When St. Louis Metropolitan Police Chief Dan Isom sat down with the American not long ago, he was fresh from a meeting with executives from several federal investigative agencies. The chief enthused that he had found willing partners in his appeal for help in fighting local organized criminal networks. If it works with Cosa Nostra, Isom was saying, why can’t it work with the petty thugs that terrorize the streets of St. Louis? And indeed, late last month we saw the first fruits of this newly intensified collaboration in the form of 15 indictments that – if the U.S. Attorney’s allegations are true – will have knocked flat one drug ring and, one hopes, struck fear in the heart of others.
Isom’s evident passion for attacking the local drug trade is particularly welcome coming from the City’s top cop. If the word on the street is true – and it is an allegation one hears often from streetwise men of a certain age – the leadership of the St. Louis police force has not always been sincere in its avowed “war on drugs.”
At the same time, Isom badly needs help at the community level if his sincerity in enforcement is to succeed. Consider some startling statistics for St. Louis his media staff shared with us. Of the 138 murder victims in 2007, 92 had documented arrests as adults on a felony charge. Seventy-one had a prior arrest for a drug violation. Forty-three had felony convictions or suspended imposition of sentences. Nineteen were under the supervision of probation or parole. That data is even more compelling when you consider that 11 of the 138 homicide victims were age 16 or younger – that is, people who did not live long enough to have convictions as an adult.
These devastating statistics point to something many criminal investigators adamantly insist: that most violent crimes are committed by a hard core of hardened criminals. The question, then, becomes: How do we stop our youth – almost always, our young men – before their experimentation with swagger or danger (aspects of adolescence we will never overcome completely) takes them too far down the wrong roads?
Without question, we do need a sincere, aggressive police chief pushing for cooperation from federal investigators to bust up criminal networks. But we also need a dedicated, consistent, holistic focus on healing our community from within. We have seen this impulse come and go under various names, and under various leaders, and we do welcome the sudden upsurge of positive movements like the Call to Oneness. But more than anything, we need the basics. We need schools and families that start – from the earliest age – preparing our children to learn and to strive. And once our schools have prepared our youth, we need meaningful jobs to challenge them and sustain them. These dire, unmet needs explain this newspaper’s – at times controversial, in this community – focus on parental involvement, education reform and economic development. Because without engaged parenting, schools that function and real, productive economic opportunities, no amount of police presence will ever stop the death and poison on our streets.