Part I
Tishaura O. Jones—mayor of St. Louis, first Black woman to hold her office, official with the most sway over a historic windfall of public money and, therefore, the region’s trajectory—is wearing flip-flops. She’s trekking across the Danforth Campus of Washington University to give a speech. It’s a schlep. Young people in backpacks drift past in the late-September heat and seem not to recognize her. At roughly their age, Jones had aspired to be a model. She even did some freeze-modeling for Helzberg Diamonds at Crestwood Plaza. To this day, as mayor, she always comes dialed in on hair, makeup, and attire, which for this event means a dress that’s fire-engine red: her favorite color. Arriving at the Holmes Lounge, she switches into leopard-print heels and walks up to a podium to face an audience of students. She’s about to unspool for them the threads of her life and mayoralty. She has done this elsewhere. But unlike much of her public commentary, this will be entirely improvised.
“Good evening, WashU!” she says in the lofted pitch with which she often greets groups. “I want to thank the Gephardt Institute for inviting me—lil’ ol’ me—to speak to you this evening.”
Get a fresh take on the day’s top news
Subscribe to the St. Louis Daily newsletter for a smart, succinct guide to local news from award-winning journalists Sarah Fenske and Ryan Krull.
This isn’t the Jones of social media, where for years she relished lighting up critics—particularly Republicans—and sometimes acted, in her own words, “petty.” (Since 2022, she has lain low on X—formerly known as Twitter—in part because of personal-safety concerns, she’ll tell the students.) Away from screens and in real life, those close to her insist, Jones is more of a policy nerd with a visceral need to feel prepared. This need often translates, during speeches, into reading aloud from written texts, which can come off sounding like she’s reading aloud from written texts. Talking to strangers in general is a skill that Jones has had to work at, observes Anne Schweitzer, the 1st Ward alderwoman who managed one of Jones’ political campaigns. “She can be hard to get to know because she’s guarded,” says Schweitzer, “but just put a baby in front of her.” Indeed, at this event, Jones has a few dozen twentysomethings in front of her, and she’s relaxed: no iPad, just a soft, conversational tenor, gestures, facial expressions. Tishaura Jones the storyteller.
She tells of the first two government roles she had: state rep and city treasurer. She tells of how, by 2017, she wanted to be mayor “so bad.” Owning such ambition feels like a departure from her 2017 TEDx talk, when she had referred to herself as “a reluctant leader.” She’s now in her eighth campaign for her third major public office. (She maintains that, in each case, someone had to persuade her to run.)
Jones reveals to the WashU students a religiosity that’s rare for progressives: “My plan—at least the one I told God—is that I want to be here for two to three terms.” She also reveals, on the subject of her post-city-hall life, a candor that’s rare for politicians: “Gonna find myself some nice lil’ cushy job and hopefully take care of my [as yet] unborn grandbabies at that time.”
The topic she explores most fully, though, is her current job—and she feels its gravity. There’s no such thing as a booming metro with a collapsed core. The success of the St. Louis region does appear to hinge on the success of the city, and Jones’ oft-stated maxim on achieving the latter is this: The city cannot succeed if over half of it is left to fail. As political rhetoric, it’s brilliant: short and sharp, summoning a history of racial injustice. It also elides some nuance. “Over half” refers to the geographic areas of the North Side and southeast city, both of which are predominantly Black, but that doesn’t mean that all Black St. Louisans are failing. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, about a third of the city’s Black households earn above the citywide median income.
Still, there’s something else Jones often mentions that shows clearly through the census data: racial disparities. The ratio of white to Black median income—1.8 to 1—is only one example. Jones believes that such disparities stem from a history of public and private entities actively restricting Black economic freedom, especially in homeownership, and that the difference compounds over generations. (Her family history, in fact, illustrates some of this.) She blames “intentional disinvestment” as well—that is, the exodus of tax-paying residents from the city since 1950 and the “status quo politicians” who “failed to stem the tide.”
She makes this argument amid a lively national debate among Black authors and academics about what’s holding back struggling Black neighborhoods. Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example, suggest it’s racism past and present, as Coates has written: “There’s never been a single thing wrong with black people that the total destruction of white supremacy would not fix.” John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes, meanwhile, consider that to be an oversimplification that understates the cultural agency of those neighborhoods. (McWhorter, for instance, has advocated for preventing more teenage pregnancies through contraception.) Wherever the roots of the disparities may lie, they do persist—and Jones has set forth her own solution in her administration’s “Roadmap to Economic Justice”: Give low-income Black residents resources. This, in her view, will address “racial disparities in real estate, business, and employment.” It’s not only the moral response, she argues, but also the prudent one, because the lower any neighborhood sinks, the higher the cost to taxpayers as city hall manages the fallout.
What sets Jones apart is that she has money to begin testing her hypothesis. Whereas previous mayors faced anemic budgets decade after decade, Jones is now the city official with the most influence over two huge pots of funding: nearly $500 million in federal pandemic-stimulus funds from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and $250 million from the city’s legal settlement with the NFL over the Rams’ departure. Thanks to these and a few other “unprecedented resources,” she tells the WashU students, “I’m at a point where I can actually keep my promises.” The future of her career and her city will unfold from her ability to do so.
It’s a “historic amount of money” for city hall, Schweitzer says. “If you mess that up, no one’s ever going to forgive you for it.”
A white boy called her the N-word to her face. Jones was a fifth-grader: lanky, nearsighted, crooked teeth. She had just transferred from the city’s school district to Affton’s as part of the region’s voluntary desegregation program. The boy was her classmate. She rode the bus home to the North Side and told her dad, Virvus Jones. Soon thereafter, Virvus strode into the district, and the boy was suspended. (During an interview inside Room 200, Jones told me this story and its epilogue: That decades after the incident, she crossed paths with this classmate, who told her how proud he was of her career, and she gave him a hug.)
The incident occurred in 1982. Virvus was an alderman then. Tishaura visited him at City Hall. She’d whirl in his office chair or peek from the gallery as he debated colleagues down on the floor. With his bow ties, mustache, and charisma, Virvus was finding, in the scrappy machinery of local governance, his natural habitat. After years of activism, he had become, in 1981, the 27th Ward’s first Black alderman. He doubted that his daughter would ever have skin thick enough for this game. But he enrolled her at Affton, he says, to at least prove to her that she needn’t fear white people, and vice versa.
Tishaura woke up early to catch the bus to Affton. One fellow student, Monique Epps, recalls today how Jones was “always well-put-together: long ponytails, bows and ribbons, matched from head to toe.” Behind that appearance, Epps says, was someone she remembers as “the sweetest, most supportive mom”: Tishaura’s mother, Laura.
Laura came from a huge family—and its journey is one that today’s Mayor Jones mentions often to illustrate the arc of the Black middle class. Laura was the 13th child of migrants from the Jim Crow South. (According to family lore, the Mississippi-born patriarch, Eddie Whitfield, a butcher by trade, had nearly been lynched for talking back to a white customer.) Once settled in St. Louis, the Whitfields rented a home on the near North Side. A wave of race-based deed restrictions—created over a half century and enforced by the private real-estate industry—had hemmed Black families into that area. (Catty-corner from the Whitfields’ home in 1946, for example, sat a parcel whose owner had agreed to not “sell, convey, lease, or rent to a negro or negroes.”) But then, as U.S. Supreme Court decisions chipped away at those restrictions and white residents flocked to the county, the city’s market opened. In 1956, the Whitfields bought a three-story house in the racially mixed Wells/Goodfellow neighborhood. The “big house,” as they called it, hosted Virvus and Laura’s wedding in 1967. After Tishaura was born in 1972, she spent countless hours there scampering with cousins. She would later say that “the home became the center of my family’s universe.” But by that time, the middle-class white homes had emptied out; the middle-class Black homes were starting to as well. The home’s appraised value fell.
Virvus’ political star, meanwhile, kept rising. In 1986, he was appointed assessor, and in 1988, comptroller. The latter post placed him alongside the mayor and aldermanic president on the powerful three-person board of estimate and apportionment, which sets the city’s budget and approves contracts. As he ascended, Tishaura moved up through Affton High School, where she made the cheerleading squad. Epps, who was in the class above and had been Affton’s first Black cheerleader, recalls Jones as a go-getter who was unusually opinionated for her age. “I do remember there being some confidence [in her] from who her dad was,” Epps says, “but I also think she took some flak because people had strong opinions about him. So she had to develop that little bit of a tough exterior to keep people off her.”
Tishaura also discovered, during her senior year, a facility with math. One counselor suggested she look at historically Black colleges and universities. These were the days of the sitcom A Different World and Spike Lee’s movie School Daze, both set at HBCUs. While Jones loved Affton, she says, she was ready for a break from “a white environment.” She chose Hampton University in Virginia. Her parents moved her there in 1990.
Over the next four years, while Tishaura was earning a degree in finance out east, Virvus was back in St. Louis clamoring to boost the city’s minority contracting—and he succeeded, according to the book St. Louis Politics by Lana Stein. Jim Shrewsbury, who served as aldermanic president after losing to Virvus in one race, sums up his former rival this way: “He was brilliant. Very skillful. But he was dishonest. The personal flaws kept him from being the great politician he could’ve been.”
On June 26, 1995, Virvus was federally indicted. A grand jury accused him of, among other things, spending more than $300,000 in campaign funds for personal uses, which included expenses for Tishaura (clothing, travel, a television, college tuition). Minutes after the news broke, Virvus reportedly emerged from his office with a hammy “Ta-daaa!” and a grin for the press. He called the charges “an absolute political witch hunt.” At his side stood his recently graduated 23-year-old daughter.
A few months later, Virvus pleaded guilty to tax fraud. He admitted to using campaign money for personal purchases and was sentenced to a year in prison. “I’m not a victim here, and it’s important for people to know that,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “But I think my record as comptroller will stand the test of time.”
Recently, over coffee at Kaldi’s on Demun, Virvus stood by those statements. His eyes ignited as he relived certain minority-contracting fights, and he drew a distinction between himself and his daughter: “She has some of the same radical ideas, but her approach is less of a sledgehammer than mine was.” On X, where today he frequently levels accusations of racism, he may sometimes be acting as her sledgehammer. Last year, in response to a public records request by KSDK, her office released a group text thread that included her, Virvus, and Richard Callow, their friend and longtime political insider. In the thread, the mayor urged her father to “correct” one of her political rivals on social media. (Virvus denied that he attacks people on the mayor’s behalf.) But the existence of the thread was no surprise: Father and daughter talk almost daily—sometimes about city business, but also because he picks up her teenage son, Aden, from school.
Asked how she felt living through the events of 1995, Mayor Jones says it was “a real dark time for my family” but emphasizes that her dad pleaded out to avoid a public trial that might have made her family “more embarrassed than we already were.”
On the night of Virvus’ plea, in 1995, he met up with friends and relatives at a club Tishaura had opened in the Central West End; she was trying to break into the hospitality business. The club’s name: Sugar’s Place. “Sugar” was Tishaura’s family nickname. It originated in a poem that Laura had written, referring to the little daughter in her care as “sugarplum.”
In the late ’90s, those caretaking roles reversed: Laura was diagnosed with cancer, and because she and Virvus were separated, Tishaura moved in to help her. Meanwhile, Tishaura was also trying to manage a heap of credit-card debt; Sugar’s Place had folded in less than a year. In 1999, she declared personal bankruptcy. In 2000, her mom died.
“I’d fallen down,” she’d later say. “It took me 10 years to stand back up.”
On a warm day in 2002, Jones walked up the brick front steps at 4115 Flora—the same house in Shaw, coincidentally, where Mayor Alfonso Cervantes had once lived—to explore an opportunity. The Missouri Democratic Party’s ward committeewoman, Lisa Suggs, wanted to step down and be replaced by an African-American woman. Suggs learned that Jones lived nearby. The two sat down in the backyard with some others to chat about the prospect of Jones entering politics.
Jones was 29. She’d just earned a master’s in health administration from Saint Louis University. She had a job at the nonprofit People’s Health Centers and was rebuilding her credit. Her father’s experience had left her wary. She did have plenty of political opinions, even if Virvus saw her as a bit removed from the grimy details of local government. He’d tease her and her friends as “the Cosby kids” when he’d see them “with their $100 jeans, ordering pizza and drinking lattes, talking about the problems of the world.” Still, Jones showed flickers of interest in the committeewoman spot, Suggs recalls.
“She understood the politics of the ward organization, and she knew who the players were,” Suggs says. “I thought she was really polished, clearly really smart.” Jones got the nod to finish Suggs’ term, then ran unopposed in 2004.
That same year, Jones traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Boston. One evening, she strolled back to the hotel with Robin Wright-Jones (no relation) who, as the state representative of Missouri’s 63rd district, was about halfway to her term limit. Wright-Jones turned to the young woman and said, “You should run for my seat.” Jones was “a little surprised,” Wright-Jones recalls. “I’d say pleasantly surprised.”
Jones resolved to go for it—that is, until December 2006, when she discovered that she was pregnant. “It was unplanned,” she would later say, “and by a dad that I really wasn’t that interested in.” In September 2007, she gave birth to Aden.
Initially, Jones abandoned her campaign. Rodney Hubbard, who was then a state rep, says bringing her back was tough. “It ain’t easy running for office,” Hubbard says. But he and others persuaded her to stay in the race. In the summer of 2008, Jones would leave work, retrieve Aden from daycare, plop him in a stroller, hand him a snack, and push him down the sidewalks. “Knocking on doors gets you votes,” she would later say. “What I found out at the time is babies get you more votes.”
She won. She brought Aden on the three-week statewide bus tour for newly elected legislators. “He was toddling a little bit,” remembers Republican Scott Dieckhaus, “and at a couple stops, he’d get away and she’d have to chase him down.”
Dieckhaus became one of Jones’ best friends in Jefferson City. During late nights inside the capitol, they and Democrat Jason Kander would compete to see who could incorporate the most Tupac Shakur lyrics into their floor speeches. Jones rose to the position of assistant minority floor leader. She got credit for helping push through legislation that reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses. Dieckhaus says Jones also did crucial legwork on a different law that both expanded the footprint of charter schools and made them more accountable. The city’s teachers union opposed it. Jones told the press it was “very unfortunate” that Republicans were advocating hardest for quality schools. “If it’s going to benefit children in the end,” she said, “then I really don’t care who the allies are.”
Then came Jones’ 2012 run for city treasurer, which promised both a higher salary and less travel. That meant more resources for, and time with, Aden. But in that cultural moment, she has said, “I couldn’t lead with that.” Instead, she led with calls for reform.
The city treasurer’s office gets much of its clout from an unlikely source: parking. Over three decades, the incumbent treasurer, Larry Williams, had amassed power by wangling the authority to issue bonds, which enabled him to build parking garages, which enabled annual parking revenue to swell to $15 million, some of which he controlled. Yet in September 2011, a scandal broke: A parking worker was federally indicted and accused of being a “ghost employee”—that is, collecting a city paycheck without doing any work.
Williams was never charged, but he chose not to run for re-election. Jones said during her campaign that the office “focuses too much on parking,” and that “I’m running for treasurer, not parking attendant.”
Yet Jones edged out three other candidates, won the race—and came to appreciate those discretionary funds. As city treasurer, she used them to launch a program in 2015 that automatically set up savings accounts for public-school kids and seeded each with $50. Her idea: nudge kids and parents to pick up financial-literacy skills and save for college or vocational school. In 2023, an investigation by the nonprofit River City Journalism Fund would find that of the 23,000 accounts created, only 15 percent of them had grown past the seed level, and 12 percent of parents had opted in to unlock incentives for school attendance. But Jones won praise in the program’s early days, earning a standing ovation for a TEDx talk about it. The Post-Dispatch’s editorial board wrote in 2015 that Jones’ program held “promise” and that she was doing “a splendid job” as treasurer, having upgraded parking meters to be payable through the ParkLouie mobile app.
Then the praise gave way to scorn.
In April 2016, Francis G. Slay, the longest-serving mayor in city history, announced that he wouldn’t run again. Seven Democrats filed to succeed him, Jones among them. Over the next year, she became the target of various critical editorials, including one about how she’d taken 50 trips in her first term as treasurer—many obviously connected to her job, a few less obviously so—and had reported $27,000 in expenses, which were reimbursed by taxpayers. Her travel expenses were only public record because she chose to report them that way; other city hall officials handled theirs differently. Jones protested that she was being “singled out.” The Post’s editorial board retorted: “This is not your money. Don’t be indignant when asked to explain what you’re asking us to pay for.”
But Jones bristled. On February 6, she declined to meet with the editorial board, flouting their endorsement. Instead, she issued a seething missive. She wasn’t above criticism, she wrote, but the past year’s editorials were “thinly veiled racism and preference for the status-quo past.” Her letter went viral. Within a few days, her campaign collected nearly $40,000. It wasn’t enough: On March 7, Lyda Krewson clinched the primary (and thus the mayoralty) with 32 percent of the vote. Jones came in a close second.
She suggested an explanation four months later at the Urban League’s national conference: Multiple Black candidates on the ballot had split the Black vote. “We need to support each other and, again, stop running against each other,” she said during a panel discussion. “We need to all get in a room and say, You’re going to run here, and you’re going to run there…and put people in office that are going to represent us.”
Her loss triggered some “soul-searching,” she would later say. “I was gonna pack up my baby, and we were gonna head somewhere—out of St. Louis—because I felt like I wasn’t supposed to be here.” But then she felt “a calling to stay” and do the work that she believed God had called her to do.
A blessing for Jones arrived in the form of Proposition D: a measure passed by city voters in 2020 that made elections nonpartisan and enshrined a run-off election between any two primary candidates with the most votes. In effect, that guaranteed Black voters a second and final chance in each contest to coalesce around a single candidate—the very thing that might’ve enabled a Jones victory a few years earlier.
In the 2021 mayor’s race, Jones advanced to the runoff to face 20th Ward Alderwoman Cara Spencer. With little ideological distance between their platforms—both agreed on violent crime as the top issue, for example, and a “focused deterrence” policy to address it—the race got personal. And ugly.
Spencer painted Jones as a “pay-to-play” politician. The Missouri state auditor had looked at Jones’ office in 2019 and found “noncompliance with legal provisions” and “the need for improvement in management practices and procedures,” specifically in procurement. When the pandemic hit, in March 2020, Jones pressed pause on parking collection and enforcement, extending it through May. But during that period, her office began paying a collection-and-enforcement contractor hundreds of thousands of dollars, despite that work being paused—and both the contractor, Hudson and Associates, and its owner, Sheila Hudson, happened to be among Jones’ biggest campaign donors. Jones denied wrongdoing, and her team said at the time that the three-year contract would save taxpayers more than a half million dollars. But her critics wouldn’t let it drop, and in the 2021 election, neither would Spencer.
Jones had her own criticisms. When Spencer posted a photo of herself on social media at Tripe City, a North Side soul-food eatery (she said she’d been invited by its owner), Jones weighed in: “Bonus points if Cara a) knows what a tripe sandwich is and b) ever ate one.” A week later, Spencer told KMOX that she feared the city might go the way of East St. Louis, where her mom had grown up, and where (in her telling) elected leaders had responded to fiscal troubles with service reductions that triggered an exodus of residents. Jones, alluding to the fact that many of those leaders were African American, told KMOX: “I think that is a dog whistle… To scare [voters] against voting for a Black woman.” (Spencer called that “phony outrage.”) There were reasons to be skeptical that Spencer would engage in such tactics: She had a progressive platform, had advocated on behalf of a majority-Black ward for six years, and had good relationships with Black aldermen. But the benefit of the doubt does not blossom in tight city races—and Jones held fast to the accusation.
In the end, Jones’ campaign seemed to resonate. On April 6, voters lifted her to the mayoralty with 51.7 percent of ballots cast. In some respects, this followed old racial patterns: Jones excelled in the predominantly Black wards of the North Side and southeast (including Spencer’s 20th Ward), while Spencer did well in the mostly white wards of the southwest and much of the central corridor. Yet the majority-white, progressive strongholds of Shaw and Tower Grove South turned out to be Jones’ base of support.
Snowflakes fell on City Hall on April 20, when Jones became the first Black woman to be sworn in as mayor. “I am standing on stone that was not built for me,” she said during her inauguration speech in the rotunda. “I am going to walk into an office that my ancestors could never have imagined me working in. But I’m here.” A central theme in her address was racial disparity: in safety, in prosperity, in health. Maybe, given her city’s history, her family’s history, her personal history, and her personality, race was an unavoidable subject. Either way, she signaled that she wouldn’t be avoiding it.
But in tackling racial disparities, what can a mayor—with all the constraints of that office—really do?
Part II
St. Louis’ murder rate may be high, but the violence is also highly concentrated: Homicides cluster on the North Side and in southeast city. Yet in trying to make those majority-Black areas safer and, thus, shrink safety disparities, Jones faces a dilemma: Two key groups of her supporters—the residents of those neighborhoods, on the one hand, and the progressive activists who powered her victory, on the other—commonly disagree on how she should proceed. And she can ill afford to alienate either one.
She has already disappointed Mike Milton, the activist who built up the local presence of The Bail Project and founded the Freedom Community Center, both criminal-justice nonprofits. Milton helped with Jones’ 2021 mayoral run—even rang doorbells for her—when he was a core player in pushing to close “The Workhouse,” the city’s medium-security institution that the legal nonprofit ArchCity Defenders claimed in a federal court petition was beset by rodents, mold, extreme temperatures, and overcrowding. (The city has denied those claims.) Milton nodded in approval when Jones pledged to close The Workhouse within 100 days of taking office—and at how, in June 2021, she followed through. But problems ensued once she did.
Across Tucker Boulevard from City Hall is the municipality’s smaller detention facility, the City Justice Center. The CJC was already tense when Jones was sworn in: four disturbances in four months, two in which detainees had smashed windows and set fires. Once Jones’ administration consolidated all detainees in the CJC, a fifth disturbance erupted there, so some were sent back to The Workhouse. Meanwhile, partly because of the closure, federal officials had to bus hundreds of their own detainees who’d been in city facilities to Kentucky and Indiana, far from their attorneys and family. One observer on Twitter quipped: “Can someone explain to me again why closing The Workhouse was a good thing?”
Since that time, the CJC has seen several inmate deaths and one hostage situation. Jones appointed Milton to a new civilian jail-oversight board, but he and other members complained that her administration blocked their access to data and to the jail itself. Milton quit the board in December—the third member to do so. Despite Jones’ “progressive campaign promises,” he wrote in this resignation letter, “we’ve faced constant obstruction.” (Jones said through a spokesperson that Milton missed training required for board members.) But had she lost his support? “I think she might’ve lost a lot of us,” Milton says. “I hope that she can turn this around.”
The more upstream philosophical split between Jones and progressive activists, though, is over the role of police. Five months into her term, after several violent incidents, Jones walked into Kiener Plaza and, surrounded by electeds and business leaders, announced she’d beef up patrols downtown. In response, Milton’s group co-signed a statement with 11 others condemning her move. (This was not a trivial disagreement: Another signatory was Action St. Louis, which, according to the Missouri Independent, had “knocked on 25,000 doors, made more than 230,000 calls and sent 100,000 text messages” to help get Jones to her 51.7 percent win.) The groups applauded the fact that she’d cut 98 vacant police officer positions out of the budget and diverted that money to affordable housing and victim support, but they called on her to “repudiate the idea that more police equals more safety.”
Except plenty of residents in high-crime areas do subscribe to that idea—a fact that Milton chalks up to their unfamiliarity with alternatives, such as street-level peacemakers.
“Police is all they know,” he says. “What they really want is for someone to intervene.” The mayor, though, must meet people where they are, which she did in a literal sense on April 23, in a North Side gym, for a Cabinet in the Community event. And during the question-and-answer segment, she got an earful.
“I’m constantly hearing gunshots,” complained one resident into the microphone, asking: If the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department deploys more officers, “will they walk a beat like they used to, back in the day, or just cruise through the neighborhood?” Said another resident: “How are we ever gonna get the community together when we have drug activity that’s causing problems…. [and] when they call the police, it’s like everything’s over with. What is it gonna take for us to get better service?” Said another resident, in reference to a nuisance property: “We can show you and tell you where all this stuff is happening, but you gotta come to the rescue… We only have six or eight policemen working in that area at a time, [so] I know it’s gonna be hard.” Said another resident about a shooting that she and her neighbors had witnessed: “We call the police over and over again, and they come a half an hour later.”
Jones assured them all that Robert Tracy—the police commissioner whom she’d picked from outside the city, a first for the department—was trying to hire more cops. Jones also asserted that she did, in fact, care about the police. This came in response to being baited by Maicoll Gomez, brother of Valentina Gomez, the hard-right candidate for Missouri secretary of state who’d put out a campaign commercial torching LGBTQ books. “You do not back law enforcement,” Gomez scolded. Every city with a “diversity mayor,” he said, has been destroyed.
Jones cut him off. “Ask any of the law enforcement here if I back law enforcement,” she replied, gesturing toward officers in the corner. “They got the biggest raise in 20 years under my administration… Homicides have come down 40 percent since I became mayor in 2021. We are safer.” Gomez persisted; she wasn’t having it. “You can excuse yourself.” She grabbed a bottle of water, made eye contact with someone in the first few rows, flashed that person a can-you-believe-this? face, then took a swig.
One of the last residents to speak that night was Precious Jones (no relation). She’d lost her son to gun violence in 2022, she said. “My concern is the narrative being pushed out that our violence and homicides are going down tremendously,” the mother said. “I don’t see that.”
The mayor’s tone was softer. “My condolences for your loss,” she said. “Since becoming mayor, I’ve lost four relatives to gun violence—one in Chicago and three here. And nothing can replace the holes you feel”—she flutters an open hand at her chest—“when they’re gone. And I hear when you say you don’t feel like crime is low. It’s lower. But it’s not low. We have come a long way, but we have so much more work to do.”
Elsewhere, Jones has described what, in her mind, that work entails. It’s not merely policing. Nor is it solely anti-poverty or prevention programs. It’s both. Politically, this position gives two crucial constituencies at least part of what they want. Practically, it happens to be backed by hard evidence.
It was Jones who spearheaded a regional crime summit and invited Thomas Abt, a University of Maryland professor and author of the book Bleeding Out. Its thesis: A small number of individuals with similar characteristics commit most homicides. The trick, according to years of research, is to focus on these would-be shooters (who also become victims) by erecting a system of rewards and punishments—a system that they, too, see as fair. The message from the community: We’re here to help you, but if you won’t let us help you, we’re here to stop you. The approach is called focused deterrence.
Abt and his colleagues at Maryland’s Violence Reduction Center came to St. Louis and helped local leaders rally behind a plan called Save Lives Now! Its goal is to reduce homicides by 20 percent over three years through focused deterrence, with its carrot and stick. Part of the carrot will be that a street outreach team connects high-risk individuals to cognitive-behavioral therapy, which has a robust record of lowering their likelihood of reoffending.
Jones and St. Louis County Executive Sam Page announced the initiative inside a crowded public-library basement in Florissant on May 23. “This room looks really, really beautiful to me,” said Jones, scanning the group of law enforcers, government officials, and service providers. “If we continue to have the hard and frank conversations about what it will take, and be honest with each other, we will definitely see progress.”
Afterward, stepping out to the parking lot, I ran into Rodrick Burton, pastor of New NorthSide Missionary Baptist Church. (His church sits in Jennings, just across the city limit on Goodfellow.) Burton was there as a member of the initiative’s advisory council. He wore a bemused smile. “I’m hopeful about this,” he said. “We got everyone in there working together now.”
He hadn’t always felt hope. His congregants, many of whom are seniors and homeowners, want “police that are effective and accountable,” he’d previously told me—and Jones’ priorities had seemed to be elsewhere. “You can focus on trying to fix historical wrongs, but if you get so hyper-progressive that the city becomes a place tourists won’t come to and businesses leave, then the taxbase shrinks for social programs,” he’d said. But Save Lives Now! calls for both prevention and enforcement. The mayor, in his view, deserves credit for that: “I feel confident with her because she’s adjusting.”
Jones speaks often of bringing her whole, authentic self to Room 200, but there’s at least one thing she now tamps down to get things done: pettiness.
She used to throw down with seemingly anyone on social media. In January 2022, a woman on Facebook described herself as “seething” because a man charged with domestic assault against her had been released pre-trial, so the woman tagged the mayor, posting, “YOUR judges are letting violent criminals out.” Replied Jones: “I don’t appoint judges. Learn how government works. Then you can talk. #gurlbye.” This exchange sparked a news story, which led Republican Eric Schmitt, then the Missouri attorney general, to declare Jones “a national embarrassment” for “insulting victims.” Schmitt and Jones traded shots frequently in those days. Six months later, Schmitt, who was suing to stop pandemic-era mask mandates as he ran for U.S. Senate, wrote on Twitter that Jones was “an unserious person.” Her response: “How are those masking lawsuits coming along? Still losing like your failing campaign for US Senate?”
But Jones announced, in November 2022, that she’d step back from Twitter. At the WashU event last fall, she explained to the grad students: “I had to stop being petty on social media.” Users would insult her, she said, so she’d challenge them and “get in trouble.” Plus, her dad had urged her to cool it because “somebody might get crazy and try to be there one day.”
There’s a pragmatic (and maybe obvious) reason, though, for not publicly torching everyone she disagrees with, and Jones has acknowledged it: Diplomacy works. As the keynote speaker at her alma mater, in 2022, Jones told Hampton graduates that she and Missouri’s Republican governor, Mike Parson, respect each other from having served in the state’s general assembly. Now they link arms on certain projects, even if it takes some “compartmentalizing” on her part. “That relationship with my governor,” she said, “benefits my city in the long run.”
Inside City Hall, Jones’ relationship with the board of aldermen has been icy at times. The ice stayed submerged for much of her first two years. Jones’ preferred modus operandi between herself and electeds she respects is praise in public; criticize in private. But mutual frustrations have surfaced as of late. One night last October, when the city began clearing a homeless encampment from the lawn below the mayor’s office, several aldermen criticized Jones’ approach. She reasoned that the encampment was a safety and health risk, and that she often must choose between a bad option and a worse one. Recalls someone who has worked with her: “She once said, ‘This job can be lonely.’ She’s forced to make difficult decisions, and sometimes that takes a toll on her personal relationships.” Occasionally, Jones is the one who turns her back. In March, she vetoed a bill to return some control of firefighter pensions to firefighters. Ten of 14 aldermen voted to override her veto. Jones responded by unfriending several of them on Facebook.
In some ways, Jones hasn’t changed: She still geeks out over musical theater and Marvel movies; sips bourbon and lip-synchs on Instagram; does laundry at laundromats during Aden’s basketball tournaments; gives radio interviews in her red Crocs. Umi Khenissi, her friend and supporter, relishes Jones’ dry asides and thoughtfulness: “When I say she listens, I mean her eyes are focused on you. She’s talking to you.” It’s also true that, as mayor, almost every day, Jones is driven around in a Chevy Tahoe by a security detail, often with a retinue of staffers. “I think she used to be a regular person,” says someone else who has worked with Jones at City Hall, “but it’s a very difficult job, and she just doesn’t seem [like] she’s connected anymore—like she’s up here, and we’re all down here.” (Jones says being a mayor and mom limits her time to do things she used to, but she “wouldn’t have it any other way.”)
Jones does show up at town-hall-style events where folks can ask her anything—even in southwest city, which can be unfriendly turf. In 2023, she spoke at the North Hampton Neighborhood Association’s meeting, after which an attendee posted on Reddit that she’d deflected persistent questions about crime and policing. This Reddit post found its way to Jones. She dropped the link into the group chat with her father and Callow. “BS read for the day…” she typed. “Long story short, I can’t please everyone…and I’m not trying.” But in her next text, the resigned shrug gave way to this description of her Reddit critic: “Self-absorbed little twat!” As though she didn’t want to care but couldn’t help it.
Epps, who knew Jones at Affton, suspects the mayor is in a catch-22 created by what she calls “the trope of the angry Black woman.” Says Epps: “If you spend all your time calling people on something they said, then you’re thin-skinned. But if you don’t respond, you give people the license to keep doing it, and in those instances, you get to the point where, OK, it’s the last straw, and it looks disproportionate.”
Former state lawmaker Jason Kander argues that, behind the scenes, life has thrown her countless punches that she does, in fact, roll with. “She’s raised a little boy by herself,” Kander says, “and she’s made it to the top of the political mountain as a Black woman. You can’t do that without a pretty solid ability to laugh some stuff off.”
Jones has also voiced special empathy for those enduring hardships that she once endured. In June 2022, a federal grand jury indicted three of her opponents on the board of aldermen—then-president Lewis Reed, Jeffrey Boyd, and John Collins-Muhammad—on charges of bribery. All three resigned. She addressed it in Room 200’s lobby. Acknowledging her frictions with them, she struck a note less of schadenfreude than of a disappointed mom when, shaking her head, she averred that “no one wins in this situation,” certainly not the families of the accused. “I understand firsthand what it’s like to keep loving someone unconditionally, even as they face consequences for their actions,” she said. “Please give grace to those who are suffering through no fault of their own.”
This presser, incidentally, occurred just hours after Jones had to deescalate a tense and unrelated situation, recalls Derrick Neuner, president of the Princeton Heights Neighborhood Association. He’d invited her to speak to his group in Willmore Park, and she’d accepted. She gave remarks, did a Q&A, then tried to leave, but a clutch of attendees confronted her and called her a “cop-hater.” “They got right in her face, and then her bodyguards got right in their face,” he says. “I was worried there for a second that something would accidentally go wrong. But she kept her cool, and they kept screaming at her.” The mayor and her team left without incident.
I brought this up to Jones. She remembered it a bit differently. “I don’t back down from a fight,” she told me. “My security detail was more scared for the person who was in my face than they were for me.”
Jones is neither queen nor dictator. After the city got $498 million in federal funding to rebound from the pandemic, she couldn’t declare by fiat, Here’s every area of need and the dollar amounts to flow toward each. Those choices were the fruit of good ol’fashioned American deliberation: by citizens, department heads, her staff, and aldermen. Federal rules had to be followed, too; this isn’t unrestricted cash. Yet whereas the choice of how much to spend on each project was not her decision alone, how it gets spent—the way it looks and feels on the ground, the way digits in a bank account morph into concrete, steel, houses, and, maybe, hope—falls almost entirely on her administration and her appointees. Jones’ team laid out its ethos in the 2023 ARPA plan. “Extreme levels of racial disparities in St. Louis are not natural or inevitable; they are a function of public policy,” the plan states. Residents must recognize their “collective responsibility to repair the damage done,” and the ARPA funds are a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to begin doing that.
Not all ARPA dollars will flow this way; some will benefit everyone. There’s at least $40 million to repave, relight, and traffic-calm streets. There’s $15 million for a new 911 call center, which will bring fire and police dispatchers under one roof. There’s money to sustain programs in which clinicians respond to 911 calls about people in nonviolent behavioral health crises, thereby freeing up officers to handle violent crime. Some money has already helped hire more 911 dispatchers, and it shows: The share of calls answered within ten seconds has climbed from 50 percent in 2023 to 80 percent today. (The national standard is 90 percent.)
But Jones says more than half the total has been committed for “economic justice,” which means, in large part, that it will be spent in qualified census tracts: areas that are federally recognized to be above a threshold concentration of poverty. (They also happen to be 76 percent “nonwhite,” per city stats.) In St. Louis, such tracts blanket the North Side and much of southeast city, and it’s on these patches where hundreds of millions of ARPA dollars will land.
Some will land in the form of direct assistance: Roughly 540 families are scheduled to receive $500 a month for 18 months in a guaranteed basic income pilot. It’s designed to give a ladder up to those whose income is low yet not quite low enough for government assistance. (It’s also being challenged in court.) But that’s only 1 percent of the total. Much of the investment will be physical. More than 1,000 abandoned buildings have already been bulldozed. Thousands of affordable units will rise. There’s $37 million in grants for businesses and nonprofits on and near major corridors. A city authority acquired the 150,000-square-foot former Killark Electric building with plans to transform it into a “workforce and training campus”; standing between the soon-to-be-built Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Center St. Louis and the Next NGA West site, it will be called The Monarch on MLK. (Jones has said she “can barely contain” her excitement on that one.)
The Jones team wasn’t required to approach the funds this way. True, the size of the city’s award was partly a function of a federal statutory formula that takes poverty into account. (Another factor was St. Louis’ dual status as city and county.) Yet the law was written with flexibility, observes Rob Finn of the Center for Community Progress, a left-of-center nonprofit. He says reporting and compliance are indeed easier when a local government spends in the low-income tracts, but he adds: “I still think it takes guts to deploy this money to serve populations that don’t have a lot of political power.”
But Jones faces a personal deadline. She’s up for re-election in March, whereas many of these projects will take years. A simple road-repaving project in the city can drag on for 800 days. Nahuel Fefer, executive director of the city’s Community Development Administration, which is managing $178 million in pandemic funds, says neither the public nor private sector was quite ready for the cash infusion. “It’s like someone who’s been starving,” he tells me, “and suddenly, you give them a huge buffet. They just can’t process it all.” His agency has added more than a dozen staffers. After all, Fefer, a political appointee, does not score proposals; staff does that. (Asked whether Jones has ever inserted herself into contractor selection, he says no.)
On top of all this, city hall faces a deadline: Every cent must have a purpose by December 31 and must be spent by the close of 2026. As of June, only about a quarter of the funds had gone out the door. One former mayor acknowledged the difficulty of holding the effort together, joking, “I wish I’d had the challenge of spending $500 million—and that’s just the ARPA money!” (The other big pot of money over which Jones has a big influence is the $250 million that the city won in its litigation against the NFL over the Rams’ departure. That cash comes with no strings attached. Jones and certain aldermen have floated a municipal endowment, but any decision is on hold.) For now, Jones tells me, her attention toggles between legacy projects and the nuts and bolts of municipal governance. Residents, she says, “won’t trust us to do the big things if we can’t do the small things.”
So how’s she doing on the small things?
An analysis of complaints made by residents to the Citizens’ Services Bureau over the past seven mayoral years (from May 1 to April 30, given that mayors take office in the second half of April) suggests that certain city services have stayed consistent since at least the Lyda Krewson administration. Pothole and streetlight repairs are two of these. Complaints about trash collection, however, have spiked during Jones’ tenure, though they’re trending back down. The culprit has been a shortage of refuse drivers. The city has increased salaries, budgeted for more drivers, and switched from a cumbersome paper-based hiring process to an online platform. But the strain is real: KMOV reported that in late May, about one-third of drivers called in sick to protest “low pay, heavy workloads and poor treatment from management.” The upshot: frustrated residents.
The neighborhood with the most missed-trash-collection complaints lately has been Baden, on the North Side. On a recent afternoon, I came upon three men hanging out on the front porch of a house there. At the mention of missed trash collection, three heads nodded at once in recognition. The homeowner, who was digging a ditch in his side yard, happened to be angry about something else: illegal dumping, which he suspects is being perpetrated by county residents coming across the nearby city limit. “I don’t say nothin’ to ’em,” he explained. “Might have a gun.” While we’re chatting, as if on cue, a sedan turns off the street and into an alley across from us, slows down, and a person inside drops a bag of trash into the dumpster. “There’s one right there,” says one man on the porch. “They don’t live around here.” The men urge me to venture up a second nearby alley and see what they’re complaining about, so I do, and sure enough: Mounds of rubbish wreathe the dumpsters. It turns out that Baden, the data show, had the second most illegal-dumping complaints.
Alderwoman Pam Boyd of the 13th Ward has lamented it for years, she tells me. Some alleys have so much trash, she says, city trucks can’t roll down them. Until recently, savvy residents knew what to do: You’d tell your alderman, who’d draw on relationships inside city departments to get it done. But since 2023, the number of wards have shrunk from 28 to 14, so aldermen have more ground to cover and phone calls to answer; the Jones administration is supposed to pick up the slack. “In defense of her,” Boyd says, “she’s coming in trying to correct 20-30 years of decline, and she’s figuring out how to go through the maze to get it done. I get that. But when are we going to start seeing change? It’s not just that she’s the Black lady and people are going to vote for her. No. People want results.”
Jones has entered the 2025 race, at least financially speaking, in a strong position. Her war chest at the end of June exceeded $165,000; the pro-Jones political action committee 314 Forward, which she doesn’t control, had more than $27,000. Meanwhile, the campaign of Jones’ opponent, Cara Spencer, reported nearly $113,000, and its website makes clear where she thinks the incumbent’s weakness is: municipal services. “Everywhere we look, the city is failing to do its most basic jobs,” the site says. “Too many of the promises that were made three years ago haven’t been met.”
This line of attack gets at the tension between two elements of Jones’ own campaign message. Her website states, on one hand, that the city is “making true progress” (she even called it a “renaissance” in her 2024 State of the City address). On the other, she argues that “it isn’t easy to turn around decades of neglect and dysfunction” and that the “work is far from over.” In essence: Look at everything I’ve done, and everything I haven’t.
Pushing the gauge of success into the future would be, of course, convenient for someone aiming to be mayor for another term or two—and little solace for disgruntled citizens today. But Jones has a point. Her ascent made history. Her chance to invest public money is historic. But St. Louis is still a city that can barely collect all of its trash. That’s her starting point. Pulling the city up to baseline functionality and fairness—maybe that, in itself, would be historic. Though, for that, she’d need more time.
“Black girl magic,” Jones likes to say, “doesn’t come with a wand.”
Editor’s Note: This is an updated version of the feature “Executive Decisions,” which was published in the August 2024 issue of St. Louis Magazine.
