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When the late summer St. Louis homicide surge comes — and it almost always does — nobody talks about hungry children.

They should. In recent days, those two stories — hunger and homicide — have filled the airwaves and headlines as unrelated news items.

After a couple of violent weekends, the annual homicide count, a crude but often-used data point for judging a mayor’s performance, rose above last year’s pace of homicides. That’s generally bad political news for Mayor Tishaura Jones. Homicides in St. Louis fell in her first year in office. If, in a few months, the yearly numbers go up again, pressure will build for new solutions.

We know what the old solutions are: more cops, and higher pay for more cops. Even though St. Louis has long had more police officers per capita than similar-sized and even many larger cities, the tough-on-crime crowd will keep pushing for that. There’s no data — not here, — that suggests more cops on the streets will significantly reduce homicides.

There is, however, about poverty and crime. When poverty goes down, so does crime. And that’s why the other story from last week is so important.

This summer, , Missouri was the only state in the nation to cut the “grab-and-go� free food program funded by the federal government and started early in the COVID-19 pandemic. The food was still available in Missouri, but kids had to eat it at community organizations or other sites providing the meals. They didn’t, according to providers in the state. Family schedules or lack of transportation were often problems. “Grab-and-go� allowed sites to provide several days of meals to families, who could avoid daily trips.

But because Gov. Mike Parson decided the pandemic was over, the kids lost the easier access to food.

There’s a reason Missouri was the only state to make this decision: 49 other states realized it made no sense. Keeping the “grab-and-go� program didn’t cost taxpayers anything, but cutting it did. It left some kids hungry. And hungry kids create other problems in society, besides the obvious moral failing of not feeding them.

There’s no direct line between this summer’s hungry kids and this summer’s homicides, of course. But there’s a long line that connects them through history. A 2016 study from the University of Texas found a direct link, for instance, between today’s hungry kids and tomorrow’s violence.

“In fact, 37% of the study’s participants who had frequent hunger as children reported that they had been involved in interpersonal violence. Of those who experienced little to no childhood hunger, 15 percent said they were involved in interpersonal violence,� Alex R. Piquero, a criminology professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. “Alleviating hunger not only helps children, it also helps their parents, their teachers, and ultimately all of us as they become productive contributors to society. We might prevent violent crime in the future by feeding children today.�

A generation from now, when there’s a new mayor and a new summer homicide surge, perhaps somebody will think of the hungry children from 2022. Some of them attend Catholic schools in the city. For years, those children have had access to the same free and reduced lunch programs that their counterparts in public school have. Funded by the USDA, the food has long been a part of a national strategy to fight child hunger.

But this school year, the Archdiocese of St. Louis decided not to allow its schools to participate in the program that feeds hungry kids. The reasons aren’t entirely clear but appear related to changes in the interpretation of Title IX, which will better protect members of the LGBTQ community, including transgender children, from discrimination. Like Missouri and the grab-and-go program, the Archdiocese of St. Louis appears to be the only one in the nation to forgo the free food for children. Archdiocese officials have said that 4% of students took part in the free lunch program and they’re looking at options, using existing funds, to provide similar meal service to those students.

The decisions that slighted hungry children are short-sighted. That’s the thing about the annual homicide surge — the politics of policing demand answers now, and politicians try to provide them, because adding a few cops downtown is easier than feeding the next generation of kids, or providing them early childhood education, or expanding Medicaid.

Unlike previous St. Louis mayors, Jones is in a unique spot to respond to the homicide surge. That’s because she’s sitting on a pile of money, literally hundreds of millions of dollars, from the federal American Rescue Plan Act, the infrastructure bill and the settlement with the National Football League over the Rams’ departure. Pressure is mounting to spend that money on cops.

I have a different suggestion: feed the next generation of hungry kids.