ST. LOUIS–It’s the first week on the job for the new chief of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, and when it comes to the city’s 2022 crime statistics, Chief Robert Tracy has his work cut out for him according to Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
St. Louis saw 200 murders in 2022, the same number as in 2021, according to police data.
“There is a long way to go to reduce homicides in St. Louis to levels that are comparable to other cities like ours, but what is heartening is that we didn’t see an increase in 2022,” remarked Rosenfeld.
He pointed out the number of homicides is significantly down from 2020 when St. Louis recorded 263 murders.
When it came to aggravated assaults with a firearm, the city had 2228 incidents in 2022, a 7% drop from the previous year. Rosenfeld explained while not all those cases involved a shooting, the number is still “too high’’.
Motor vehicle thefts shot up 78% in 2022 with 7366 reportedly stolen. Earlier in the year, St. Louis officials pointed to a rise in Hyundai and Kia thefts for the uptick. Nationwide, thieves were exploiting a security design flaw in the vehicles, a trend fueled by social media videos.
“We have a real crime problem and we have a crime perception problem,” he said.
Rosenfeld said it is important to keep in mind the citywide crime statistics are driven disproportionately by serious violent crime in only a handful of city neighborhoods.
“What people tend to do is assume that what is happening in the areas of the city where violence is exceptionally high, to use that to kind of paint a broad brush over the entire city, as if all areas had violent crime levels that high,” explained Rosenfeld.
He said there are crime problems downtown, but not close to the ones that exist in parts of north or south east St. Louis.
Rosenfeld told Spectrum News the biggest challenge Chief Tracy will have to overcome to reduce violent crime is two-fold: reduce firearm violence and to assure policing in the city is fair and equitable.
“He is well-positioned, it seems to me, to lead the department in the direction it needs to go to reduce crime of all kinds, and firearm violence in particular,” Rosenfeld said. He said less is known about Chief Tracy’s efforts on making sure policing is done fairly and equitably.
Chief Tracy, the first chief to come from outside the department, most recently held the same position in Wilmington, Del. where the city saw its lowest number of murders in 15 years, according to the city’s 2022 Year-End Crime Report. Chief Tracy also held leadership roles in New York City and Chicago where Rosenfeld said departments were focused on crime reduction.