While St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson cites poverty first in his list of root causes behind the latest wave of shootings and killings in the city, he also realizes as chief – technically, now, commissioner – of police, the public does not expect him to solve or stop poverty. It’s his job to solve or stop crime.
In a long, candid interview with The American on July 21, Dotson did not attempt to offer facile solutions to St. Louis’ current crisis in violent crime. The scope and depth of the problem are not lost on him.
“This weekend I had shootings from South Jefferson to North Broadway, with no rhyme or reason. There’s no pattern,” Dotson said.
“If there are a dozen shootings, there are a dozen suspects. Times that by 52 weeks, and I have 600 shooting suspects a year. And while we’re concerned about all of the shootings by young people, I just had a 59-year-old man kill a 63-year-old man with a knife. How do I prepare for that?”
By the end of June 2014, there had been 58 homicides in the city, which was up from 49 at the end of June 2013, though the same for end of June 2012. By the end of June this year, there had been 92 homicides, an increase of nearly 60 percent over the previous year. Aggravated assaults were up 17 percent over end of June last year, from 1,486 to 1,741. By press time on July 22, there had been 106 homicides in the city in 2015.
After poverty, Dotson sees substance abuse, personal disputes and robbery as providing what patterns of homicide motives he can find. Robbery is up 39 percent from last year, comparing end of June numbers; vehicle theft is up 15 percent; and both burglary and larceny are up 10 percent.
As for drugs, the abused substance of choice in violent disputes in St. Louis is now heroin.
“I just saw some new rehab stats, where 40 percent of people were admitted locally for heroin. It’s surpassed alcohol. In 2005, heroin accounted for only 5 percent of local rehab admissions,” Dotson said.
“And let’s face it, the people who check into rehab have money. The people we are dealing with are not checking into rehab, so we have no way to track their usage but it must be sky-high.”
Heroin is synthesized from morphine, which is extracted from the seed pod of the Asian poppy plant, which is not grown in St. Louis. Where is the heroin coming from?
“Where isn’t it coming from?” Dotson said. “We caught a ring bringing it here from Los Angeles on American Airlines. It’s coming up in cars from the South – Steelville, of all places, is a distribution center.”
Steelville, population 1,642 at the 2010 Census, is a short jog south of Cuba, Missouri off Interstate 44. It’s nearly 100 miles from St. Louis – far outside of Dotson’s command scope. For that, he relies on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
“I need the DEA for interdictions,” Dotson said, and federal agents are actively investigating and infiltrating heroin trails into St. Louis.
Dotson also has concluded that he needs another federal agency – namely, the Department of Justice, and more specifically, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Eastern Missouri. Federal prosecutors (famously) have deeper resources than the state prosecutors who try most violent crimes. But when a murder is committed as part of a drug transaction, Dotson and U.S. Attorney Richard Callahan claim, the federal prosecutor has standing to bring charges.
Callahan’s office just filed two sets of murder charges in St. Louis, and Dotson said to expect more – and bigger – federal charges for violent crimes in St. Louis to be filed next week.
Being the epicenter of the region’s crime, the city will be the prime focus of Mission SAVE, an acronym for “Strike Against Violence Early,” a new multi-modal criminal justice task force announced on Monday, July 20. Police and prosecutors in St. Louis city and county are collaborating with federal prosecutors, the DEA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, as well as municipal officials.
The task force will use a model adapted from the No Violence Alliance in Kansas City, which The American reported on in February when St. Louis Prosecutor Jennifer Joyce led a delegation to study it. In this model, social media and other intelligence are analyzed to identify key individuals in criminal networks. It’s a social network version of hot-spot policing, where the hot spots are the people who are most connected to criminal groups, rather than the places where crimes are most likely to be committed.
Those targeted individuals are then invited to meet with officials, along with people in their social network. These “call-ins” have a carrot-and-stick strategy, where the target is offered a range of social services and support if they want to put down the gun – or threatened with enforcement from every direction if another murder associated with their criminal network is committed.
The idea is to bridge two sets of silos – the often-disconnected social services designed to lift people out of poverty, and the equally disconnected arms of the law.
“We’ll find out all of the ways they are already breaking the law and threaten maximum enforcement, but also highlight jobs programs, conflict resolution training and other social services,” Dotson said. “We will spotlight a network and try to do something that has a life-changing impact.”
One area where law enforcement is less connected now than it has been recently is command planning of protests anticipated for the August 9 anniversary of the Ferguson police killing of Michael Brown Jr. Dotson said he, St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar and Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri Highway Patrol have not been closely coordinating plans as they did last year.
Dotson appeared mindful of the Department of Justice report concluding that police response to the initial protests was overly aggressive and militant and made matters worse.
“We’re not moving to 12-hour shifts in advance or setting up any kind of command center,” Dotson said. “I’m not looking to be a catalyst.”
