For five nights, Zach Chasnoff says he called the police asking them to do something about the youths terrorizing his LaSalle Park neighborhood, blasting off fireworks, setting a dumpster aflame, and threatening to take his dog and rape his wife. On the fifth night, Friday, when officers did arrive, it was Chasnoff who they handcuffed.
Chasnoff and his neighbors say the incident has boiled over their frustrations about unruly teens and what they see as an ineffective police response. The police, however, say the incident demonstrates the need for more officers in the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.
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Chasnoff, 48, has lived in the neighborhood just south of downtown for more than six years. On one side are leafy streets of red brick duplexes and Lafayette Square-style townhomes with placards supporting public media, Teslas, and Subarus. Vinyl-sided housing projects are a two-minute walk away. Chasnoff himself lives right on the edge of where one world meets the other. He’s no stranger to city living and is accustomed to its extended July 4 celebrations.
“Our neighborhood, just like most city neighborhoods, has a certain amount of fireworks that go from June to, like, September,” he says. He’s never before called the police about fireworks. “But this year it was different.”
Beginning June 8, neighbors say, there were more kids roaming the streets, shooting off bigger and louder fireworks. “It was like commercial grade, things that were really explosive, M-80s,” Chasnoff says. The neighborhood sounded like a warzone at night, as video taken by a neighbor that week demonstrates. Chasnoff’s neighbor Ben West says youth were firing the explosives not into the sky but at each other, in what seemed to be a rolling series of fireworks battles. “Instead of Roman candles, they’re shooting the large rocket-style fireworks that do starbursts up in the air—but now they’re shooting horizontally at each other, so there’s large explosions on the ground,” West says.
Chasnoff says he called the police Monday, using the non-emergency line, but no officers came. The kids and the fireworks returned Tuesday. Chasnoff again called police, and again no officers responded. The same thing happened Wednesday and Thursday nights, neighbors say. Debra Aerne, who lives near Chasnoff, witnessed the youth shooting fireworks directly at the apartment of a woman in the housing projects who’d complained. “They lit her house up,” one neighbor told Aerne.
Police records show a dozen calls for service that week for fireworks coming from LaSalle Park, starting on that Wednesday and going through Saturday. That tally does not include calls to 911 classified as a more general peace disturbance. Says Chasnoff, “Every night it’s escalating.”
Police spokesman Mitch McCoy says the department, like every big police agency in the country, triages 911 calls as they come in. Officers can’t rush to the scene of fireworks being lit off if they are busy running to the scene of someone who has been shot with a gun.
“That is the reality of what we’re in,” he says. “We have consistently shared that we need more police officers.”
He adds that data shows the SLMPD on average arrives at the scene of “priority one” incidents–like a shooting–in about five minutes.
Hear more about this story on The 314 Podcast.
Things came to a head in LaSalle Park on Friday, with what had been a group of about 10 kids causing trouble swelling to 30 to 40 kids, Aerne says. The pedestrian mall at 10th and Hickory—more or less the line between the projects and the nicer red brick abodes—was clouded with smoke from the fireworks. Residents sought to reason with the youth and ask them to move to a block without homes on it, but they didn’t listen. Two homes were shot at, and Aerne believes the youth used fireworks to mask the sound of gunshots. “It was much more violent, there was just a lot more happening,” Chasnoff says. Two neighbors confirm that they called the police multiple times, as did Chasnoff.
About an hour later, as Chasnoff and his wife were outside their house making sure no one shot fireworks at it, two officers in an SUV pulled into their alley. Chasnoff says he flagged them down and directed them towards the heart of the explosions. “This has got to get shut down, because someone is seriously going to get hurt,” he recalls telling them. The officers said they’d take a look.
But Aerne says they merely drove through the neighborhood with their sirens on, at which point the kids briefly dispersed. Almost as soon as they drove away, the bedlam returned. Kids set a dumpster on fire. Chasnoff says that a group of kids at one point surrounded his wife, told her they were going to kill him, rape her, break into homes, and steal dogs—“all kinds of crazy stuff.” Chasnoff had retrieved a gun at this point and showed the teens he had it in his waistband. They backed off.
Chasnoff admits he was in a “very elevated emotional state” when, five days after his first call to the non-emergency number and two hours after the interaction with the police in the alley, officers again arrived. Chasnoff believed the two officers were the same ones who’d driven off without taking action two hours prior. He immediately started yelling at them: “Thanks a fucking lot for nothing.”
That’s when it seems as if every neighbor began recording the scene with their phones.
Chasnoff turned his back to the officers and headed towards his house. Someone from public housing shouted at the police to “tase his ass.” An officer pointed a taser at Chasnoff and told him to get on the ground, but while the taser buzzed, it didn’t fire. Chasnoff kneeled down as instructed. An officer cuffed him. “Way to go,” said Chasnoff.
“I just showed up,” the officer said. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
“Yeah, you just showed up.”
The officer said that police only have four people in a district with 80 calls. “But we’re not doing our job, right?” he asked. “We’re the lowest guys on the totem pole. What do you want us to do?”
“Your job.” Chasnoff said, adding, “Like I get every day and do my job.”
The officer asked what he did; Chasnoff replied that he owns his own painting company. “Can I come work for you?” the officer asked. Chasnoff said sure. The officer said, “Thank God.” He added, “You can’t just come up here and start screaming!” After some back and forth, Chasnoff calmed down.
But police continued to process paperwork on his detention. While he knelt, handcuffed, and officers started writing him a ticket, another neighbor approached the officer. “You’re spending time on the wrong guy,” he said quietly. Another neighbor sought to explain that they all had information on the fireworks situation if only the officers would listen. “This is the wrong battle because we’ve had our neighborhood set on fire,” one woman explained.
Chasnoff comes from a family of people who want to abolish the police. His father, John, was a well-known activist. The younger Chasnoff, however, is described by people who know him as working well with police in his area and trying to bridge the neighborhood’s divides. Last year, he and artist Simiya Sudduth completed a mural in the neighborhood, funded by an ARPA for the Arts grant. Chasnoff and his wife, Amanda, are leaders in the LaSalle Park Neighborhood Association and worked with Purina, whose headquarters are nearby, to have high-definition security cameras installed in the area. But by that point Friday, he acknowledges, he’d reached his breaking point.
When police uncuffed Chasnoff that night instead of arresting him, neighbors thought that was the end of it. Instead, on Monday, officers hand-delivered a summons. He must report to court on August 25. The charge: disturbing the peace.
Overall, the neighbors agree that Chasnoff should have been calmer when approaching the officers (although they also note the officers escalated things pretty quickly by threatening to tase him). But they’re stunned that police made time to issue him a summons when they’ve seemingly ignored the five-day barrage of fireworks, gunshots, and street battles that rendered their neighborhood almost unlivable.
They note that the St. Louis Housing Authority has a roughly $1.2 million annual contract with police to provide on-duty officers to patrol its development in LaSalle Park. If the department doesn’t have the manpower, it’s under no obligation to provide the patrols (and then police don’t invoice for the work). But the Housing Authority, which is federally funded, has failed to redirect those funds to a different security provider, even as conditions in the neighborhood have seemingly grown worse in recent months.
Neighbors want the housing authority to secure the environment. They’d also like to see the curfew that the mayor put over downtown be extended a few blocks into their neighborhood
Jami Cox Antwi, the neighborhood’s alderwoman, went to a neighborhood meeting a few days after Chasnoff’s detainment. “Neighbors were upset, justifiably upset,” she says. She sees extending the curfew as very much on the table. Having kids as young as seven out without parents late into the night, she says, “is just something that the city should not even allow or support.” But she adds that curfew enforcement is something that requires police enforcement.
LaSalle Park residents are proud of the way their neighborhood has made friendships that cut across income levels. They note that not just middle-class homeowners but tenants in the housing authority are being terrorized by the fireworks battles. And they think proactive law enforcement could change the situation: They believe their neighborhood is being flooded with fireworks by an unauthorized dealer who brings in pickup trucks full of the explosives to sell to kids. They’ve photographed his car. They feel certain the security cameras in the neighborhood would document what’s going on.
But without a good relationship with the police, and more support from federal and local officials, they’re beginning to despair.
“We have invested a ton of time and money in this place,” says Aerne. “You know, nobody wants to move. But I think a few will after this week.”
In the early hours of Sunday morning, just over a day after Chasnoff’s detainment at LaSalle Park, a man was shot in the same area. The high-definition security cameras funded by Purina captured images of the likely shooters, dressed in all black and wearing masks. Around 8 a.m. Sunday, in the light of the following morning, different cameras captured one still in the same clothes, walking through the pedestrian courtyard back toward the housing projects, a gun ripped casually at his side.
The police incident report says that officers arrived around 2 a.m. on Rutger Street, about a block from where Chasnoff lives, to find an adult man who had been shot and was suffering non-life threatening injuries. He said he’d heard fireworks and confronted the people shooting them off. The firework shooters then opened fire, with a gun, on him.
Hear more about this story on The 314 Podcast.
