Last year, 262 people were murdered in St. Louis, bringing the city’s homicide rate higher than it’s been in 50 years. Most of those cases are still open and unsolved. Those figures have made reducing violent crime one of the key issues in the city’s upcoming mayoral election. 

Activists have stressed that this shouldn’t mean ramping up policing, but addressing the root causes of violence instead. They’re hoping the next mayor will take an approach to public safety that embraces that vision.

The two candidates on the ballot on Tuesday have both promised some criminal justice reforms. City Treasurer Tishaura Jones and Alderperson Cara Spencer align on several issues like directing some 911 calls to mental health professionals instead of police and closing The Workhouse, one of the city’s notorious jails. Jones has also championed ending cash bail and the decriminalization of sex work.

But both candidates have also laid out plans for a violence prevention model called focused deterrence that runs the risk of becoming yet another punitive law enforcement tool.

This approach identifies people who police suspect are likely to commit violent crime and offers them social services couched in the threat of harsh prosecution if they break the law. Regardless of who wins the mayoral election, a focused deterrence strategy is on St. Louis’s horizon.

“Focused deterrence can end up being very police-heavy and I’ve seen it misused in those ways,” said Antonio Cediel, urban strategies campaign manager at the LIVE FREE Campaign, a faith-based movement to reduce gun violence and end mass incarceration. “I would really caution against simply viewing it as a more ingenious version of tough on crime.”

Focused deterrence strategies operate under the premise that a small number of people in “street groups” are responsible for much of violent crime in a city, and that there are people at risk of committing violence who can avoid it if given the right interventions. The idea is for public authorities to team up with nonprofits and community leaders to identify these individuals and groups. They do that by reviewing data on homicides and nonfatal shootings, information about people in crime-heavy areas who have criminal records, and also details about people in their social networks. 

Officials and community leaders then reach out to the groups to deliver a message that Spencer has described as a “carrot and stick.” They offer them tailored services and support, like housing, health services, or job training. But if someone commits violence, law enforcement and other agencies take targeted action against them. 

Some criminal justice reform advocates push back against the punitive threats this strategy relies on. As part of a focused deterrence strategy, law enforcement typically crack down not only on people accused of committing violence, but also on other people they are associated with. This can include arresting people on charges for unrelated offenses, and employing non-traditional enforcement actions like checking group members’ car registrations, fining them for housing code violations, or seeking to evict them from public housing. 

“We don’t want the rights of people trampled on while draconian measures are put in place,” Johnson Lancaster, a St. Louis resident and a member of the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression, told The Appeal: Political Report.  Lancaster added that taking a more focused approach to violent crime and offering social services could be promising as long as it doesn’t lead to heavy policing that violates people’s civil liberties.

David Muhammad, who is the executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform and has worked with cities across the country to implement violence reduction programs, says most places do not implement focused deterrence well. “It certainly should not be an enforcement-only strategy or enforcement-mostly strategy,” Muhammad told the Political Report. “It’s not carrot and stick. It’s not if you don’t take services you get enforcement. It’s if you continue to engage in gun violence there’s enforcement.” The emphasis, he said, should be on providing social services and involving community members in the decision-making process.

Other St. Louis initiatives aimed at stemming violence have given activists reason to treat focused deterrence with caution. For example, the city rolled out a Cure Violence program last year. It was supposed to involve hiring outreach workers and violence interrupters with strong ties to the community to mediate conflicts and connect people with services. But local activists say city officials ignored input from the community groups that brought the program to the city in the first place. 

And in 2017, St. Louis Metropolitan Police Chief John Hayden launched a strategy dubbed “Hayden’s Rectangle,” a form of “hotspot” policing that targets a particular geographic area of the city and increases the police presence in that neighborhood. Hayden measured success based partly on the number of arrests officers made, which flies in the face of the solutions that activists have called for. Lancaster said the city needs “a new vision of public safety that focuses less on arresting, prosecuting, and incarcerating and more on addressing the root causes of crime in communities and building opportunities for these people.”

David Kennedy, a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the director of the National Network for Safe Communities, is credited with developing some of the first focused deterrence strategies in the United States. He said concerns about focused deterrence are unsurprising, given communities’ past experiences with police. But ultimately, he sees it as a departure from other types of policing strategies that tend to crack down on low-level offenses or target entire neighborhoods. 

“People are right to be attentive to and skeptical about really bad criminal justice practices because these communities have forever been over-policed and under-protected,” said Kennedy. “But this is a way to not continue to do the damage that bad policing does.”

Studies have shown that focused deterrence can lead to reductions in gun violence, and proponents like Kennedy often point to Oakland, California, as an example where social services and community engagement have been prioritized over law enforcement. 

Oakland got a focused deterrence program called Oakland Ceasefire Strategy up and running in 2013. During the first five years of Ceasefire, gun-related homicides dropped in the city by 45 percent, although in the past year they’ve returned to pre-Ceasefire levels. Oakland’s model has been successful, proponents say, because the city made significant investments in the program by funding positions like outreach workers and life coaches, who make contact with individuals, connect them with services, and maintain a relationship to encourage them to stick with the life changes they are making and avoid violent behavior.

Efforts to reduce violent crime in St. Louis will fail if the focused deterrence strategy cuts corners, said Muhammad. “Some cities will say, ‘Oh we gave them some referrals to service providers.’ That’s not enough. You need to create positions so it’s people’s full-time job to be in contact with the highest-risk guys … there needs to be ongoing, structured, intensive engagement.”

Daniel Webster, director of the center for gun policy and research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said Baltimore failed to provide robust services and relied too heavily on law enforcement when rolling out a focused deterrence strategy. He said that in Baltimore there was little community involvement and on the city’s part “there was not enough support services and there was no ‘focus’ in the focused deterrence.”

Philadelphia’s focused deterrence strategy included heavy-handed, punitive measures, including turning off the utilities of people’s loved ones in response to shootings.

“I remember once talking to a U.S. attorney who was almost bragging about threatening to shut off the services, like that was some type of heroic move,” said Cediel from LIVE FREE.

Spencer and Jones told the Political Report they would not do this. Jones’s campaign said her strategy “would not use the deprivation of critical resources to St. Louisans to encourage participation.” Spencer said, “Turning off the utilities is often the first step in homelessness. Using that as a threat is not something my administration would do.”

Spencer has repeatedly cited Oakland as a model she would base her administration’s focused deterrence strategy on and said she aims to drive down the city’s homicide rate by 30 percent in her first term if elected. Spencer said although her model would involve law enforcement and prosecutors, hers would not be a heavily punitive program. The city would “partner with agencies that will connect people to the resources they need to turn their lives around,” she explained. 

Similarly, Jones said her focused deterrence strategy would involve police and prosecutors, but that would be coupled with other changes Jones seeks to make when it comes to public safety.

“Successfully implementing focused deterrence requires not just concentrated police attention on a small group of citizens, but also authentic relationships with credible prevention workers and robust social services available for those willing to avoid criminal behavior,” Jones’s campaign told the Political Report in an email. “The St. Louis focused deterrence version will integrate critical city services and access to nonprofits to assist with employment, substance abuse, mental health, and other services.”

While groups like the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression have yet to take an official position on the strategy, Lancaster sees what happened with the Cure Violence program as a cautionary tale: Although the coalition was involved in the effort to bring Cure Violence to St. Louis, it later bowed out of the initiative, as did others, citing concerns over the way it was being implemented. 

“That’s what happens when there’s a disconnect between the will of the people and the folks who implement the policies on a government level,” said Lancaster. “When they’d rather satisfy their political objectives as opposed to carrying out the will of the people. So we hope to avoid that with the next mayoral administration.”

The post This Anti-Violence Strategy May Be Coming to St. Louis, but Activists See Red Flags appeared first on Bolts.

Two-hundred sixty-two people were murdered in St. Louis last year, bringing the city’s homicide rate higher than it’s been in 50 years. Only about 30 percent of those cases have been  closed. 

The spike has made public safety a central issue in an upcoming mayoral election. But in a city that’s been reckoning with racial justice since the police murder of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson seven years ago, many are saying that ramping up policing isn’t the answer. 

“We need to divest from harmful systems like the criminal justice system that has been used to cage, control, and surveil communities, largely Black communities … and put that money into resources that make communities safe,” said Jae Shepherd, an organizer with Action STL. “The new administration needs to really look at our city budget,” Shepherd added, noting that a significant portion goes to policing yet crime is still high. “Obviously arresting and incarcerating people isn’t working.”

Shepherd and others say the city’s decades-long trend of investing heavily in policing has not had the desired effect when it comes to reducing crime or improving clearance rates for violent crimes like murder. Instead, organizers say they would like to see the next administration take a second look at the police department’s budget and see where funds could be redirected to non-police crisis response teams and violence interrupters. 

All four candidates running to become St. Louis’s next mayor say reducing violence and raising the city’s low homicide closure rate are top priorities, but have different plans for how they’ll do it. 

City Treasurer Tishaura Jones and Alderperson Cara Spencer are promising a clear departure from the status quo. The two align on several issues like reducing the scope of policing in favor of alternatives and closing The Workhouse, one of the city’s notorious jails. But Tishaura Jones has gone a step further by championing an end to cash bail and the decriminalization of sex work.

Meanwhile, in a recent forum, utility executive Andrew Jones praised the police and opposed reducing the police department’s budget. Board of Alders President Lewis Reed is also wary of reforms that would shrink the criminal legal system; he opposes closing The Workhouse, for example. And both are open to expanding policing with aerial surveillance.

St. Louis’s current mayor, Lyda Krewson, isn’t seeking a second term, so voters will choose between these four candidates in a primary election on Tuesday. The two candidates with the most votes will go on to a runoff to decide the next mayor on April 6.    

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Local organizers who spoke with The Appeal: Political Report said they want the next administration to move away from the current public safety model and recognize that improving public safety does not equate with increasing police funding.

“We want less of an emphasis on the arrest, prosecute, and incarcerate model and more of an emphasis on getting to the root causes of violent crime in our neighborhoods,” said Johnson Lancaster from the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression (CAPCR), also noting that an outsize portion of St. Louis’s budget is spent on policing. “That money should be redirected to social programs that help address some of these needs that we’re talking about.”

A coalition of 38 grassroots organizations in St. Louis, including Action STL and CAPCR, signed on to a comprehensive policy agenda that offers a framework for how the city can move away from policies that have contributed to racial and socioeconomic inequity. The agenda, called The People’s Plan, also endorses policies that could help lift more people out of poverty, end over-policing and mass incarceration, and keep people in their homes. One of the plan’s four pillars is “re-envisioning public safety” by divesting from policing and investing in alternative forms of crisis response and in violence interruption programs. The plan also calls for civilianizing certain police functions, like traffic enforcement and internal affairs. 

Cities across the country have begun to shrink the roles and responsibilities of police by shifting traffic enforcement, forensic analysis, and response to mental health calls to other departments. In Austin, Texas,, city leaders have changed the city’s 911 system so that callers are asked if they need fire, EMS, mental health services, or police. Nearly a quarter of all people shot and killed by police in the United States since 2015 suffered from mental illness. 

In St. Louis, 911 dispatchers receive hundreds of thousands of calls each year, and thousands of those could be diverted to behavioral health responders, which could give police officers more time to work on solving violent crimes like homicide, and provide a more appropriate response to the person in crisis. Spencer, Tishaura Jones, and Reed have all said they support expanding St. Louis’s Cops and Clinicians program, which sends health professionals to respond to crisis calls alongside police officers. The program is still in its infancy with only a small staff. These three candidates have also expressed support for changing the city’s 911 system to direct some calls to health professionals instead of police.

Spencer and Tishaura Jones have said they support moving certain functions, like internal affairs and use-of-force investigations, out of the police department. Andrew Jones does not support such a proposal. Reed did not commit to doing so but said he may “look into” it if other efforts to improve the police department’s operations didn’t work.

The Political Report asked all of the candidates if they would consider reforms like one passed in Berkeley, California, which shifts traffic enforcement away from the police. Andrew Jones said he would like to see the results of Berkeley’s measure before committing to anything. Tishaura Jones said she would “absolutely” consider such a proposal and said that if she is elected, she would review the police department’s functions to see what “could be enforced by civilians” because the city needs “to transform and reimagine how we respond to citizens.” Spencer and Reed did not respond.

Both Tishaura Jones and Spencer have expressed support for rethinking the police department’s budget. Currently, the St. Louis Police Department has an operating budget of over $200 million. Jones said she thinks that figure is “too much” and said resources within the city’s Public Safety Department need to be reallocated. Similarly, Spencer said the city has “some gross inefficiencies in our police department” and that the budget “has to be reoriented.” Both indicated that funds should go to a broader range of safety measures, including non-police emergency responders. 

Andrew Jones does not believe police funding needs to be cut, and Reed did not respond when asked about his stance on the issue. Jones and Reed have said they would be willing to consider expanding police presence in St. Louis by allowing an aerial surveillance measure to pass City Council. Tishaura Jones and Spencer oppose it.

For Spencer and Tishaura Jones, a broader view of public safety includes violence interruption programs like the focused deterrence model. Focused deterrence involves identifying people who have repeatedly committed certain crimes and bringing them into meetings with police, prosecutors, social workers, and other groups who tell the individual what the consequences will be for continuing to commit violence and offer incentives to stop. While Spencer has cited the success of the program in Oakland as a reason to pursue it in St. Louis, elsewhere in the United States, it has led to surveillance and abuse. 

The violence prevention method endorsed by Reed, Cure Violence, has also had mixed results. Local activists are unhappy with the way the program ended up being implemented and criticized the lack of involvement from the community groups that brought the program to the city in the first place. Andrew Jones did not express support for any violence interruption program and said he wants police to have the resources and support they need to continue doing what he calls a “fantastic job,” despite the city’s recent rise in violent crime and unsolved homicides.

When it comes to moving away from what local organizers have called the “arrest and incarcerate” model of public safety, both Tishaura Jones and Spencer say they want to close The Workhouse, a notorious city jail that houses pretrial detainees in deplorable conditions. Andrew Jones does not support closing it, while Reed previously supported efforts to close the jail but now says it is irresponsible to do so during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tishaura Jones said she would use funds saved from closing The Workhouse to invest in job training, housing, diversion programs, and substance use programs. And she is the only candidate in the race who wants to further reduce mass incarceration by decriminalizing sex work and ending cash bail for nonviolent offenses.

“I think a lot of the issues are interconnected—the violence, the schools, the housing, the jails, policing,” said Latrell Stanton, an organizer with Ex-Incarcerated People Organizing St. Louis. Stanton added that he wants the next mayor to present progressive solutions.

“It seems like when it comes to crime, the solution is always to give more money to the police department. That never stops the crime, it never deters the crime. If the crime does go down, I never feel like it’s the result of policing.”

The post Policing and Public Safety at Odds in St. Louis Mayoral Race appeared first on Bolts.

When Kim Gardner and Mary Pat Carl first faced off in 2016 to be the chief prosecutor of St. Louis, Carl had endorsements from the retiring incumbent and the local police union. But Gardner, whose platform echoed some of the Black Lives Matter movement’s demands just two years after the nearby Ferguson protests, won by a large margin, becoming the city’s first Black circuit attorney.

Gardner faces a rematch against Carl in the Aug. 4 Democratic primary, but their contest is playing out on very different terrain. Nationwide political shifts toward criminal justice reform have emboldened activists to expect more from Gardner, and they have pushed Carl to soften her language compared to 2016.

Still, local activists view this race as a referendum on the fierce pushback that Gardner has faced since she took office. The primary, which will most likely decide the election in this Democratic city, may be an early window into whether this sort of pushback will prove successful in other jurisdictions where reform-minded prosecutors soon face re-election. 

Gardner has been under sustained fire from police unions and from Missouri’s GOP elected officials throughout her term, including for her handling of the high-profile case of former Republican Governor Eric Greitens. Earlier this year, state lawmakers proposed a bill to transfer some of her power to the state’s Republican attorney general. And in recent weeks U.S. Senator Josh Hawley, also a Republican, has repeatedly attacked her for not prosecuting Black Lives Matter protesters. 

Gardner’s supporters say these hurdles are the reflection of status quo interests fighting aggressively against a powerful Black woman in a way that other reform-minded prosecutors do not have to deal with. In January,  nearly a dozen elected Black female prosecutors from across the country— including Kim Foxx in Chicago and Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore—issued a statement in solidarity with Gardner, saying she was “fac[ing] an unprecedented campaign by the city’s corrupt and racist political establishment to destroy her.”  

“Progressives who challenge the status quo are going to get pushback, but for Black women it’s like quadruple the amount,” Tiffany Cabán, who narrowly lost her district attorney bid in Queens last year, told The Appeal: Political Report. Cabán now works as a national political organizer for the Working Families Party, which has endorsed Gardner for re-election. 

Carl, by contrast, believes the controversies that have surrounded Gardner’s tenure are evidence that she is unfit to lead. She says she would restore “competence and confidence” to the office, and she has criticized Gardner for a historically high turnover in her staff, a lack of public transparency, and a drop in the rate of trials that result in a conviction. 

And Carl largely lays the blame for the battles between Gardner and other law enforcement agencies on the incumbent and her practices, a perspective that is rejected by local activists wary of what they view as punitive backlash against reform efforts. 

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During her 2016 run, Carl enjoyed the support of the departing circuit attorney, Jennifer Joyce. Carl called herself “tough on crime” and she emphasized her experience as the city’s top homicide prosecutor. Carl qualified that moniker to say she would also be “smart on crime” when it comes to low-level offenses by using diversion programs and treatment courts as alternatives to jail time. 

This time around, Carl has scrapped her “tough on crime” language.

“I don’t think my policy stances have changed much from 2016, but I think I’m doing a better job of being able to communicate what they are,” Carl told the Political Report. She credits a nationwide wave of progressive prosecutors since 2016 with giving candidates like her a clearer roadmap to campaign on. 

Carl even says that Gardner has not been progressive enough on some issues, critiquing the incumbent for not steering enough people toward diversion and for continuing to use cash bail. 

Activists say they are working to figure out if there’s substance to Carl’s new statements, or if they’re largely rhetorical. 

John Chasnoff, the co-chairperson of the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression in St. Louis, acknowledged Carl is “saying some of the right things these days” and credits the changing political landscape for pushing candidates leftward. “But I think our tendency is to stick with the candidate who was saying those things back when they weren’t quite so popular,” he added. 

Mike Milton, the Bail Project’s policy and advocacy manager in Missouri, also credits Carl for “listening” as St. Louis has become more “politically activated” around criminal justice. But “historically Mary Pat Carl has been the police candidate,” he said. 

Carl was endorsed by the St. Louis Police Officers Association, the majority-white police union, in 2016. This year, the SLPOA has not endorsed a candidate, though it is disparaging of Gardner. “We will let you know if/when we issue an endorsement,” said Jeff Roorda, the SLPOA spokesperson, when asked of the union’s plans. “Kim Gardner has proven herself unfit for public office.” 

Roorda has made a litany of more aggressive attacks against Gardner. He wrote a commentary in 2019 accusing her of declaring “war” with police officers; later that year, he said Gardner should be removed “by force or by choice.” 

Carl attributes these tensions with cops to Gardner’s style and policies. “I think you can hold the police accountable without going to war with the police,” she said in April. In her interview with the Political Report, Carl suggested Gardner’s combative relationship with the police compounded the city’s crime problems, pointing to the more than 60 St. Louis children who have been shot this year. “If we are spending the time fighting each other we’re not solving the problem,” she said.

But Carl also says she would support changing city policies to better address police misconduct. She is campaigning on creating a “duty to intervene” policy, which would require an officer to step in and prevent another officer from violating rules and laws.

Carl also says she would continue Gardner’s practice of maintaining a list of police officers with a history of corruption or lying whose testimony prosecutors should not rely on. (Gardner has dismissed many cases brought by officers on this list, angering the police union.) For some police, Carl said, misconduct would warrant “outright exclusion from testifying or from presenting cases to the circuit attorney office.” But she has not specified what sorts of behaviors would rise to this level. “I would publish the ethical criteria that an officer must follow, the things I will not tolerate, and I will work with the community to come up with that list,” she said.

Carl faulted Gardner for not releasing the names on her “do not call” list and pledged to disclose the identity of officers with serious charges against them to ensure police departments in other cities don’t make hires without “full knowledge of their history in St. Louis.” Carl thinks the police could be more open to her style of list-building than Gardner’s. “My selling point would be getting bad officers off the street is beneficial to all,” she said.

To Gardner, though, Carl’s orientation toward the police, including her “duty to intervene” proposal which assumes officers will call out wrongdoing, reflect naivety about the challenges of holding police accountable. “There are a lot of good police who sit in complicit silence,” she told the Political Report. “She does not understand that the ‘blue code of silence’ is real.”

In January, Gardner filed a lawsuit against the police union, among other entities, alleging a conspiracy to thwart her reform efforts, including her bid to rein in police misconduct.

Beyond Carl’s statements on taking a more cooperative approach with  the police, some local organizers have been troubled by her attitude toward the broader blowback against Gardner.

Action St. Louis, a group that promotes racial justice, asked the candidates in a questionnaire about efforts by the state’s attorney general and the region’s Trump-appointed U.S. attorney to increase federal prosecutions in St. Louis, thereby wading into the jurisdiction of the circuit attorney. Over the last year, federal prosecutors and state officials have similarly impeded the authority of reform-minded prosecutors in Baltimore and Philadelphia.

Gardner answered that the uptick in federal charges was “largely political,” she describes it as a pushback against her agenda, echoing how Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner and Baltimore’s Mosby have criticized efforts to limit their power. By contrast, Carl’s reply attributed federal prosecutors’ involvement to understaffing in Gardner’s office, which “forc[ed] the US Attorney’s office to take responsibility for prosecuting violent crimes.” 

Kayla Reed, the executive director of Action St. Louis, told the Political Report she found Carl’s answer “really concerning.” She described the increase in federal prosecution, much like the legislative efforts to usurp control from Gardner, as retaliatory. “In my opinion, if you’re going to run on holding police accountable then you call that behavior out,” she said. “By not doing that, the rest feels performative.”  

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Activists give Gardner credit for bringing positive change to St. Louis. For instance, she has stopped prosecuting standalone charges for simple possession of less than 100 grams of marijuana, and has expanded diversion options for people charged with low-level and nonviolent offenses as a strategy to reduce incarceration. Gardner has also pushed to release Lamar Johnson, whom her office says has not committed the murder for which he has been incarcerated for 25 years.

“We think she’s done a fantastic job of introducing a progressive agenda to St. Louis,” said Chasnoff of the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression. “It’s a markedly different direction from her predecessor.” Milton of the Bail Project agrees that the previous circuit attorney, Jennifer Joyce, “had a deep relationship with incarceration” and applauded Gardner for going after the “root harms” of crime. 

There have been times, though, when activists felt Gardner resisted reform or moved too slowly. 

One was around closing the Workhouse, a St. Louis jail that the Board of Aldermen voted last week to shut down by the end of the year. A coalition of groups led a multi-year campaign to close the jail and bail out the people detained there. Although both Gardner and Carl campaigned this year on closing the facility, Gardner hadn’t previously supported this.

Reed said she could not explain why Gardner hadn’t supported the closing sooner. The Appeal reported in 2018 that Reed and other advocates were disappointed that Gardner was continuing to send people to the Workhouse, and seeking to hold them there pretrial.

Reed thinks disagreements with prosecutors come with the territory for “anti-carceral organizers,” as she looked ahead to pushing the office “over how and when change should occur.” Gardner told the Political Report she welcomes these conversations. “I look forward to talking to activists who may not agree with me,” she said. “I always say the system wasn’t built this way overnight, and it won’t be rebuilt overnight either.” 

Other advocates also hope to see more bold reforms over the next four years. Milton said he wants the prosecutor’s office to decriminalize substance use, keep the pressure on police, and  continue to reduce the reliance on cash bail.

Sara Baker, legislative and policy director at the ACLU of Missouri, said she was encouraged to hear both Gardner and Carl make new commitments to decriminalizing sex work at a debate held this month. Her group plans to hold the next circuit attorney accountable to those pledges. 

A year ago, Cabán’s commitment to decriminalize sex work in Queens pushed that issue into the national spotlight; months later, Chesa Boudin won in San Francisco on a similar promise. “I’d argue that candidates like myself, and Chesa Boudin, we ran on platforms to the left of folks like Gardner,” Cabán said. “But we could not have done so successfully without them going first.”

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