Mitch McCoy’s comms shop is staffing up.
At a meeting yesterday, the Board of Police Commissioners approved increasing the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s public affairs operation from four people to seven. McCoy, a former TV reporter, came aboard as the SLMPD’s chief spokesman in the summer of 2024 and in the years since has become the department’s most recognizable face other than Chief Robert Tracy.
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Tracy spoke at the meeting in favor of creating the new positions, saying that when he came on board as chief one of the biggest things he heard from the community was that the department wasn’t as transparent as it should be. “They were correct,” says Tracy.
McCoy says that since he started, the department’s reach on social media has grown significantly, with followers on Facebook doubling to 135,000. That’s not a vain influencer metric, but reflects the department’s ability to get things like suspect photos out more quickly to more people, he says. Last year, when officer Nathan Spiess was severely injured on I-70 while attempting to make an arrest, a snippet of body camera footage had an image of the Cadillac that ran him over. “There were conversations internally about, do we put a picture of the car out? Do we not? There was the thought that we don’t, and it was Public Affairs that said we got to put a picture of the car out,” says McCoy. They did, and the tip that led to the driver’s arrest came in over Facebook 25 minutes later.
Likewise, McCoy says that virtually all the arrests of young people associated with teen takeovers have come through the department posting images on social media. (The teens themselves are also the architects of their own arrests, as they’re filming each other at the scenes of the conduct drawing police’s attention.)
At the Police Board meeting yesterday, Mayor Cara Spencer offered some pushback to the new positions. “I’m envious. That’s a big team,” she said. Spencer’s office has just three communications staffers, none paid as much as McCoy.
She cautioned that adding positions to the department’s comms shop shouldn’t come at the expense of hiring officers. She ultimately voted no on the matter. “I am just cautioning the Board…when you add positions to one you have to take them from the other,” she said.
The city’s Public Safety Director Shawn Dace also pushed back after the meeting, telling SLM now is not the time for these new hires. “As a police officer for over 35 years, it was discouraging for me to look at the staffing and see how short the districts were,” he said, referring to the department’s officer shortfall. “I think we need more police officers on the street, not more staffers on Instagram.”
Yet McCoy tells SLM that, to his mind, a strong social media presence is exactly what helps bring new recruits into the department. “Everything we do on social media has a recruiting element,” he says. A class of 34 new recruits starts the academy on Monday.
The new public affairs positions will come with salaries ranging from $47,000 to $85,000.
McCoy, who makes $130,000 in his current role, worked at Fox 2 prior to joining the SLMPD as their spokesman. Less than a year before he switched careers, McCoy was reporting on the towing practices of the North County municipality of Hillsdale when his cameraman was run over by a car in which the tiny municipality’s top leader was riding shotgun.
His hiring by the department was preceded by police crashing an SUV into South City gay bar Bar:PM, followed by the responding officers arresting the bar’s co-owner—a fiasco for the police on the communications and every other front. “The police department didn’t communicate, I think it was for two days. The first time there was an on-camera interview was Wednesday, and it was via Teams,” McCoy says.
In touting McCoy’s work for the department, Tracy yesterday noted that the spokesman is regularly out at crime scenes with officers in the middle of the night, on weekends, and on his day off. His shop also handles internal messaging and at times inter-agency communications, for instance designing graphics related to alternate travel routes when a massive sinkhole opens up in the city.
SLM asked McCoy about how he feels about at times being referred to as “Chief McCoy” by Donnybrook panelist Bill McClellan. McCoy said that as far as he knows McClellan’s only nickname for him has been “Chip McCoy.” (McClellan has called him both.)
One does get the sense that at least occasionally McCoy is having a good time. Last week, he announced on X the arrest of an 18-year-old related to a recent takeover of Bevo Mill. He titled the post, “Dinner plans interrupted.”
The teen had been apprehended in the middle of a meal at a local Mexican restaurant.
“It was detailed that we took them into custody at this restaurant,” McCoy says.” So I was like, ‘We’ll put it out.’ It was around dinner time when we posted that.”
This story has been updated with comment from Public Safety Director Shawn Dace.
