The number of murders actually remains down in the city of St. Louis, compared to this time last year, though neither the police nor the community ever enjoy a long enough break from responding to street violence to feel very good about this improvement.
St. Louis Metropolitan Police Chief Dan Isom recently released the results of a citizen survey he had commissioned. He confronted the evident fact that public approval and confidence ratings in the 70 percentile range really are not acceptable for a public service as crucial and sensitive as the police. The public needs something much closer to complete trust in its police force – approval and confidence numbers much closer to 100 percent – before the police will receive the public cooperation they need to do their job properly.
Of course, the public could do the police force – and itself – no better favor than to learn to settle its problems peacefully. The nonviolence training workshop held last weekend in the St. Louis area by the Building Life Foundations Nonviolence Center was helpful. Our families and schools must become more vigilant at early signs of delinquency and violence. The new Innovative Concept Academy in the St. Louis Public Schools, which targets students with previous behavioral issues, and a new Dropout Task Force formed by the state Legislature also promise the sorts of help our most troubled youth need.
However, we see the problems of our streets as intertwined with equally disturbing and ingrained institutional problems. The citizen survey revealed that the public wants more police enforcement directed at street-level drug deals than dismantling drug rings. That may seem short-sighted – disrupt the drug ring, one might well argue, and you’ll stop the street deal. But it is understandable for a demoralized (and, in many cases, terrorized) public that looks outside the window and sees plain evidence of street crime to wonder: Who will put a stop to this? When?
Ideally, of course, this would not be an either/or proposition in local law enforcement, but both aims would be pursued equally.
On two recent occasions, The St. Louis American has violated a code against “snitching” in our own community by calling the public to come forth and assist the federal agencies in St. Louis that routinely investigate corruption in government, including in police work. Outgoing FBI St. Louis Special Agent in Charge John V. Gillies has told us that the small organized crime ring within the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department that recently was disrupted is not typical. Gillies said that only a small number of street cops are dirty. At the same time, he knows more are out there and he called for clean cops and the public to come forward and identify anyone paid to police crime who is actually helping to perpetuate it for personal gain.
We also have heard little about conditions in the City jails, administered by the City of St. Louis Department of Public Safety, since several Corrections officers were busted running drugs into a City jail. A report produced by the regional ACLU before those institutional drug busts suggested the problems in the administration of those jails are chronic, rather than isolated. Mayor Slay’s Chief of Staff Jeff Rainford has said conditions in our jails are “no Shangri-La.” We take this insulting wisecrack to be directed at the good, tax-paying citizens who assume that their shadow will never darken a jail cell. We take this as a wink, to acknowledge they (the criminals) don’t have it so good, but they deserve what they get.
Like our jails, the city of St. Louis is increasingly “no Shangri-La.” And if we continue to accept our police force and city government as they have been administered in recent years, there will be no improvement.