The faces of a 7-year-old girl, Deniya Irving and 13-year-old boy, Anthony Wilson Jr. – two victims of gun violence this week – are etched in our hearts and minds. Investigators responded to 11 murders in three days in St. Louis city alone, and the stories of the children’s deaths just rip your heart out.
Already community leaders have scheduled two crime prevention summits – one on Saturday and another on Tuesday – to talk about the loss of these lives and how to prevent more senseless violence in the future. Mayor Lyda Krewson recently proposed to raise taxes to hire more officers and pay them better.
Fortunately, Lisa Cagle – who was recently selected as a member of the mayor’s search committee for a new police chief – has joined the growing voices who say that simply throwing more money at the police is not going to fix the problem.
St. Louis city has increased its public safety budget by almost $19 million in two years – and that’s an increase of $10 million for the police department alone, she said. And what has it gotten us?
“Until we significantly change the way we do things in our region, and what and who we invest in, our city is not going to be safer for anyone,” Cagle said.
Cagle argues that St. Louis city is somewhere between the sixth and eighth most policed city in the country. She bases this off the city’s police per capita rate of 41.3 – a rate nearly double that of Kansas City at 27.4 per capita.
“It seems that our problem with public safety maybe isn’t the number of police officers,” Cagle said. “Public safety is not just about policing. We need to be spending more money on preventing the causes of crime in the first place. Imagine if the 57 percent of our general fund budget currently spent on public safety addressed the issues that we know lead to crime: lack of education, lack of opportunity, racial and socioeconomic disparities in wealth, income, resources and services.”
On Saturday, June 10, the North Newstead Association is hosting a Crime Prevention Summit from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. at the O’Fallon Park Rec Center, 4343 W. Florissant. The speaker lineup includes the mayor, interim police chief, circuit attorney and several community development executives.
In response to the announcement of the forum, the Arch City Defenders nonprofit law firm tweeted out, “Crime prevention is not limited to police and prosecutors. No such meeting should occur without social workers and organizers. Redefine public safety.” We could not agree more.
The call for social workers on the police force has been an ongoing one since the aftermath of the distress of the Ferguson unrest, but the appeal has not yet been addressed by the city.
Alderwoman Pamela Boyd of the 27th Ward, where many of the shootings occurred, is organizing a town hall meeting on crime prevention on Tuesday, June 13, at 6 p.m. at the New Northside Conference Center, 5939 Goodfellow Blvd. Police officers from the Sixth District, elected officials and leaders of community will be present, she said.
It’s encouraging to see so many leaders putting their heads together to address crime. Most likely, all of these leaders agree on one thing: what we have right now is not working.
We agree with Cagle that merely investing more money, despite its populist appeal, to maintain its failing current state without reform is useless. We need to look outside our city for innovative ideas (e.g., Pittsburgh had 56 homicides last year while St. Louis had 188) as well as build on the concrete models of success that already exist in our city. We need to support them and scale them up.
Better Family Life’s formula to de-escalate gun violence may be instructive. We know that if members of a community report a potentially deadly conflict to one of Better Family Life’s de-escalation centers, the center will immediately start calling all of the family and friends of the two people in conflict. Those loved ones then start calling the two people “to talk them off the ledge.” Better Family Life’s James Clark says using this method, they save about a dozen lives every month. They have yet to lose a life, Clark said. What if this effort had more support and the practice was replicated more widely?
Since the National Housing Support Corporation started a crime prevention program in the College Hill neighborhood by working with the Sixth District police station and service providers, crime has gone down significantly in this area. What if this group had more support?
What we can’t do is ignore this “state of emergency,” as Clark puts it.
And as Boyd said, “For anyone in the City of St. Louis to put their heads in the sand and deny where more resources must go immediately is to sign the death warrant for more innocent children, more shattered families, more tears shed in North St. Louis.”
Forward thinking about combatting the scourge of violence, abetted by rampant drug trafficking and poverty, must be wholistic and not restricted to our current, almost complete reliance on an insufficient model, an approach that assumes that policing is the answer to deeply entrenched social, economic and policy issues.
