St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones has continued her push to defund the city’s police department despite the city currently being at a 50-year high for murders.
“We still have two separate police unions — one for black police officers and one for white officers,” Jones said of the city’s police. “If they can’t trust each other, then how can they expect the public to trust them?”
St. Louis has outpaced its 2020 murder rate of 87 murders per 100,000 so far this year, despite that number being the worst in the nation last year. While city officials have pointed to the pandemic as the reason for the grim murder numbers, the city also had the nation’s highest murder rate in 2019.
But those numbers aren’t holding back Jones, who made police reform the cornerstone of her campaign to be the city’s first black female mayor.
THEY REALLY ARE ‘DEFUNDING’ THE POLICE, AND IT’S NOT GOING WELL
The new mayor has continued to call on funds to be reallocated from the police department and revealed plans to shut down a city jail. The head of the city’s corrections department also recently resigned after Jones made clear she wasn’t happy with how the department was being run.
“We don’t need two jails,” Jones said. “We need to move people through the system, we need to find alternatives to jails for some of the offenses.”
Jones’s plan calls for funding for the police department to be slashed, moving the money to social programs that she says could handle half of the city’s calls that are typically made to police.
“Funding a comprehensive approach to violent crime is the best approach to reducing murders,” interim city of St. Louis Director of Public Safety Daniel Isom said of the mayor’s plan. “This requires both police and partnering agencies adequately funded to support victims and hold offenders accountable. It also requires target arrest and prosecutions to get murderers and shooters off the streets and not filling jails with nonviolent offenders.”
The mayor’s proposed budget for next year would cut $4 million from the police department, reallocating those funds to an affordable housing fund program, victim support services, and the city’s Department of Health and Human Services and Civil Rights Enforcement Agency.
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The proposal also calls for the elimination of 100 police positions that are currently vacant but would not lay off any officers who currently work for the department.
“This $4mil allocation will help us start being proactive and put the public back in public safety,” Jones said of the plan.
