via flickr/geoffeg
After a brutal downtown carjacking left a young mother dead, St. Louis is tightening up enforcement against crimes that disproportionately affect the homeless, including panhandling, public urination, and excessive noise.
The murder of 21-year-old Brandi Hill, who was shot during a carjacking downtown this past weekend, shocked St. Louis. The details of the crime are almost unfathomable. Hill was in her car on Washington Avenue, stopped at a red light, when two men approached. They ripped Hill’s friend, who is nine months pregnant, out of the car; then they shot Hill and left her for dead in the street. Later, they tossed out Hill’s infant child, who was riding in the back seat. Luckily, the child was unharmed.
See also: Police: Gunmen Threw Baby Out of Stolen Car After Killing Mother
For years, downtown’s renaissance, with promising developments like the Arch Grounds renovation, Ballpark Village, and Washington Avenue restaurants, coupled with an increase in residents in renovated loft buildings, has been undercut by the widely held belief that the urban core is unsafe. Headline-grabbing crimes like this only reinforce that perception.
On Thursday afternoon, with one of the culprits in Hill’s murder having turned himself in and the other soon to be killed by police, Downtown STL Inc. CEO Missy Kelley sent an email titled “Downtown Security: Where do we go from here?” in an attempt to assuage the concerns of downtown stakeholders. (You can read Kelley’s full letter here.)
“Once again, we residents, business owners, and professionals who work in downtown find ourselves experiencing a combination of shock, sadness, anger and fear as a result of the recent crime spree in Downtown St. Louis,” Kelley began. “The entire St. Louis region should be outraged by the horrific murder of Brandi Hill…” She goes on to explain that downtown is the heart of the region and that what happens in the urban core affects everyone who calls greater St. Louis home. It’s true: Across the country, the cities that are the strongest economically are those with vibrant downtowns.
Kelley has been part of a push to increase the number of security cameras downtown, and that effort seemed to pay off in the Hill case, with video footage of the crime contributing to how swiftly the culprits were brought to justice. This email might have been a good time for Kelley to tout those surveillance efforts, but she didn’t mention them. Nor did she propose any solutions to the systemic issues that lead to violent gun crime: the ease with which criminals can acquire handguns in the absence of gun control measures, a lack of education and economic opportunity for poor young men that hopelessly leads them to a life of crime, the drug epidemic that fuels a violent black market.
See also: Scared New World: Inside St. Louis’ Real-Time Crime Center
Instead, Kelley’s email seemed to target the homeless. “This morning, I met with Mary Ellen Ponder, Chief of Staff to Mayor Slay. The Mayor’s Office has committed to immediately increasing the police presence in Downtown,” Kelley wrote, “Law enforcement will be visible. All laws, including municipal violations, such as; panhandling, open container, public urination and excessive noise, to name a few, will be strictly enforced.”
Update May 27, 4:15 p.m.: On Friday afternoon, Mayor Slay doubled down on Kelley's comments, telling the Post-Dispatch, "We are going to step up security dramatically." Slay said that meant increased enforcement of "loud noise, speeding motor cycles, public urination, and littering," according to the Post. "If people think they have a little leeway here, a little leeway over there, they take advantage of it," Slay said.
What does panhandling have to do with murder? I called Kelley to ask. She said that to truly reduce the region’s violent crime rate, we must find long-term solutions to systemic issues like the ones listed above. She rattled off several organizations focused on finding such solutions in which she is involved. But she defended the idea that, in the short term, cracking down on nuisance crimes will make a difference for violent crime, too.
“The connection is that when people can get away with little things, when things that are against the law are ignored or overlooked, then it gives the sense that no one is in charge, and that you can get away with bigger things,” she says. “One of the complaints we’ve received from the many residents that live down here is that things like the noise violations and the panhandling and open container laws are not being enforced, and those are quality of life issues for people who live and work down here. They are important in that regard, but they are also important to signaling to the criminal element that nothing is tolerated here.” So this approach can both reduce violent crime and also appease residents who are sick of seeing nuisance violations outside their lofts, she reasons. It’s a win-win.
This is, more or less, the basic premise behind the broken-windows policing model that has been successful in New York City and elsewhere. The idea is that by reducing the overall level of disorder or minor crimes, like graffiti, public urination, and yes, broken windows, police allow residents to regain social control over neighborhoods and prevent serious crime from infiltrating. As evidence that this strategy works, Kelley forwarded me an email, originally sent Friday morning by Mayor Slay’s former chief of staff, Jeff Rainford, which included a link to an opinion article from the Wall Street Journal arguing against efforts to peel back broken-windows techniques in New York. Kelley suggested that I read the article to “educate yourself.”
This is, of course, a somewhat problematic justification for cracking down on the homeless here in St. Louis. For one thing, it’s an opinion piece, so it comes with a slant. For another, it’s a newspaper article, not a scientific report. The article does include impressive statistics: Annual shootings fell by nearly 3,300 in the four years after the broken windows approach was put in place in New York. Felony arrests were reduced, as was the jail population.
But the article neglects to mention that many academics have questioned whether all of the credit for the change can be given to the broken-windows model when there were other social forces at play. The Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy has reviewed various scientific examinations of the broken-windows model and found mixed results, with an overall modest impact in reducing crime. The key, its findings suggest, is in how the broken windows model is implemented. In technical lingo, broken windows policing works when it focuses on “place-based, problem oriented interventions.” It doesn’t work when it focuses on “aggressive order maintenance strategies” or “zero tolerance” (as in Kelley’s comment that “nothing is tolerated here”). To put it in simpler terms, broken windows policing works well when it’s part of an overall effort to improve quality of life, but doesn’t when it focuses on just throwing people in jail for misdemeanors.
Consider this example from New York, included in a City Journal article titled “Why We Need Broken Windows Policing”:
It has become clear over the past 20 years, however, that many of the challenges to public order confronting cities and communities cannot be solved by simple police action. We as a society cannot police or arrest our way out of these problems; police need partners to help solve or manage complex social issues. A vision of collaborative community policing is emerging, in which police work closely with local communities, social-services providers, business-improvement districts, district attorneys’ offices, and other government entities to control crime and disorder.
A current example is the NYPD’s work—together with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the New York City Department of Homeless Services, and the Bowery Residence Committee—to help homeless substance abusers and the emotionally disturbed who sleep in public spaces, especially the subway. Teams of police officers in the NYPD Homeless Outreach Unit patrol together with social workers from the Bowery Residence Committee. They offer services including safe-haven beds, mental health counseling, and medical care. Homeless arrests are already down 16 percent in the subway and 22 percent citywide. All this takes place in the broader context of Mayor de Blasio’s push to change the way the criminal-justice system deals with people with mental health and substance-abuse problems. The mayor is allocating $130 million to diversion, pretrial, and treatment programs over the next four years, with the goal of reducing the incarceration of people better served by various treatment and out-of-jail management options.
Going forward, the police must strengthen their relationships with citizens, civic organizations, and communities.
Compare that holistic approach, done within the context of broken-windows policing, to what Kelley told me: “And if there is a larger police presence in downtown, which there will be, they need to be doing something. We want people to know that they’re there, they’re walking around, and they’re enforcing all laws.” In other words, the police might as well arrest loitering homeless people, because, well, they’re going to be walking past them anyway.
Kelley’s words and Ponder’s actions are a shame because they undermine what seem to be recent good-faith efforts from the city to finally address homelessness. Mayor Slay had a 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness, but the decade came and went without much progress. Up to now, the city has acted as a facilitator, funneling money from the federal government to the Continuum of Care, an alliance of nonprofit service providers. But under the direction of new health and human services director Eddie Roth, the city plans to open a shelter of its own, Biddle House, which will use a best-practices housing-first model to get homeless people directly into permanent housing and onto the path to rebuilding their lives.
A policing model that pairs with social-service organizations to connect those in need to such a shelter would be a huge benefit for downtown. Simply locking people up for public urination, not so much. The way to prevent public urination is to give people a place to pee. The way to prevent panhandling is to give people a means to support themselves.
Brandi Hill’s murder was a terrible tragedy. Using it as an excuse to arrest homeless people dishonors her memory.
