In Dec 2014, Mayor Slay and Chief Dotson announced an $8 million proposal to increase the St. Louis Police Department by 160 new officers in 2 years mostly through increased ticket and fee revenue. Mayor Slay has attempted to justify this plan by citing an alleged jump in crime in the city since August, but as the recent police murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner show, more police does not equal safer communities. More police only guarantees increased targeting of the poor and peoples of color. We oppose any increase in either police powers or numbers. 

Chief Dotson cites an alleged "Ferguson Effect" to explain a supposed increase in homicides in 2014 over the previous year. Looking at the actual crime statistics he used and those cited by the St Louis Post Dispatch, the actual major increase was in the Spring of 2014, months before the Ferguson Protests began. As well, the 31 Dec Post Dispatch article entitled “St. Louis homicides up more than 30 percent in 2014 to highest total since 2008”, shows no increase in homicides in St Louis County for the entire year of 2014 over 2013. If Dotson is attempting to blame the Ferguson Protests for a spike in homicides, shouldn’t there have been an increase in St. Louis County where the actual protests first occurred? This shows how politicians and police officials like Chief Dotson will use fear and manipulate statistics to justify increases in their own powers and demonize communities challenging police brutality.  

Mayor Slay and Chief Dotson could have used the aftermath of the murder of Michael Brown and the international focus on police violence and systemic racism as an opportunity for St. Louis to become a model city that attempted to tackle the greatest risks to peoples’ survival and the root causes of crime. They could have proposed initiatives to confront worsening poverty in the city, lack of access to health care, adequate housing, and education.  After months of protests, politicians like Democratic Mayor Slay have been  forced to propose band-aid reforms like police cameras.  Meanwhile they continue  criminalizing   large sections of black youth, and the poor.

The Kerner Commission, assembled by President Johnson in 1968 after three years of riots to investigate the cases of strife in communities of color, proposed systematic solutions to confront racially-segregated communities, inferior schools, high unemployment, and racist police violence. Our politicians today ignore systemic approaches like those proposed in the 1960s, yet wonder why their programs fail to seriously tackle crime and only lead to the indignation of communities of color. We, like the rest of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, demand nothing less than fundamental change.

Due to the racist and unequal nature of St. Louis City, and U.S. society more broadly, any additional police officers will continue to target the most marginalized in the city: the poor, people of color, and those with disabilities. Racism in fact dictates who gets arrested, stopped, and the length of their prison terms. In St. Louis County for example, 40 percent or more of their annual revenue comes from the petty fines and fees collected by their municipal courts.  The people that are going to be forced to foot the $8 million bill in St. Louis City will literally be the exact people already most targeted by the police.  

Instead of making communities safer, increased law enforcement devastates communities. We live in the country that imprisons more people than any other society that has existed. The FBI reports that in 2011, cops in America killed 404 suspects in acts of ‘justifiable homicide’.” Today, police kill black Americans at nearly the same rate as the lynching that occured during the Jim Crow era and young black men are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police than white men. This is why, as a recent New York Times editorial points out, the scale of police harassment and killings in many black communities that “are justifiably seen as an alien, occupying force that is synonymous with state-sponsored abuse.”

Increased state repression in the U.S. is directly connected to the fact that we live in one of the most economically and racially unequal societies in human history. St. Louis ranks among the nation’s metropolitan counties with the highest poverty rates. Nationally, the average white family has six times the total assets – house, cars, savings, and retirement – as black and Latino families as of 2010. Women make 77 cents to every man’s dollar and for African-American women, they earn 64 cents and Latina women earn 56 cents for every dollar earned by awhite man. Increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour is urgently needed to address poverty.   

Since a budget is the clearest statement of the politics and morality of a government, instead of hiring more officers, we demand that the $8 million proposed be the first among many investments for jobs programs, and increased investments in health care and affordable housing. Furthermore, the facts outlined above clearly demonstrate the need for an independent, democratically elected, fully funded, civilian body with full powers over the police as a step towards community control of public safety. If these bodies also have the power to set budget priorities, this would allow St. Louisans to mobilize to demand programs that ordinary people actually need.