St. LOUIS — Across from the Little Explorer’s Learning Center,
diagonal to a crumbling house where heroin dealers and hangers-on often
mill about, a garland of teddy bears adorns a telephone pole, a memorial
to the latest victim to fall here at one of this city’s deadliest corners.
The victim was a 27-year-old man shot dead on Dec. 23, one of the
last casualties in a year of surging gun violence. “It’s nothing to get a
firearm,” said Michael Shelton, who was badly wounded by gunfire eight
years ago at this same corner, in the bleak Wells-Goodfellow
neighborhood of north St. Louis, and is now determined to stay out of
trouble. “I don’t know anybody who doesn’t carry or have easy access to
one.”
Murder rates have fallen sharply in most of the country. But St.
Louis is one of a few major cities, including Memphis and Washington,
where the number of homicides jumped last year. It is also one of
several cities, including Baltimore, Detroit, Gary, Ind., and New Orleans, where violent crime, concentrated in low-income minority neighborhoods, has remained stubbornly high, though down from the crack-driven peaks of the early 1990s.
The start of the new year was equally violent. On Jan. 15, shaken by
six murders in five shootings overnight, the city’s mayor, Francis Slay,
called for more police, more surveillance cameras, more certain
penalties for carriers of illegal guns and stronger gun laws, declaring:
“Crime is the absolute No. 1 priority in the City of St. Louis.”
A seventh person was killed on the afternoon of the mayor’s news
conference. Why St. Louis suffered a major setback in a year in which
many cities saw further progress is hotly debated. By all accounts, the
proliferation of guns among young men here is beyond control, turning
petty insults, neighborhood rivalries and drug disputes into lethal
melees of attack and reprisal that can occur in waves. There was a 33
percent rise in homicides last year, to 159, compared with 120 in 2013
in this city of 318,000.
Jennifer M. Joyce, the city’s circuit attorney, or prosecutor, an
elected position, complains that in St. Louis, the illegal possession of
a gun is too often “A Crime Without a Consequence,” making it difficult
to stop confrontation from turning lethal. At the same time, deeper
social roots of violence such
as addiction and unemployment continue unchecked. And city officials
also cite what they call a “Ferguson effect,” an increase in crime last
year as police officers were diverted to control protests after a white
officer shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager in the
nearby suburb on Aug. 9.
The violence is not uniform. Nearly all the increase in murders in
St. Louis last year occurred in eight neighborhoods, said Richard
Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. The
largest jump was in Wells-Goodfellow, a desolate zone where more than a
third of the houses are abandoned, liquor stores and churches are
sprinkled among boarded-up shops and older residents fear stepping
outside at night. In this neighborhood of fewer
than 6,000 residents, 14 people were murdered in 2014, up from seven in
2013, for a per-person homicide rate five times the city average.
The mayor and the police chief, Sam Dotson, ascribe much of the rise
in crime to the extended confrontations that followed the shooting in
Ferguson and the failure of the grand jury to indict the white officer,
Darren Wilson. Normal patrolling of neighborhoods was interrupted,
officers became tired and frustrated, and there was an intangible
emboldening of criminals, these officials say.
Further raising tensions, racial distrust in a city that is half
African-American and deeply segregated has intensified since the
Ferguson shooting and the protests that followed. In late January, a
hearing to discuss proposals for a civilian review board turned into a
shouting match when police officers rose in opposition.
City officials are calling for the hiring of 160 more officers, with a
special effort to bring more minority officers onto a 1,255-member
force that is 35 percent black. In 2012, with crime in apparent decline,
the city lets the police force shrink by 80 officers. Now, an
overstretched department is forced to pick one neighborhood at a time to
flood with officers. Last month, Chief Dotson even asked the state
highway patrol if it could lend a dozen men to help watch downtown
streets; the agency declined.
As he waits for the city to find money for new hires, Chief Dotson
has required the department’s 60 detectives to wear uniforms in public
as a way to increase the visible police presence. Criminologists and Ms.
Joyce, the prosecutor, play down the effect of Ferguson on violent crime, noting that murders were rising well before August, though Mr. Rosenfeld sai.
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