In St. Louis and St. Louis County, about $355 per year is spent per resident on police services, according to a from Better Together St. Louis, a nonprofit group studying a potential city-county merger.
That’s $110 more than what Indianapolis-Marion County spends and $98 more than what is spent per capita in Louisville-Jefferson County, Ky.
In reality, the city and county’s numbers are higher. The organization did not factor in the budgets of eight police departments that declined to provide data.
The report says that the cities of Beverly Hills, Country Club Hills, Hillsdale, Kinloch, Lakeshire, St. Ann, Vinita Park and Wellston have yet to provide information requested in November under the state’s Sunshine Law.
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So are taxpayers getting a higher level of police service in the city and county by spending $468 million per year on its 60 departments?
Dave Leipholtz, director of community-based studies, said the organization could not say at this point.
It has farmed out the task of analyzing the data and coming up with best policing practices to the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based research and policy organization.
Leipholtz said the organization should present its findings in early May.
Leipholtz also said that the organization chose the Indianapolis and Louisville regions because they shared similar economic and population characteristics with St. Louis.
Those cities also have collaborative forms of government with their counties.
Some other facts from the report:
• The 60 departments provide service to 1.3 million people over 589 square miles.
• Populations served by the departments vary in size from the 298 residents served by the Kinloch Police Department to the 415,937 citizens served by the St. Louis County Police Department throughout unincorporated areas and in 18 municipalities.
• The number of officers per 1,000 residents also varies widely. The city of Edmundson, near Lambert Airport with a population 843, had the highest number of police per 1,000 residents, with 13.19. Ballwin, in west St. Louis County with a population of 30,304, had the lowest rate, with 1.55.