In the span of three days, four SLMPD officers were injured in the line of duty: two were struck by a motorist on Hwy 40/I-64 while responding to an accident in the center median on Monday, Jan. 24 and two City officers were shot on Jan. 26 while attempting to make an arrest in St. Louis County on Wednesday. Three of the four officers have been confirmed to be in their 20s, and one was still in his probationary period as an officer.
SLPOA has doubled down on its racist rhetoric, blaming nearly every Black leader, doxing private citizens, and generating more lies to distort the fact that they are, in fact, losing their power to We the People.
Instead of focusing on the literal one job that a labor union has – advocating for better working conditions, training, and pay for its membership – St. Louis Police Officers Association (SLPOA) has instead engaged in a messy, short-sighted publicity stunt that involves doxing a private citizen and spreading yet another wave of malicious lies about City leadership.
At the center of the chaos is SLPOA’s lawyer, lobbyist, and Chief Distraction Officer Jane Dueker, who took to her Twitter feed to express her faux outrage that a Black man in the St. Louis City Court dare be afforded his due process rights. The man was arrested and charged for domestic assault, and although nothing in the court record shows any sort of irregularity of the man’s legal proceedings, Dueker decided to bear the cross of doxing and exposing his entire identity to the world – including his full name, date of birth, social security number, and home address.
All without redaction and potentially exposing herself to legal and ethical liabilities, Dueker has twice posted court documents that are not publicly accessible. Presumably, Dueker used her attorney login credentials for CaseNet to pull the otherwise inaccessible documents to then post publicly. But her vile smear campaign against this private individual didn’t stop there. As a representative of the SLPOA – and arguably a member of the side prosecuting the man – Dueker went out of her way to locate and contact the victim (the man’s co-parent) and further exploited her by soliciting and posting graphic photos, purportedly of the woman, following the assault.
A seven-minute video made by the victim and posted to her public Facebook account echoed talking points that originated with Dueker, including blaming Mayor Tishaura Jones directly for Judge Annette Llewelyn’s bond order and personal attacks directed toward both Black women for their unspecified roles in the man’s criminal proceedings. Dueker’s tweets and the woman’s words seem eerily similar, even tweeting “when Tishaura helps [Tony] Messnenger falsely a good a man of rape that’s good. When a woman is violently assaulted and it’s Tishaura’s fault Messenger defends it.”
As an attorney for decades, Dueker fully knows the legal process and all the players involved within criminal proceedings; she is one of the few Stenger allies to avoid criminal investigation or indictment. But even while understanding how the law works, Dueker has created an intentionally false narrative and has shared this incorrect legal knowledge with the victim, who likely believed that she was getting accurate information from the police lobbyist.
This is not Dueker’s first time manipulating a member of the domestic violence advocacy community in a transparent attempt to advance her pro-policing agenda. The orchestrated attack comes less than a year after Dueker was caught originating the false narrative that SLMPD’s domestic abuse response team (DART) was disbanding due to Mayor Jones’ support of the “defund the police” movement, and Dueker even went so far as to manipulate a victim advocate into sending an email to the Family Violence Council that repeated the blatant falsehood, was posted on social media, and caused unnecessary strife for victims across the region.
The advocate later clarified her position and her reliance upon the false information provided by Dueker, but there were no consequences for the police lobbyist and lawyer for her role in spreading malicious, panic-inducing lies about SLMPD’s domestic abuse unit.
Outside of these two instances, Dueker does not seem to have a recent record of supporting victims. Quite the contrary, Dueker’s silence has been noteworthy on criminal cases involving police officers in the City and County.
When former Byrnes Mill police officer Ryan Shomaker was sentenced to only five years of probation in December by Dueker’s husband, Judge Joseph Dueker, on charges of sodomizing a minor, Jane Dueker didn’t say a word. And where was Jane’s ire when a Ferguson police officer intentionally struck an unarmed Black man with an unmarked police vehicle, and her husband released him on a $5,000 cash bond following charges of first-degree assault, fourth-degree assault, and armed criminal action? Civil rights attorneys Jerryl Christmas and Ben Crump have called for Judge Dueker’s recusal on criminal cases that involve law enforcement, specifically citing the conflict of interest created by Jane Dueker’s representation of the white police unions of the City and County. Judge Dueker also oversaw the sodomy and molestation charges against a Clayton youth pastor that resulted in a five year probation sentence and more of Jane’s silence.
A former Ritenour High School social studies teacher who pleaded guilty to statutory rape charges after maintaining a sexual relationship with an underaged student also received five years of probation from Judge Dueker. In each of these instances, the defendants were white men; we suppose Jane’s outrage of lenient judicial treatment by her own husband does not extend to them.
That the majority of SLMPD officers have chosen to be represented by a person who has publicly demonstrated a blatant disregard for civil rights, due process, and the criminal legal system, is telling. This is, after all, the City of segregated police unions, a police department with its history rooted in organized slave patrols, and different criminal legal systems where the outcome depends on the color of your skin.
But when SLPOA and its representatives create distractions, that is our call to pay attention to what lies beneath the surface: pro-police extremists are losing. In just the last year alone, SLPOA has fumbled negotiations of a new collective bargaining agreement with a then-friendly administration; their members continue to lose bids for qualified immunity protection in federal courts; and the SLMPD “slush fund” created by vacant, unfilled jobs has been drained. Dueker herself has hemorrhaged clients, losing big-ticket clients like the State Council of Fire Fighters, Home Builders Association, and the National Restaurant Association.
But within the chaos that Dueker has attempted to create, one thing has been abundantly clear: St. Louis has seen that alternatives to policing work better for our City, and more police does not equate to less crime. Instead of recognizing that the era of “defunding” the police is supported by the very communities that their officers are sworn to protect and serve, SLPOA has doubled down on its racist rhetoric, blaming nearly every Black leader, doxing private citizens, and generating more lies to distort the fact that they are, in fact, losing their power to We the People. Instead of joining their communities by celebrating the progress that policing alternative programs have made, SLPOA bitterly sulks in the corner, watching both its power and relevance fade into the sunset.
