quincunx wrote: ↑Aug 23, 2022
^yeah, what's weird about that is they tried and continue to try to tie it to the current admin as some trick to make themselves look better when the biggest delta was in 2020 to the potential benefit of the previous admin.
What did the previous city administrations stop doing/change that lead to the quadrupling of the murder rate 2003-2020?
Another thought experiment I've been considering is what changes to policy, practices, spending, staffing, etc a place with a low murder rate, say Chesterfield, have to make to have the same murder rate as Stl City? That would be 32 homicides using STL's 2021 rate.
On your first point, haters gonna hate. There is a faction of the StL elite/establishment/whatever you want to call it that does not like Jones and will seek to blame her for everything that goes wrong. Ditto for Kim Gardner, though I think the criticisms there are much more legit: She's clearly incompetent and the CAO has degraded as a result, putting more offenders back on the streets than might have been the case even with another reformer, e.g., Wesley Bell, in charge. This explain some fraction of the change from 2003--2020, but really only from 2017 onward.
On your second re City administration, not much, except for personnel changes. I'm not aware of any particular set of city policies or programs that have changed so drastically as to drive such an increase but maybe older heads on here will know otherwise. What has changed, however, are state gun laws in particular, as has been discussed ad nauseum here and elsewhere. Barring maybe Texas, there is no state more lax about guns than MO and its cities are prohibited from enacting their own restrictions.
I would attribute the trend mainly to economic factors, in most cases driven by federal rather than state or local economic policy. I'll never get tired of posting
this Rand Corp study showing that the top 10% (and really the top .01%) of income earners siphoned ~$47 TRILLION from the lower 90% between 1975 and 2018 (and undoubtedly beyond). That kind of mass wealth transfer will have negative knock on effects for generations, even if the meritocratic myth were true and that siphoning was entirely done through honest means.
Lastly, re Chesterfield, it depends on what you mean. The single best predictor of crime/violent crime is concentrated poverty, a factor not prevalent in Chesterfield. I suppose if they cut their police force significantly, reduced bail/bonding, and shrunk and neutered the prosecuting attorney's office then the metro area's criminals would start doing more crimes there. Even then I don't think you'd get to the same rate as the City. If you're asking what law/order factors would have to change to see Chesterfieldians start murdering each other at the same rate as City dwellers, the answer is probably that it doesn't matter, because the conditions that drive crime and criminality aren't present. At least as we're talking exclusively about street crime. The white collar variety might merit a different analysis.
