Last week, I made a post which analyzed our most often used excuse when it comes to our place on the “Top 10 Most Dangerous Cities” list. The excuse goes something like this: Our place on this list is inaccurate due to the fact that most of our safe residential neighborhoods aren’t recognized as being part of the city, despite the fact that they are demographically similar and geographically adjacent to the city proper. This skews the numbers negatively.
Some people agreed with me, and the data supports that conclusion to a certain extent. But there was one massive problem: The homicide rate in North City is catastrophically bad. According to this Guardian piece there are more census tracts in North City with more than 5 homicides (8) than there are in much larger cities such as Chicago (4) and Baltimore (also 4). This points out an unusually high concentration of homicides in a relatively small population. This highly concentrated homicide rate takes the air out of any argument claiming that St. Louis has a similar level of violence to other cities such as Cincinnati, KC, and Indianapolis, even if that argument is numerically true.
I guess the next logical question is: Why are homicides so concentrated in North City?
Andrew Papachristos is a criminologist who has done some interesting work in this arena. If you have 30 minutes, you should watch this video of one of his lectures.
If you don’t have time, I’ll summarize it:
Papachristos studied a community in Boston by taking a look at the arrest records of homicide victims. He started with a single victim, looking up his arrest records and mapping out all of the people he was arrested with throughout the course of his life. Then Papachristos mapped out the arrest records of those people. He repeated this process and eventually mapped out an entire network of criminal relations, all by looking at co-arrest data. In this particular Boston community, Papachristos found that a single criminal network, containing 4% of the total population, contained 81% of the homicide victims for that community. To put it another way, Papachristos determined that the chances of becoming a homicide victim was not random. Rather, the risk factors for homicide were concentrated among a very small group of people and spread like a blood borne infection.
If this is indeed true, then one could argue that the high concentration of murders in North City isn’t completely random. Instead, its individuals from a much smaller segment of the total community killing each other. Most of us are very unlikely to be murdered, despite the homicide rate. Homicide victims in Saint Louis are by and large young black men in North City.
For what it’s worth, the homicide rate in St. Louis, along with the violent crime rate, has been falling for the last 20 years. It hasn’t been until recently that the homicide rate has shot back up (113 murders in 2012, 188 murders in 2015). The violent crime rate continues to fall, although the rate of descent appears to have slowed down considerably.
What has caused this sudden reversal in homicide rate?
Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist from UMSL, has put forward 3 ideas in this article:
1) The Opioid epidemic -With use of opioids increasing, competition between black market dealers has intensified. Due to the illegality of opioids, disputes between distributors cannot be settled legally. Instead, it’s settled by violence.
2) Lowering Prison population -With more people leaving prison than entering, and with the rates of recidivism being so high, theoretically you could argue that there would be more crime in the streets.
3) The Ferguson Effect -I’ll explain momentarily.
The Opioid Epidemic, along with lowering of prison populations, has been occurring for a decade, and wouldn’t explain why the homicide rate shot up so suddenly in 2014 and 2015. Due to the sudden spike in homicide rate, Rosenfeld seems to give the most credence to The Ferguson Effect. The Ferguson Effect is popularly thought to be an increase in criminal activity due to the de-policing which occurred in response to the protests to Michael Brown’s shooting. But Rosenfeld characterizes the Ferguson effect in a different way: The shooting of Michael Brown crystallized the feelings of distrust most black people feel towards the police. This distrust makes people in black neighborhoods less likely to rely on the police to resolve disputes. Assaults, robberies, burglaries, and homicides are reported less often. Cooperation between citizens and the police force, essential for prevention of crime and detention of criminals, becomes non-existent. This emboldens those who are predisposed to do crime. With the threat of being caught so low, the potential reward from a criminal act becomes worth the risk. And as more people get away with crime, this sends a message to others that crime isn’t as risky as it used to be. It becomes part of the neighborhood culture.
In my opinion, there are a lot of forces which have caused North Saint Louis to be such a violent place. For starters, the population of Saint Louis City as a whole has been in a free fall since the ’50s. This has emptied out entire neighborhoods, leaving vacant houses and untended streets. It’s hard to catch a mugger when there are no witnesses and plenty of places to hide. Money has been removed from the city en masse, along with opportunities for legitimate sources of income. Every month seems to bring a new story about a corporate headquarters leaving Saint Louis or being bought out. Technological advances have pushed many 9-5 careers out of the market, leaving only highly skilled positions available. Many of our residents, hampered by generations of extreme poverty, do not have the skills to compete in these fields. The opioid epidemic has provided one means of income, but it’s an illegal means and the most successful way to resolve disputes in that market is violence. Finally, with the Ferguson protests, the police force and court system became de-legitimized. This is when everything blew up. Drug dealers have more motive to deal with competitors violently because the chances of getting caught are very low. Interpersonal disputes are resolved informally with violence instead of legally. Violence begets more violence. The temperature gets turned up. Insults and disrespect are responded to with bullets and beatings instead of words.
All of those previous forces have put our underpaid, undertrained, and understaffed police force in a difficult situation. You cannot control crime without cooperation from the citizenry. Any stable civilization requires a trustworthy legal structure to lean upon. It’s this legal structure which upholds property rights and removes violence as an option to settle disputes. In large areas of St. Louis, this structure seems to have fallen apart. Homicides are way up in North City. Non-homicide violent crime, while down in total, has increased considerably in Dutchtown, Gravois Park, the Central West End, and Downtown. The civic fabric which holds together our city has been torn away in these areas. The new police chief will have his (or her) hands full trying to mend that fabric. He and his police force will have to contend with a segment of society which doesn’t trust them, won’t cooperate, and is already entrenched in a violent culture. They will have to contend with a shrinking pool of resources, under trained officers, and terrible, pessimistic media scrutiny.
I assume that most of us live in areas of South City where that civic fabric still holds strong. I think that the best thing we can do is to double down on our civic duties. Go to meetings for our local neighborhood associations. Get to know our NSO’s (neighborhood stabilization officers). Join the PTO. Get to know our network of neighbors and participate in our community. The police rely on those networks to catch criminals. And every criminal that gets caught is a deterrent to another criminal.
We can’t sit on the sidelines and act angry when the municipal government is unable fix the crime problem. This is something that can only be fixed when a lot of us make small changes to our routines and pitch in just a little bit of effort to make our city better. Walk around your neighborhood and say hello. Get to know your neighbors. Ride your bike to the store instead of driving. The more people on the streets, the safer they are. We are social creatures. It’s not natural for us to be locked up in our houses all day.
We live in a great city. I was at Fair Saint Louis yesterday and was amazed at how diverse, joyful, and laid back everybody seemed. You would never know it unless you actually go outside and talk to real people. Don’t be afraid. The good people outnumber the bad. We just have to cooperate.
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