Understanding St. Louis: The 12 Neighborhoods of the 30-Day Anti-Crime Initiative

Recently, nextSTL has looked at the total crime index and crime-ridden neighborhoods as well as violent crimes and property crimes per 1,000 residents in the 79 City of St. Louis neighborhoods. If the analysis showed anything, it was that a) the total crime index is nearly worthless as a tool to understand crime in the city, and b) considering crimes per 1,000 residents, and pervalence of violent crime and property crime provides a much more clear understanding of crime in our city. There remain significant caveats, most significantly, neighborhoods with a significant influx of workers or visitors appear to have a higher prevalence of crime because only residential numbers were used.

Recently, the city has announced a possibly influx of $600,000 to help address crime in the city. This has come with the expected, but still unfortunate local news headlines, such as, "St. Louis officials re-doubling anti-crime efforts." Beyond the headlines, the effort is important and significant. In short, as a trial effort, dozens of officers are being taken off their day shifts and moved to nights for a period of 30 days. St. Louis Police Chief Dan Isom was quoted as saying, "These officers are patrolling very well defined areas where we believe we have the most chance, the most probability of preventing homicides or shootings." The experiment has reportedly already shown positive results. The first weekend of implementation saw two shootings and no homicides in the city, as opposed to 10 shootings and two homicides the prior weekend.