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ST. LOUIS — Reducing the city’s homicide rate “must be the metro’s top priority,” the region’s two leading business organizations say in a new policy paper released Friday, signaling a growing consensus that reducing crime needs to be the first item on area leaders’ to-do list.

The new comes as regional leaders plan to convene Wednesday for a regional crime summit called for by St. Louis Mayor Tishaura O. Jones and organized by the East-West Gateway Council of Governments.

While it’s largely a recitation of the grim statistics with which many St. Louisans are familiar, the paper hones in on homicides to make the case that murders, in particular, make St. Louis an outlier compared to other cities and drive a narrative about the wider region that stymies growth.

“We are quite an outlier when it comes to our homicide rate,” said leading criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, a University of Missouri-St. Louis professor who was tapped by business groups Greater St. Louis Inc. and the Regional Business Council to help compile the policy paper. “With respect to violent crime generally and property crime, the St. Louis region ranks somewhere in the middle of metropolitan areas.”

The policy brief is an attempt to focus the discussion in advance of next week’s regional crime summit, and it follows weeks of turmoil over the near-collapse of the St. Louis circuit attorney’s office under outgoing prosecutor Kimberly M. Gardner. Meanwhile, high-profile violence downtown and at a popular Cinco de Mayo street festival have continued to feed regional anxiety over crime.

“Violent crime impacts everyone in the 15-county bi-state St. Louis metro and, right now, we are in the midst of a homicide crisis,” reads a joint statement from Greater St. Louis CEO Jason Hall and Regional Business Council President Kathy Osborn. “This is taking a tremendous human toll and is a barrier to economic growth and prosperity for people in every community. This is our crisis as a region, and it requires all of us to roll up our sleeves and get to work to fix it.”

It’s nothing new for business leaders to weigh in or throw money at the region’s public safety problems. They’ve funded major studies of law enforcement agencies and even part of new St. Louis police Chief Robert Tracy’s salary.

But the brief is the latest example of Greater St. Louis, the region’s leading business and economic development advocacy group, taking on a more vocal role in confronting public safety issues. When Greater St. Louis formed in late 2020 and released its 2030 Jobs Plan meant to guide its priorities for the decade, critics such as St. Charles County Executive Steve Ehlmann questioned why public safety wasn’t more prominent. At the time, Hall said public safety was beyond the scope of the jobs plan but has since said public safety is “moving up the priority list for our members.”

Now, Greater St. Louis, in the new white paper, says its policy board has “determined that crime and public safety are a leading barrier to the implementation and success of the STL 2030 Jobs Plan.”

Rosenfeld agreed. Though the region’s homicides are disproportionately concentrated in a few neighborhoods in the city of St. Louis, he said their effects ripple throughout the regional economy.

“Our homicide problem makes it difficult to recruit businesses to the region, to retain businesses in the region,” he said. “The economic vitality, the health of the region, really does depend on the region’s ability to come together, act as a single entity and mount evidence-based programs that have proven successful elsewhere in reducing homicide.”

Chief among those approaches is what’s referred to in criminal justice circles as “focused deterrence,” in which police concentrate resources on the relatively small group of individuals that tend to drive homicides in a region and confront them during in-person home meetings with a choice: social services and help getting out of “the life,” or the heavy hand of a criminal justice system that already knows who and where they are.

Tracy, the new police chief Jones hired, has touted his use of focused deterrence in driving down the homicide rate in Wilmington, Delaware, and Rosenfeld said St. Louis police have already been using it to a degree. Rosenfeld noted that when homicides here peaked during the pandemic in 2020, home visits under the approach were curtailed. Another focused deterrence pilot here with people convicted of gun crimes but on probation or parole demonstrated a reduction in arrests, Rosenfeld said.

“We have shown in the city of St. Louis that that kind of approach can be effective,” he said. “The effort at the crime summit will be to get a regional commitment to expand that kind of effort.”

A leading proponent of the approach, , a criminologist and author of the 2019 book “Bleeding Out,” will be the keynote speaker at Wednesday’s summit and plans to assist St. Louis leaders in using focused deterrence to reduce its murder rate, Rosenfeld said.

The approach will take years to pay off and needs a sustained commitment from area leaders, Rosenfeld said. The business groups’ pilot paper says research suggests a 10% reduction in homicides per year “is both reasonable and attainable.” They recommend the formation of a regional Office of Violence Prevention that tracks progress and reports to the public.

But Rosenfeld said putting the needed resources into homicide reduction while responding to growing calls from the public for more traffic enforcement and quality-of-life policing will require more personnel.

“These so-called proactive approaches that have been successful both here and elsewhere in reducing crime, both property and violent crime, with a limited supply of resources, namely police officers, that becomes a real issue when officers are simply responding to the radio,” he said. “Whatever can be done should be done to recruit more officers to the city department.”