Mayor Lyda Krewson announced today that city police chief Sam Dotson will retire after four years in the position.
“We want to move in a new direction,” Krewson said of the mutual decision, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “He wants to be successful and wants the city to be successful. He offered to retire.”
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The Post also reports that Dotson’s retirement is effective immediately, but he will serve as a consultant to the city for a year.
Dotson, who is 47, was voted police chief by the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners in December of 2012. Before that, he served as former mayor Francis Slay’s operations director and coordinated several city services, including streets and building inspections. He has worked on the police force for 23 years.
Ahead of the mayoral Democratic primary in March, former alderman Antonio French and city treasurer Tishaura Jones both said if elected, they would fire Dotson. The former police chief also briefly threw his hat in the ring for mayor last fall, but dropped out after Slay expressed his opposition, saying he should resign as police chief if he were to pursue a campaign for mayor.
The announcement comes on Krewson’s first full day in office as the mayor of St. Louis. In her inauguration speech Tuesday, she spoke to a crowd gathered inside City Hall about many issues facing the city, including public safety.
“We must find the will and the resources for more summer jobs and more recreation programs,” she said. “We must also find a way to a more competitively paid, staffed, and trained police department, who can rebuild the frayed relationships between law enforcement and in our community.”
