Were you aware that St. Louis has a crime problem? Probably not! It’s easy to forget about our oppressive crime issue when you’re smeared in gooey butter cake and thigh deep in ravioli and provel.
Although crime has been falling everywhere, including St. Louis, since the early ’90s, there has been a stalling and reversal of the violent crime rate in recent years. This was partly the topic of another post. We are all aware that the increase of violent crime has mostly occurred in specific areas of St. Louis, notably north St. Louis and areas around Dutchtown and Soulard. However, were you aware that the type of crime hasn’t increased evenly across those “bad” areas? For example, it’s obvious that there has been a drastic increase in the number of homicides. But did you know that ~40% of that increase occurred in just 3 neighborhoods? The Greater Ville increased by ~15 homicides, Wells-Goodfellow by ~9, and Jeff Vanderlou by ~7. Assaults and robberies have decreased in these neighborhoods, fairly drastically. On the other hand, the number of homicides in Dutchtown, Gravois Park, and the Central West End is about the same now as they were in 2012. But robbery and assault rates have skyrocketed.
Clearly, something different is happening in each of these areas.
When we think about our police force, generally we want more police, better trained, and more involved with the community. I’m here to share with you the tried and true methods that the police have used in the past and can continue to use today.
The two most fear inducing crime issues facing St. Louis today are the homicide rate and armed robbery rate. The risk of homicide is extremely low for most people. However, our position as the murder capital of the United States puts us at a tremendous disadvantage when it comes to attracting business, tourism, and transplants. Armed robbery is often scarier because it is seemingly random. Plus, things can go very wrong very quickly when you have a gun pointed at your head. As it turns out, you have to utilize different strategies to prevent different types of crime. The strategy you use to target the illegal narcotics market, for example, will not decrease the rate of criminal assault.
In the past, homicides have successfully been suppressed in St. Louis by utilizing hot spot policing. This technique places an overwhelming amount of police attention on the very small geographic areas which have the highest concentration of homicides. It’s received a lot of criticism post-Ferguson. Antonio French compared it to playing “whack-a-mole,” and Lewis Reed has talked about it being phased out. However, after immersing myself in this subject for some time, I’m not convinced that we should do away with this strategy. It has been proven to work without crime “spreading” to adjacent areas.
Dealing with robberies requires an entirely different set of strategies. Here is a well cited outline of these strategies. Generally they involve making robbery more risky for the potential criminal, hardening the civilians against victimization, interrupting the black market for stolen goods, and recognizing the hot spots where robbery happens often (for example, Dutchtown, the CWE, and Downtown West) and placing a visible police presence in those hot spots. This is what has worked for other areas.
It’s my argument that we should primarily allocate our resources towards these strategies.
A common refrain I hear in opposition to allocating resources to a police driven solution to crime is the argument that crime is caused by bad socioeconomic situations, therefore we should focus our attention on alleviating socioeconomic disparities. We should be diverting our resources and energy to social services, infrastructure projects, and minimum wage increases.
I don’t disagree that crime is an issue driven by a complicated nexus of social issues. As Colen, Ramey, and Browning show in their paper, crime has tracked with things like teen fertility. Growth in the service sector and expansion of family planning services to low-income women have presented the most convincing explanation for the drops in the violent crime rates of the 90s. However, I counter that this “social improvement” strategy is a much more capital intensive, error prone, and difficult means to lowering the crime rate in St. Louis. By focusing our energy on police driven solutions first, we can most assuredly lower the crime rate in the next couple of years. When the crime rate starts to come down it will be easier to attract new business, new transplants, and new money. All of this makes the providing of social services easier as well. We have to get the biggest bang for our buck right now, because we are circling the drain. The social strategy will require decades to come to fruition while the police driven solution will work right now.
There’s also some steps we can take on the side of the courts. Rosenfeld and Williams found by following a cohort of individuals arrested for gun related offenses that higher initial bonds increased the amount of time that criminals spent in prison. These individuals were 3 times less likely to be re-arrested for gun offenses in the next 2.5 years.
Rosenfeld/Williams also found, surprisingly, that 40% of those arrested for gun offenses were never charged due to the courts refusing to issue a warrant. Why was this? Well, Missouri had recently passed a statute (MO Amendment 5) which allows open carry in a vehicle without a warrant. This means that when the police pull over a car containing multiple felons, if they find a gun in the car and nobody claims it, they cannot arrest anybody or press any charges. Therefore, those felons continue on their way. This is INSANE! Could this statute, passed in 2014, be part of the reason firearm assaults increased in 2015 and 2016? I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t mind hearing a response from the Second Amendment people.
One more thing which Rosenfeld mentions frequently in his writing: The police need to get better at collecting data. Often, the results of crime studies are inconclusive or non-specific because the criminologist doesn’t have enough information to draw a firm conclusion. For example, we know that hot spot policing lowers homicide rate. But exactly what aspects of hot spot policing is most effective? We don’t know because the data isn’t detailed enough. I hope that our next police chief is a data fanatic and that he works closely with Rosenfeld and other criminologists.
Love to spend time near Sea !