IT STARTED AS A DISPUTE over grass clippings.

According to local news reports 29-year-old Allen Waller, who lived in the Glasgow Village area of north St. Louis County, got into an argument on June 6 with the men who cut his neighbor’s lawn, over debris they allegedly kept leaving behind. The dispute quickly escalated. Guns were drawn, shots were fired, and moments later Waller lay dead in his driveway.

Investigators are still working to determine whether Waller’s killer acted in self-defense.

It was the type of killing that is becoming more common, according to Lt. Craig Longworth of the St. Louis County Police Department’s Bureau of Crimes Against Persons.

“What used to be an argument turns into a shooting now. People’s patience level is way down,” Longworth said.

What’s not down, he said grimly, is the number of homicides in St. Louis County: “It goes up every year.”

In 2020 county police — who patrol unincorporated areas of the county as well as municipalities including Jennings, Valley Park and Wildwood that contract with the department — investigated a record 71 homicides, up from 66 in 2019, Longworth said. (Although most of those happened in the county’s patrol areas, some occurred in municipalities where the local police department asks the county police to handle the investigation.)

Based on the caseload so far this year, 2021 could set another record for investigations, Longworth added.

Beyond the city limits

When the subject of crime comes up in the St. Louis area, discussion tends to focus heavily on St. Louis City, an independent municipality separate from the county. This is understandable, given that the number of homicides there spiked to 264 last year from 2019’s already-high figure of 194, guaranteeing another year for the city in a long streak of dubious appearances on lists of the nation’s most violent places.

Crimes in the city are also easier to count, at least in most years, since the data originate from one source: the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.

St. Louis County, by contrast, presents a bewildering thicket of law enforcement jurisdictions. The county police department patrols less than half the county, while some municipal forces cover just one tiny city or village with fewer than 2,000 residents.

But since 2015, St. Louis County as a whole has exhibited its own worrying trend. Crime data provided to McPherson by the Missouri State Highway Patrol, which compiles information from the county police and about 55 separate municipal departments, reveal some sobering statistics:

  • Last year police departments in St. Louis County recorded more than 100 homicides (115 to be exact). This appears to be the first time the county has reached triple digits, based on a review of FBI crime data going back to the 1980s.
  • The county’s homicide rate is still far lower than the city’s, but it was rising fast even before the murderous year of 2020 (see chart 1 above). Over the past three years, the county has averaged about 9.8 murders annually per 100,000 residents. That’s more than two and a half times the annual average in the years 2012 through 2014.
  • Overall violent crime, which in addition to homicides covers rapes, robberies and assaults, has recently been rising at a faster pace in the county than in the city. From 2017 through 2019 the county’s violent crime rate was up 23 percent over the rate in 2012-2014, compared to a rise of 16 percent in the city. (2020 is not included in this calculation, since changes in the way data is reported may have inflated the county’s 2020 figures somewhat. See the “About the crime figures” section at the bottom of this story for more details.)

As in the city, crime in the county tends to be concentrated in a relatively small number of areas. Still, the trends since 2015 suggest that St. Louis County — the metro area’s population anchor with an estimated 994,000 residents, and home to vital economic engines such as Clayton and the I-64/Highway 40 corridor — deserves more of the spotlight when it comes to public discussions concerning crime.

“This isn’t just a St. Louis City issue; it’s an issue that faces the entire region, because it affects the entire region,” said Pat Kelly, executive director of the Municipal League of Metro St. Louis. “I think you’re going to start to see more conversations along those lines, especially as we come out of COVID.”

After Ferguson

Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, told McPherson in an interview: “One of the most important points about the period you’re covering is what happened after Ferguson.”

Rosenfeld was referring to the years following the shooting death in 2014 of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer. Amid national and international media coverage, the incident sparked large vigils and protests led by Black Lives Matter activists in the St. Louis region and other metro areas.

“The rise in St. Louis City and St. Louis County — those increases were not unique to the St. Louis area. I’ve done research showing that crime rates were up in nearly all the big cities,” Rosenfeld said.

The often-ferocious debate over U.S. law enforcement, with some public officials calling for “reimagining” or “defunding” the police,  was reignited again last year after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Crime rates, especially homicides, surged again in cities around the country.

In a March commentary for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that examined St. Louis City’s sharp rise in homicides in 2020, Rosenfeld noted that while crime affects the entire city, half the homicide increase over 2019 was concentrated in just six of the city’s 79 neighborhoods. In those neighborhoods (all of them on the city’s North Side), 40% of the residents are poor and 92% are black, he wrote.

“I think it’s also important to pay some attention to where the increases are occurring in the county,” Rosenfeld told McPherson. He added that he agrees “we need more good information on crime in the county.”

Since the middle of the last decade, when homicides in the county began rising significantly, most of the increase has been driven by incidents that involve personal feuds or domestic disputes involving family members and acquaintances, Longworth told McPherson. Those types of incidents are very difficult for police to prevent.

“We don’t see an increase in any kind of gang activity, robberies or anything like that,” Longworth said. He noted that during 2018 and 2019, there was also an increase in the number of women and children who were killed, mirroring a trend nationwide.

In terms of geography, for the county police department the increase in overall violent crime is driven primarily by the Jennings Precinct and the larger North County Precinct, Longworth said. The former serves the city of Jennings, while the latter serves areas including unincorporated North County, the Glasgow Village and Jamestown neighborhoods, and the cities of Black Jack and Spanish Lake.

Some public officials in St. Louis and elsewhere point to the proliferation of weapons and the easy availability of guns in Missouri as a prime cause of the increased violence.

Rosenfeld, however, says it’s equally important to consider the specific types of firearms, such as automatic and semi-automatic guns capable of firing multiple rounds within seconds.

“The question is, what’s happened to the lethality of the weapons typically found out on the streets?” he said. “There’s good evidence that there are simply more powerful weapons out on the streets and used in homicides. Those weapons…are more likely to end in the victim’s death.”

Bits of good news

Not every jurisdiction is on track for another record-breaking year of crime in 2021.

Last year the North County Police Cooperative, which covers eight municipalities including Pine Lawn, Vinita Park and Wellston, recorded 14 homicides, ranking it second in St. Louis County behind the county’s own department. There were eight homicides in 2019 and 14 in 2018, according to Maj. Ron Martin, assistant chief of police for the cooperative.

So far in 2021 the department has recorded only two homicides in its patrol areas, which include about 17,000 residents in areas comprising about five square miles, Martin said. Both have been “cleared,” with arrest warrants issued for suspects in both cases, Martin said.

“At the end of 2020 things started getting back to normal,” Martin said, citing the gradual easing of restrictions related to the COVID pandemic and the fact that people are now getting out and about more.

While incidents related to factors such as domestic violence are hard to control, there are initiatives police departments are using to try and prevent crime in the first place, such as community-based programs that get neighborhood leaders involved through churches and other institutions, Longworth said.

He also cited the results of a partnership last year between county police and the city’s Metropolitan Police Department that sought to reduce violent crime in Jennings and the nearby Walnut Park West neighborhood in the city. That program was recommended by consulting firm Teneo, which was hired by business leaders to conduct extensive reviews of both departments.

Doug Moore, a spokesman for County Executive Sam Page, said the county Board of Police Commissioners, which Page appoints, has spent considerable time reviewing Teneo’s report on the county police. (That report, released in December, warned of serious racial divides inside the department.)

“Crime is a regional issue and must be tackled as such,” Moore said in an e-mail.

It’s likely that 2020’s current count of 115 homicides for the county will be whittled down slightly. Longworth said that if prosecutors decide following an investigation that a killing by a police officer or a citizen was justified, the county police remove it from their total.

“We’re all seeing the same trends,” he said, referring to departments across the county. “You work together, and you try to come with ideas, and the unfortunate thing is sometimes we come up short.”

About the crime figures

The crime statistics for St. Louis County referenced in this story were provided to McPherson from the Criminal Justice Information Services Division (CJIS) of the Missouri State Highway Patrol. CJIS provides crime information to the public at https://showmecrime.mo.gov/CrimeReporting/CrimeReportingTOPS.html

Since 2001 every law enforcement agency in the state has been required to report its crime data monthly to the Highway Patrol. (Some agencies fall short of this requirement.) The Highway Patrol maintains and analyzes the data, and provides appropriate information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the FBI’s nationwide Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program.

The UCR Program contains databases for both violent crime and property crime. Violent crime categories include murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.

The CJIS Division updates its Show-Me Crime database continuously as it receives updates, corrections, late reports or other edits from law enforcement agencies around the state. The 2005-2020 violent crime statistics for St. Louis County in this story were current as of June 15.

In addition to the St. Louis County Police Department, St. Louis County has about 55 municipal police departments, as well as departments covering St. Louis Lambert International Airport and local colleges and universities. The CJIS statistics include data from any department that has the power of arrest. For the cities of Eureka (mostly in St. Louis County) and Pacific (mostly in Franklin County), the statistics are recorded for the county where the incident/arrest was made, according to the Highway Patrol.

For St. Louis City, McPherson obtained crime data for 2005-2020 from the website of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. Population figures (used to calculate crime rates in the city and county) are annual estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau, which McPherson accessed via the FRED database of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Effective Jan. 1, the FBI required law enforcement agencies to report all data using the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which provides more detail about crime incidents than the previous system. For a particular incident, NIBRS requires the reporting of all separate and distinct offenses (up to 10) within that incident. For example, in an incident involving shots fired at a group and one person being killed, the old system captured only the homicide, while NIBRS captures the homicide and all other assaults. (This example was provided by the Metropolitan Police Department.)

This change makes it likely there will be an increase in the number of violent crimes reported, particularly in the category of assaults. Some police departments transitioned to NIBRS well ahead of the deadline; the St. Louis County Police Department, for example, switched on Jan. 1, 2020. This means the number of violent crimes reported in St. Louis County in 2020 is likely to be slightly inflated compared to previous years.

The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department and the North County Police Cooperative switched to NIBRS effective Jan. 1, 2021. –McP–

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