There should be oversight to ensure it's not dealt out in a racially disparate or unconstitutional manner, but criminals in this city need to be put on notice that this is not some sort of anarchic playground.

jsbru wrote:

goat314 wrote:I think it's kind of a chicken-egg thing. On one hand, the lack of economic development and educational opportunities in the city of St. Louis causes many of these problems, but these problems are also a major deterrent to most people (regardless of race, socioeconomic standing etc.) from living or doing business in the city. I think we need real reform in St. Louis on so many levels or these problems will continue to harm the quality of life and perception of the city as a whole, which has real life consequences.

Obviously, stop and frisk is a very sticky subject. For one, it will almost certainly be used to harass any black male of a certain age, whether they are a "criminal" or not. This alone makes it dangerous. The fact is we "DO" have some racist police officers and they "WOULD" use it as an excuse to harass any and every black male they come across, which is why it was met with so much backlash in NYC. On the other hand, we simply cant let the criminal element run rampant and wild throughout the city of St. Louis and region. White people are up in arms when an "innocent" white person gets beat up by a black "mob", just like black folks are up in arms when an "unarmed" black man gets gunned down by a white "cop". The fact remains, the majority of people murdered, robbed, and assaulted in the city of St. Louis live in impoverished, Afro-American neighborhoods and were likely involved in illegal activity. What is truly sad is that there are open air drug markets, rolling gun battles, armed robberies, etc. throughout the city of St. Louis everyday and somehow the police can never catch the perpetrators. The people who suffer the most are the children who get hit by stray bullets, the family that is forced to leave North St. Louis because they are constantly getting their house broken into, the elderly person who is scared to walk to church because gangbangers are hanging on the corners, and the people who are trapped in food deserts because no grocery store will open in a neighborhood with open air drug markets. How do we continue to let this happen in St. Louis? Many cities are starting to clean up their act, some even "blacker" and "poorer" than St. Louis. It truly is a shame. Everybody talks about Chicago, but if we had their murder rate we would have about 50 murders/year, if they had ours they would have about 1500 murders/year.

It is sort of a chicken and egg thing, but I think the primary instigator of this viscous cycle still has to be identified as the behavior of a small but menacing subset of the population.

You can't blame it all on racism and white flight, because anybody that has the means, no matter what color, has chosen to flee these neighborhoods. The Black middle class also moves out. They're not racist. They just want a safe place to live.

I tend to think that "all of the above" are true when talking about our country's and our region's urban social problems. It is partly because the perpetrators are just terrible people, partly poor parenting, partly the lack of resources and/or lack of anything better to do, partly the dilapidated state of the infrastructure which adds to the collective lack of esteem for the area...

And yet all we get is a finger-pointing war, with no actual action to improve things. Conservatives only want to focus on personal responsibility, liberals only want to focus on external and systemic shortcomings. Each individual circumstance has a different mix of the above factors at play, and collectively, you're not going to solve the problems unless you focus on each one of them. As a liberal, I find it irritating when other liberals apologize for criminal behavior, make excuses, and focus only on the rights of the perpetrator. A lot of these people make a lifetime and a living out of violating the rights of others.

But then conservatives have to admit that our economic system is fundamentally flawed if it creates no jobs, resources, purpose, or role in society for a lot of people in this country. If the only reason you're supposed to invest is for the profit motive, you shouldn't be surprised that poor neighborhoods are made worse by being choked from investment. There's no immediately attainable profit in trying to solve social problems, so the market is not going to come up with a solution to any of this--it's just going to ignore it and make it worse.