Jeff Roorda, the stridently racist business manager of the St. Louis Police Officers Association, has been terminated from his leadership role.
The white police union reportedly severed ties with Roorda earlier this month, and Jay Schroeder, president of SLPOA, asked City officials to remove Roorda “from all bargaining related emails moving forward.” According to Roorda, his termination from the white police union was to appease Mayor Tishaura O. Jones.
If so, good.
Firing Roorda means the white police union is finally willing to come to the negotiation table to discuss the City’s relationship with policing moving forward. Roorda received national attention in the wake of Michael Brown’s murder in 2014, after the former Arnold cop made countless racist statements about a city he likely had not stepped foot in prior to Brown’s death. Considering the union has lacked a collective bargaining agreement with the City since the Krewson administration, terminating Roorda’s employment with SLPOA is long overdue. Even former mayor Lyda Krewsoncalled for SLPOA to fire Roorda, although she continued to negotiate with the white police union with Roorda leading it.
This is a victory for Mayor Jones, who has made it clear that, “if the SLPOA wants a seat at my table, they’ll get rid of Jeff Roorda.” The move comes at a time when the Mayor’s office is trying to reign in abusive private policing practices and the Comptroller is seeking pay raises for City officers. Maybe SLPOA has finally read the metaphorical writing on the wall.
Speaking of re-funding the police, the self-titled “Car Wash Daddy” Alderman Joe Vaccaro (D-Ward 23) introduced Board Bill 82, to install and implement an “emergency vehicle traffic signal pre-emption system.” This type of system is installed at stoplights, and will turn a traffic signal red in all directions as an emergency vehicle approaches an intersection. As the emergency vehicle gets closer, all traffic hypothetically is stopped and the first responders will get a green light to proceed through. There is no data on whether or not it works. Police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances already are required to use their sirens and flashing lights when responding to an emergency.
Not only is this bill a solution in search of a problem, but the solution itself seems to be yet another mediocre police technology that fails citizens and instead lines the pockets of corporations in search of a paycheck.
We refer of course to the abysmal performance of St. Louis-area police departments’ “ShotSpotter” system, which was found by SIUE researchers to be wholly ineffective at curbing gun violence. Less than 1% of all ShotSpotter calls in the City produced enough evidence to write a police report, and the number of ShotSpotter calls resulting in an arrest amounted to less than 0.1% over a ten-year period.
But, as Board Bill 82 stood at last week’s Public Safety Committee meeting, neither Vaccaro nor his colleagues seemed to know anything about the stop light control system that the pro-police alderman wants to implement. He doesn’t even know what the actual cost to the City would be, and he couldn’t articulate the name of the company that designed the software. All Vaccaro could do was point to St. Charles, which uses a similar system that cost around $17 million to implement. There has been no independent research to determine if this technology works – that is, no researcher outside of companies selling this traffic light system has found that it prevents accidents.
At best, this traffic light control system is just another expensive police toy, funded by City tax dollars. At worst, Vaccaro has been horribly misguided into thinking that this system will reduce the rising number of pedestrian deaths caused by speeding vehicles.
It’s probably worth mentioning that earlier this year, Vaccaro received $500 from the St. Louis Police Officers Association (SLPOA) – at least, that’s what his campaign finance report says. SLPOA’s political action committee had actually declared that same $500 donation on November 30 – nearly two months before Vaccaro reported it to the Missouri Ethics Commission. Curiously, Vaccaro’s controversial Detention Facility Oversight Bill – which neutralized any civilian efforts to actually provide oversight to City jails – was passed exactly one week before SLPOA’s $500 contribution.
St. Charles “Mooch” Ehlmann offers unwanted advice
Speaking of St. Charles, the regional mooch County Executive Steve Ehlmann has stepped into a steaming pile of business that doesn’t belong to him, writing in the St. Louis Business Journal that St. Louis City and St. Louis County should merge under one prosecuting attorney.
Which St. Louis County prosecutor, however, was left out by Ehlmann. He must have forgotten that St. Louis County is already incredibly fractured with 91 municipalities – the vast majority of them have their own municipal court and prosecuting attorney. Maybe that’s a better starting place than finger-pointing at the City’s first Black woman mayor.
Ehlmann certainly didn’t have anything to say about rising crime in St. Louis City during the Slay and Krewson administrations, so the fact that he is now raising these issues is suspicious. Ehlmann even tries to invoke the “Great Divorce” – the split between St. Louis City and County that originated in the County’s desire to continue the practice of enslaved labor and human trafficking. But the point that Ehlmann deliberately fails to raise in his heavily-opinionated piece is the ongoing racism that is inherent in the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department and the systemic injustices that have stood in the way of equality in its treatment of Black citizens.
Despite St. Charles County providing no tax base for Lambert International Airport, Ehlmann wants to criticize without proposing an equitable solution, other than “give more conservative white politicians more power.”
But perhaps most offensive in Ehlmann’s op-ed is his suggestion that St. Louis City voters be disregarded when police officers are prosecuted for injuring or killing a civilian. Specifically, what this person – who does not live in either the City or County – “recommends” is that the Missouri legislature pass a law to require “only the attorney general, or a prosecutor from another jurisdiction appointed by the judge, decide whether to prosecute police officers involved in the shooting of a civilian.”
In other words, Ehlmann wants to see the democratically-elected prosecuting attorney for the City of St. Louis neutralized in her ability to do her job — but seemingly doesn’t require anyone to be subject to this law anywhere else in the state.
Why is it always Missouri Republicans advocating to take away voter power? And why does the St. Charles County Executive feel empowered to say anything about St. Louis City, when his own county prosecutor’s office is lead by an accused domestic abuser and drunk driver, Tim Lohmar? Let’s not forget that under Ehlmann’s “leadership”, St. Charles County refused to implement any measures to slow the spread of COVID and instead voted to allocate more than $1 million in federal COVID relief dollars to increase the number of police officers in schools. As research has revealed, the presence of police in schools does not deter violent crime or school shootings but does increase the number of suspensions, expulsions, and arrests of students.
Maybe Ehlmann should clean up his own house, including sharing in the costs that support some of the region’s cultural amenities and initiatives that could give this region a better opportunity to compete in the new world that is coming, inexorably, into being, before looking through the windows of others. It is the backward and regressive thinking of elected officials like Ehlmann who see their power being curbed that undermines any change that could lead to a better, more equitable future for this region. While he and his colleagues gripe and seek to exploit fear and grievance, with their self-absorbed retrograde thinking, the opportunity to move forward is ignored in favor of parochialism and divisiveness. They need to take a deep breath and gain a new more realistic perspective on what will really drive this region forward.