Gov. Mike Kehoe’s picks for the new board that will govern the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department reflect his primary metric of success for St. Louis: Whether businesses feel safe enough to invest here.
Four of his five appointees to the Board of Police Commissioners are business owners: Brad Arteaga of Arteaga Photos Ltd., BAKM LLC., and Arteaga LLC (a voting member; one-year term); Edward McVey of Maggie O’Brien’s (voting member, three-year term); Chris Saracino of Bartolino’s Hospitality Group (voting member, four-year-term); and Don Brown of Don Brown Chevrolet (non-voting member, four-year term).
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His fifth appointee is Sonya Jenkins-Gray, the city’s former director of personnel who had been hired and then, in a swirl of controversy, fired in March by former mayor Tishaura Jones. She is a voting member with a two-year term—and the only Black member of the board in a city that is 41 percent Black, a fact that did not go unnoticed by certain Democrats. “So much for north-side representation,” wrote Alderman Rasheen Aldridge of the 14th Ward on social media. It wasn’t immediately clear what the applicant pool looked like, though Kehoe did say at the press conference: “We had lots of applications. The interest was significant.”
Filling out the board is Mayor Cara Spencer; the city’s mayor automatically gets a board seat under the new law.
Why It Matters: For residents, the switch to governor-appointed oversight may not feel, for the time being, like any kind of switch at all. That’s because the SLMPD’s overall strategy and day-to-day operations will stay under the control of Police Commissioner Robert Tracy, Kehoe said at the event: “The appointment of this board does not change the crime-fighting and community engagement efforts of the chief.” What remains to be seen is the extent to which the board will affect police funding—and in turn, police presence on the streets—given that the law establishing the new governance already delineates the minimum percentage of general revenue the city must spend on the police force: 22 percent by the end of this year and 25 percent by 2028.
What’s Next: Under the new law, the appointments must be confirmed “with the advice and consent of the Senate.” In practical terms, that means that one or both of the city’s two Democratic senators, Karla May and Steven Roberts, would sponsor the appointees in a future legislative session; the next regular session begins in January. But a press release from the governor says that the board will “begin work immediately, with the assistance of Transition Director Derek Winters, to ensure an orderly and responsible implementation period.”
