ST. LOUIS — It’s crime summit time in St. Louis, and you know what that means.
It’s time to come up with a flashy moniker.
Operation Save Downtown, or Operation Protect the City. Or, if you’re a white, rural Republican who is worried about next year’s primary challenge: Operation Take the City Away From St. Louis Voters Because Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner and Mayor Tishaura O. Jones Are Really, Really Awful (and Black).
I kid, but only a little.
Three years ago, when Gov. Mike Parson came to town to stand at a podium with former Mayor Lyda Krewson and former U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen to announce Operation Legend, I took a trip down memory lane and recounted some of the previous “operations.†I also looked to what would likely come out of the next crime summit. Here’s what I wrote:
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“It’s the same as it ever was. Like in 1993, when St. Louis had a spike of 267 homicides, and there was federal intervention, and legislative debate, and press conferences with the U.S. attorney and mayor and governor. This time it’s Operation Legend. Previously, it was Operation Cease Fire and Operation Safe Streets and Project Safe Neighborhoods. Officials name these surges after military operations because that’s the only solution they’ve ever tried.
“But each time, in the ’80s, the ’90s, after another crime spike in 2001, and several times already in the new century, the solution is the same, only the names change. More cops. More jails. ‘Unprecedented’ federal cooperation as though the exact same script followed a decade previously wasn’t precedent.â€
Maybe, just maybe, this crime summit can be different.
Jim Wild, executive director of the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, last week said that at the request of Jones and with the support of other board members, he is trying to pull together a . Wild isn’t limiting it to the normal cast of characters — cops, prosecutors and a couple of tough-on-crime politicians. He is planning to include school superintendents, academics, mayors on both sides of the Mississippi River, law enforcement officials, and business and civic leaders.
Wild says he expects to follow a “holistic†approach. That’s a good thing, compared with the scattershot legislation being debated in Jefferson City to take the city’s police department from Jones or prosecutorial power from Gardner. In fact, that holistic approach was the same one suggested by a criminal justice expert during the 1993 crime surge.
That year, criminologist Rick Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri-St. Louis shared an idea with the folks trying to stem a spike in gun violence and homicides.
“I’d like to see the state and our city respond to the 267th or 268th homicide with the same level of material and moral energy that we devoted to the Great Flood of 1993,†Rosenfeld said. “We have a flood of violence in our city.â€
Indeed, that was true then, when the state had control of the police and long before Gardner was elected. And it’s true today because the city and state never really devote “moral energy†to the underlying causes of crime, such as poverty in the neighborhoods most affected by gun violence.
The flood comparison is fascinating because when the water is rising, there is often a sense of community that is lacking during crime debates. Neighbors pitch in to raise sandbag walls and put up people who lost their homes. Officials cross boundaries to offer help; politicians cooperate regardless of party. Money is found to rebuild. The finger-pointing that dominates discussions about reducing crime is diminished, or at least muted, during flood fights.
The thing about fighting crime is that we know much of what works, based on empirical studies. But those solutions take generational investments: early childhood education, vocational training for people coming out of prison, effective drug treatment programs, reducing child poverty.
As far back as 1998, the Department of Justice published a report linking to the nation’s best research on these solutions. None of the strategies, of course, give politicians the immediate gratification of announcing a surge of arrests, which are forgotten about by the time the news cycle is 24 hours old.
This time, St. Louis is sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars from the NFL-Rams settlement and federal sources that can be put to work tackling big problems. Maybe the latest crime summit can get beyond the same tired, re-packaged ideas.
Call it Operation Invest in the Future.
When he was in the state senate, Gov. Mike Parson was opposed to federal intervention to enforce gun laws. What changed?
Former prosecutor says leaving Gardner, Bell out of meeting is a big mistake.