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ST. LOUIS — If Jennifer Clemons-Abdullah were a professional football coach, she’d be dusting off her resume right about now. That’s because last week, she received the dreaded vote of confidence.

If you’re a sports fan, you understand the context. When professional coaches are under fire long enough, after losing streaks or other poor performance, eventually, reporters get the team’s general manager or owner to weigh in. They offer a vote of confidence, as a way for everybody to save face, and, then, some time shortly thereafter, the coach is fired, or resigns to spend time with his family.

Clemons-Abdullah is the jail commissioner in the city of St. Louis. She is on quite the losing streak, after nine deaths, a couple of riots, detainees holding a guard hostage, and a couple of different lawsuits alleging massive use-of-force issues leading to abuse of people in the jail, as well as the destruction of records related to those abuses.

Things are so bad that allies of Clemons-Abdullah’s boss — Mayor Tishaura O. Jones — have been calling for her to resign. It started with members of the oversight board that have been at war with Clemons-Abdullah because she is standing in the way of them doing any actual oversight, and elevated with Megan Green, the president of the Board of Aldermen, joining the chorus of criticism.

It’s in this context that Jones — who campaigned on running a jail that was compassionate toward the men and women housed there — wrote a letter last week giving her jail commissioner a vote of confidence.

“It’s because of her steady leadership that she continues to have my full confidence in her current role,” Jones wrote.

To me, the most important words in that sentence are the last four: “in her current role.” In politics, it’s rare for elected officials to fire their appointees. No need to create a potential enemy, when a nice transfer into some other job can answer the critics seeking accountability, while saving face for a loyalist.

So it was back when Jones was a state representative, and the governor at the time, Jay Nixon, found himself in hot water for the first time. The governor’s controversy was related to elevated E. coli levels at a couple of state-owned beaches at the Lake of the Ozarks over the busy Memorial Day weekend in 2009. The state knew of the problem before the weekend, kept the beaches open, and then put Nixon out there to say the beaches were closed before the governor knew the full extent of what happened.

There were Senate hearings, and daily headlines and much brouhaha. And nobody died.

But eventually Nixon put his director of the Department of Natural Resources on a temporary suspension. He put the time to good use, because not long after he came back to the job, after a vote of confidence from the governor, he resigned to take another job in another government.

This is how things generally work in politics. It’s why I take Jones’ letter defending her jail commissioner with a grain of salt. So does the Rev. Darryl Gray. He’s a member of the jail oversight board that has been fighting with Clemons-Abdullah. He thinks she’s doing a terrible job. Gray has a few theories on why Jones is still backing the jail commissioner, and he’s not sure which one is most likely to be the fullest version of the truth.

“We’re all asking each other the same question: Why is she holding on?” Gray says, of the generally progressive allies of the mayor. “The mayor has made some pretty historical appointments in this city.” 

Clemons-Abdullah is the second Black woman to lead the jail, after Alice Pollard-Buckingham’s tenure in the 2000s.

“To have to go back and rethink that appointment, it takes some of the luster off of that,” Gray says. “What elected official wants to be second guessed?”

But those who were appointed to the board on which Gray serves, are, indeed, second guessing the mayor who appointed them, and they hope that, vote of confidence aside, she’s listening.

“It’s been made extremely clear to this administration where the obstacles have been,” Gray says. The biggest obstacle? Clemons-Abdullah, he says, even when it comes to accomplishing the training that Jones says is holding up the oversight board from doing its job. The board plans to press forward. Its investigators who work for the city have been cleared to start looking into complaints at the jail. With or without Clemons-Abdullah in charge, the oversight board plans to figure out why so many people are dying. In time, Gray hopes the jail commissioner sees the writing on the wall.

“I would think that any reasonable person would be planning an exit strategy,” Gray says. “Nine people have died under your watch. You can’t hide from this.”

This story has been updated to reflect Clemons-Abdullah as the second Black woman to lead the jail.