Why 1,000 Homicides in St. Louis Remain Unsolved
Why 1,000 Homicides in St. Louis Remain Unsolved
In one of America's deadliest cities, police have struggled to solve killings due to staffing shortages, shoddy detective work and lack of community trust.
Of the roughly 1,900 homicides committed in the city of St. Louis from 2014 through 2023, more than 1,000 remain unsolved, according to an analysis of homicide data obtained by APM Reports and St. Louis Public Radio.
During those years, murders in St. Louis surged, making the city one of the nation's deadliest. For most of the decade, police struggled to bring perpetrators to justice. A review of 20 years of data and records reveals some of the reasons why police failed to solve so many homicides, including shoddy detective work, lack of resources and an erosion of community trust.
Holy shit! Those are crazy numbers!
Wtf is going on in St. Louis???
St. Louis is arguably the worst case of urban decay currently occuring in America, even worse than the much popularly maligned Detroit.
Basically, there are whole districts of the city that are just literally falling apart. The city's population has been shrinking, poverty is rampant as the economy tanks, public services are on the decline...
Vice has a documentary on it.
Edit: For comparison, heres St Louis crime statistics compared to by far the most dangerous city in Ecuador (currently only in Western news for their war against cartels).
As you can see, an international news worthy level of violence in Ecuador is just shy of an average day in St Louis.
To add onto this, St. Louis is similar to Baltimore where the city and the county have split. The city isn’t like almost every other city in America. The city numbers don’t have the more suburban calmness and reduced crime to easily compare across other cities. The north of the city is definitely dangerous, but as I understand it every city has a more run down dangerous area.
Note to self: Do not live in north St. Louis.
North County was previously where all the middle class white people went after fleeing the urban core. Then as more African American families moved in to get away from urban decay, the white population moved to suburbs south and west of the city. This isn't civil rights history, either -- it's been an ongoing process as recently as the 90s. My (white) dad grew up in Blackjack, just a short ways from Ferguson, and his parents only moved out of the area around 1995. When the unrest around Michael Brown's death kicked off, he turned on the evening news to see the supermarket where my grandmother used to buy groceries going up in flames.