By Jeremy Kohler and Heather Ratcliffe, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Murders in St. Louis fell by nearly one-fourth last year to 113 - the same number recorded in 1998. Authorities credited intense policing in the city’s troubled neighborhoods and a push to incarcerate violent offenders and reduce guns on the street.
The incidence of murder - 113 - was the lowest since 1966, when the city recorded 106 murders. But last year’s murder rate was twice as high per capita as it was 36 years ago because the city’s population has shrunk to less than half its size then.
Still, the drop in murders last year represents a dramatic turnaround from the crack cocaine wars of the early 1990s, when the city exceeded 200 murders each year of five consecutive years.
Elsewhere, murders dipped by three, to 35, in St. Clair County but increased by three, to 40, in St. Louis County. It was the fourth straight year with an increase in St. Louis County.
Collectively, the metropolitan area of 11 counties and the city of St. Louis had 218 murders last year, one more than in 2000. Murders spiked to 251 in 2001 because of a violent year in the city.
City officials last week had reported 112 murders, which would have been the city’s lowest total since 1966. But that figure did not include the death of Dwight Bland, who died April 17 from an intestinal infection caused by a bullet lodged from a shooting in 1986. Police have a suspect in the case, but no charges have been issued.
Bland’s death brought the city’s murder total to 113.
All figures are subject to change before they are delivered to the FBI for its annual uniform crime report. Police departments often reclassify deaths as more evidence becomes available.
The last time the city recorded less than 100 murders was 1962, when the city had 69. That low total came when the city was the nation’s 10th-largest, with 750,000 people. Since then, the city’s population has shrunk to just under 350,000.
Criminologist Scott Decker, a professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, credits the growing cooperation among St. Louis Police Chief Joe Mokwa, Mayor Francis Slay, Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce and Ray Gruender, the U.S. attorney for eastern Missouri, for the dramatic decline in the city.
Those authorities have used two federal programs - Project Safe Neighborhoods and Operation Cease Fire - to focus police efforts on violent neighborhoods and to incarcerate convicted felons found to be in possession of firearms, Decker said.
Gruender said his office prosecuted 183 cases last year in which a convicted felon was arrested in St. Louis, say, in a motor vehicle stop or a drug bust, and was found to have a firearm - a federal offense. That’s a 50 percent increase in cases prosecuted from the previous year, he said.
“We’ve been working closer with (Joyce) to go through all cases involving guns and make sure they’re being prosecuted with the stiffest penalties available” under the law, Gruender said.
Publicity of the federal government’s stake in local law enforcement has reached the streets and has become a deterrent to carrying guns, said Decker, who studies the city’s crime intervention efforts.
Said Gruender, “People don’t want their case to go federal.”
Safe suburbs
St. Louis County again had a low murder rate, with just fewer than 4 people killed per 100,000.
“Homicides in St. Louis County are still a relatively low number, especially compared to the population of the area,” said St. Louis County police Lt. Jon Belmar, who leads the bureau of Crimes Against Persons. “People here should take comfort knowing that.”
Murder victims in St. Louis County were as young as 10 months and as old as 91. The average age was 32. The suspects accused in their killings were from 12 to 75 years old. The average age was 35.
Eight killings were linked to domestic violence, a number police said has been decreasing for a decade. Police, prosecutors, counselors and court officials have increasingly sought to help domestic-violence victims before the violence escalates to murder.
Seven victims were linked to illegal drug activity, police said. Twelve were killed during a disturbance or gang activity.
Investigators said they were most disturbed by six victims killed in unprovoked attacks.
They were an elderly woman suffocated in her nursing home bed and an Oakville woman stabbed by her daughter’s boyfriend when she opened the front door, police said.
Three were killed when a man attacked Metropolitan Sewer District workers who were socializing at a picnic table in Valley Park. Police said their assailant, Mitchell Osburn, did not know the men - Robert Whitson, Steven Weiss and Joseph Bisso.
“These were three men violently struck down for no reason at all,” Belmar said.
Police solved the case because a witness provided a description of a man who was later arrested for a disturbance at a Home Depot store in Richmond Heights. Police said such cases are rare.
“It difficult to solve a case with no link between a suspect and victim,” Belmar said.
Another victim whom police will remember for years is Cassandra “Casey” Williamson, a 6-year-old girl who, police say, was snatched from her Valley Park home by a man who spent the night on her family’s couch.
National news networks broadcast the story as St. Louis County police spent eight hours searching for Casey before Johnny Johnson, 24, admitted to police he tried to rape her, then hit her in the head with a rock at an abandoned glass factory nearby.
Valley Park had five killings last year, giving the community one of the highest murder rates in the St. Louis area - 77 murders per 100,000 population.
Police in all departments in St. Louis County solved 85 percent of the murder cases they investigated. St. Louis County police homicide detectives solved 90 percent of the 10 cases in unincorporated areas.
A Closer Look:
Despite its gains, St. Louis again ranked among the nation’s most dangerous places, with 32 people in the city killed per 100,000.
As in many cases, overall statistics don’t tell the whole story. Huge areas of the city were safe, while others were perilous.
For example, the Police Department’s 2nd District, the vast southwest corner of the city west of Kingshighway and south of Lindell Boulevard that is home to 60,810 people, had two murders. That’s a murder rate of 3.2 murders per 100,000 people, one of the lowest rates in the metropolitan area.
It was a different story in some other parts of the city. In the 6th District, at the city’s northern tip, where 42,364 people live, 30 people were killed, by far the most of any of the city’s nine police districts. That’s a murder rate of 70 per 100,000 people.
In terms of the murder rate, the 5th District north of downtown, which has a population of 16,007, had 17 murders. It had a rate of 106 murders per 100,000 people.