ST. LOUIS — Homicides in St. Louis are down about 22% from this time last year, and other reported crimes in the city are among their lowest levels since 2009.
The drop in homicides is on pace to be the city’s largest year-over-year decrease since the 1930s, and the city has its fewest homicides through late August in almost a decade.
Meanwhile, reported aggravated assaults were down about 6.5% through the end of July. Robberies were down 17%, and burglaries more than 13%.
The trend is encouraging for St. Louis, where for years the per capita homicide rate was among the highest of any city in the nation, largely because violence is concentrated in the city while residents are spread throughout the region. And it’s especially notable because during the dog days of July and August, crimes — especially homicides — tend to spike.
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But so far this year, that hasn’t been the case. Last year in August, police reported more than 30 homicides, according to weekly incident reports. Through the first three weeks of August this year, police reported fewer than 10.
And through Aug. 20 for the entire year, St. Louis police reported 97 homicides, according to federal data that varies slightly from what the city reports each week. Last year at the same time, the city had reported 125.
Trends in St. Louis mirror what’s happening in cities across the country, said Richard Rosenfeld, a longtime criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. The overall nationwide decline in homicides for .
Two major factors are the most likely explanations, Rosenfeld said. One is that many of the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic have finally eased. The other, he said, is there have been no police killings that garnered national attention like Michael Brown’s 2014 Ferguson killing or George Floyd’s Minneapolis killing in 2020.
When protests break out after those kinds of deaths, Rosenfeld said, researchers see homicide rates spike. He believes officers, stretched thin and frustrated with public perceptions of police, may disengage from their jobs just as tensions are especially high among the public, which results in more violent incidents.
“So what we’ve seen, I think, is the unraveling (or) the unfolding of the conditions that brought us the big increase over time,” he said. “And that big increase was very abrupt.”
Police hold back a grieving man trying to rush past police tape around the scene of a homicide where a man was found with a gunshot wound to his head lying on the ground in a parking lot near the intersection of Grand Boulevard and Gravois Avenue in St. Louis on Monday, May 8, 2023.
That was the case in St. Louis, where the city had 79 homicides for the year as of Aug. 20, 2014 — about typical compared with previous years — days after Brown was killed by Ferguson police. By that same day the following year, the city had surged to 128 homicides for the year, and they’ve yet to come back to pre-2015 levels since then.
The decline nationwide is a “pleasant surprise,” said Jeff Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics, a consulting firm that tracks homicide data for more than 100 cities. He echoed Rosenfeld and said high-profile police killings can have a significant influence on homicide rates, especially in the city where the incident happened.
He pointed to Memphis as a recent example, where homicides have increased 40% so far this year. In a high-profile incident, police there beat to death Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, during a traffic stop in January.
“If you look at the data right now, you can clearly see something happening in Memphis after Tyre Nichols was killed and the video came out a couple of weeks later,” Asher said. “There’s been a huge spike in murder in Memphis.”
Kansas City, though without an obvious explanation, has also seen a homicide spike of 18% this year,
A man who gave his name as C.J. makes a sign of peace at a wreath left in memory of his friend who was shot to death the day before in Poelker Park, across the street from St. Louis City Hall, on Friday, June 2, 2023. C.J. said that he arrived at the park after the shooting to see his friend dead, but the gunman in a passing car returned. “I heard his voice, his soul, say bro look up, look up,” said C.J. “If he hadn’t told me that, there would have been more bodies out there.”
Where homicides are up or down
St. Louis’ decrease in homicides means that some of the neighborhoods that tend to see the most killings each year — such as Walnut Park West, Walnut Park East, Kingsway East and Greater Ville on the north side, and Dutchtown in the south — have experienced a sharp decline this year.
But that’s not the case for all city neighborhoods. North Pointe, nestled between Calvary Cemetery and Jennings, didn’t have a single homicide last year. So far this year it’s seen four. And Jeff-Vander-Lou, northeast of Downtown, is on pace to meet or exceed its total from last year.
A woman watches over the area on Bacon Street where a man was shot and killed near the intersection of North Market Street in the Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood on Thursday, March 23, 2023.
Downtown is on a similar trajectory, running about even to last year’s number despite funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into extra patrol and security services there.
Those funds include the Downtown Community Improvement District boosting its spending on security services this year by more than $100,000. The district contracts with The City’s Finest, a private company staffed with about 200 off-duty police officers.
The St. Louis Police Foundation, a nonprofit that supports local police, also began spending $860,000 in July to put additional officers on patrol downtown.
St. Louis police Chief Robert Tracy, who spearheaded the overtime initiative, said in an interview earlier this month that the decline shows progress. He noted he’s focused on getting the department functioning the way it did before the pandemic, and he said he’s proud of the work his officers have done this year.
Tracy has pushed department leaders to talk about crime in real time and share information between departments and investigations, such as ballistic evidence, to solve crimes more efficiently and connect one offender to multiple incidents.
“I think there is no one reason (for the decrease),” the chief said. “I think it’s an overall comprehensive plan. … And we have so much more work to do because there still are way too many shootings and homicides in the city.”
