Isadora Ruyter-Harcourt via Flickr
The report from Police Executive Research Forum reveals dysfunctional, fragmented and inefficient police departments, especially in north St. Louis County.
With a long sigh of frustration, Chuck Wexler leans back in his chair and buries his head in his hand. A former police administrator-turned-think tank director, Wexler spent six months studying the state of policing here, as he has across the U.S., China, and the Middle East.
But St. Louis has been unique. Wexler still can’t believe how difficult it was to get St. Louis County’s small, municipal police departments to provide answers to basic inquiries, such as how many officers are on the force.
“That shouldn’t be like the Manhattan Project, you know?” Wexler tells SLM. “It should be part of doing business. The more we didn’t get it, the more we worry about it.”
St. Louis is already worried by policing policies after months of dealing with the aftermath of the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The militarized response following protests drew criticism from neighbors and elected officials alike, and a scathing U.S. Department of Justice study exposed a litany of upsetting practices inside Ferguson’s police department.
The Police Executive Research Forum, an independent research group, came to St. Louis in November to analyze St. Louis police policies, assess police-community relations, and recommend steps to improve policing. According to the report, released Monday, researchers found a network of dysfunctional, fragmented, and inefficient police departments often incapable of even answering the group’s requests for crime data.
“If they can’t easily give it to us, it means they don’t have it themselves,” says Craig Fraser, who’s managed more than 250 studies on police practices for Wexler’s think tank. “They’re not using it.”
via policeforum.org
Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum.
“Or they don’t like what the figures look like,” Wexler adds. “Either way, no news is bad news.”
Of course, not every police department in St. Louis city and county is dysfunctional. One of the study’s biggest recommendations—to merge 18 small departments in North County into three larger precincts—depends on help from St. Louis County and University City police departments.
“You simply can’t put cities that are under stress together and expect something to come out of it,” Wexler says. “They need some kind of structure with some kind of department that has some stability.”
The study recommends combining nine North County jurisdictions—Beverly HIlls, Hillsdale, Northwoods, Pagedale, Pine Lawn, Uplands Park, Velda City, Velda Village Hills, and Wellston—with University City Police Department, which is nearby and highly regarded. The report also suggests combining Ferguson with Berkeley, Calverton Park, and Kinloch as a single district contracted under St. Louis County Police, as well as combining Bellefontaine Neighbors, Country Club Hills, Flordell Hills, Moline Acres, and Riverview into the Jennings precinct of the St. Louis County Police.
Those listed North County precincts have high crime rates, but they also have high numbers of officers per square mile enforcing low-level crimes and traffic citations, the study says.
“This proposed consolidation cluster would eliminate redundant command structures and reduce the total number of officers, thereby increasing efficiency and saving money,” the report notes. “At the same time, officers would be freed from revenue-generating activities and be able to focus on crime control and prevention.”
Consolidating, unifying, uniting—these can be thorny ideas for a region that’s resisted merging the city and county governments for decades. The debate over unification birthed Better Together, the organization that studies St. Louis’ fractured municipal make-up and commissioned the Police Executive Research Forum’s report months before Brown’s death.
Wexler says in an ideal world, the St. Louis region would unify.
“In an ideal world, yes, they should come together,” Wexler says. “But I don’t think you can do that without building up incrementally... At this point in time, let’s deal with the most compelling issues first.”
Those compelling issues include:
-A single, state-of-the-art police training center for joint city-county training exercises.
-Uniform standards for hiring, training and use-of-force policies. For example, rules for using Tasers vary around the region. The Police Executive Research Forum recommends one joint standard.
-Cross-deputizing St. Louis city and county officers to give them flexibility to make arrests and fight crime in either jurisdiction. As Wexler says, “Criminals don’t observe jurisdictional boundaries.”
-Creation of a central data warehouse, run by both the city and the county, to store budgets, crime data, and information on all officer-involved shootings.
Wexler says Ferguson isn’t the only St. Louis County municipality with racially unrepresentative forces and policies that favor revenue over justice, but he’s optimistic that St. Louis can start a new chapter in its history with police.
“There are a lot of good people, a lot of good police officers, a lot of good police chiefs” in St. Louis, Wexler says. “Thankfully, there are more of them than the ones who are indifferent. I’m optimistic that people will seize this as an opportunity to make policing in this area a model for the country.”
Editor's note: A previous version of this story identified Wexler as a former police officer. He was a senior civilian administrator with the Boston Police Department, not a sworn officer.
