Violent crime in the St. Louis area, which is to say mostly blacks assaulting and killing other blacks, is a Klansman’s fantasy: if your enemy is committing suicide, don’t interfere. Better Family Life’s James Clark knows this, and has often said that black folks have done more harm to themselves in the past few decades with guns and violence than white supremacists did during all of Jim Crow. Structural racism adds to the body count, since, as University of California law professor John Powell trenchantly notes, black communities are, historically, “overpoliced and underprotected.”
But why is St. Louis such a singular mess? New York City, population 8 million, had 328 murders last year. If the Big Apple had the City of St. Louis’s murder rate, there would be almost 4,000 dead in the New York streets. We have a murder rate 12 times that of New York, 10 times Los Angeles’s, 3.5 times Chicago’s. To top it off, the murder rate in East St. Louis is even higher than the City’s, making metro St. Louis one of the Western Hemisphere’s deadliest killing grounds for black people.
Poverty, sketchy schools, lack of jobs, and a blasted infrastructure are unfortunate, but common features of most black urban areas. They may be worse in the St. Louis area, but are they 12 times worse than New York City’s? Are poverty and systematic racism here so brutal that they create more violence than other cities? Does St. Louis have a larger percentage of gun-toting bottom-feeders than other places? Do we have a greater number of police forces in the region focused on counter-insurgency in black neighborhoods rather than on crime prevention?
Data may point us toward some answers. City Police statistics show 159 murders in the City last year; 143 victims are black, as are 114 of 117 arrested murder suspects. So 90 percent of the victims and 97 percent of the arrested suspects are black; no surprise there.
The surprise comes when you look for a motive. Organized drug or gang activity might make the bloodshed easier to deal with, since this is America, and business is business, whether the dispute’s over gang turf or drug distribution. But of all the deaths, police list only four as gang-related, and only six involved drugs. That means 94 percent of city murders were personal, leaving us to contemplate not organized crime, but a dystopia of borderline sociopaths with lots of guns and no impulse control.
Every one of those arrested has some sort of criminal history, as did 90 percent of the victims. But all the havoc is being caused by a fairly small number of people. A recent study of violent crime in Cincinnati guesstimated that most murders, assaults, rapes, and armed robberies there were committed by 0.7 per-cent of the population. If that’s anywhere near accurate, and holds true in other places, it means that only 2,200 people in the City are responsible for most of the mayhem in our streets.
If the criminals were part of organized gangs or drug cartels, cops and the community might be able to get a handle on the problem through a decapitation strategy – taking out gang and cartel leaders and lieutenants, and crippling their ability to conduct business. But our area’s absurdly high murder rate is not business. It’s personal. True, a lot of the killings may end up involving drugs in some way, but the primary motives for killings seem to be arguments, perceived insults or disrespect, real or imagined. Since knuckleheads attract other knuckleheads, the killers and their fanboys often clot together in small groups. These sets try to pass themselves off as gangs, but they usually amount to losers’ social clubs who create havoc by shooting it out with similar groups over what often seems like not much of anything.
The fact that violence and murders are rising in the St. Louis region while they drop almost everywhere else is why law enforcement officials like Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce travelled across the state last week to look at Kansas City’s No Violence Alliance, which is credited with helping drop K.C.’s homicide rate to a half-century low.
Kansas City’s success involves using criminologists to map the connections among criminals and crime the same way epidemiologists map disease vectors to prevent epidemics. Using a sophisticated, data-driven approach would be a total change from the way St. Louis political and law enforcement leaders have been treating violent crime so far.
City leaders first complained years ago that the crime stats were overblown because the city covers such a small area, and that a better picture would result from blending in St. Louis County’s crime figures. Statistical minimalism having failed, they then insisted all was under control, with both the mayor and police chief went on record in 2013 and 2014 as saying the city had plenty of police officers to handle crime. Then, after Mike Brown was killed, they created “the Ferguson Effect,” claiming crime is up because bad guys no longer fear the cops.
Finally, reality seems to be intruding. Strategies like “hot spot policing” are reactive, only flooding an area with cops after violent crimes. The city wants to hire another 160 officers. And there seems to be a growing realization that insurgent policing – cruising in secured vehicles like Marines in Kandahar and treating the community like an Taliban-infested village – needs to be replaced with a model that values intelligence-gathering and preventive policing.
A lot of this depends on community co-operation. And as long as communities feel police are there not to protect them, but to contain them, that may be hard to come by. But the alternative is more violence by gunmen who don’t have any regard for anyone except themselves.
Charles Jaco is a journalist, novelist and author who has worked for NBC News, CNN, Fox 2, KMOX and KTRS.
