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On Track To Surpass Last Year: St. Louis Reaches 120 Homicides Over the Weekend

Crime scene tape blocks off the area involved in a March 8 shootout in St. Louis. A cell phone photo of the body of Carlos Boles, the man killed in the shootout, is the subject of an investigation.
Rachel Lippmann
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St. Louis Public Radio
Crime scene tape blocks off the area involved in a March 8 shootout in St. Louis. A cell phone photo of the body of Carlos Boles, the man killed in the shootout, is the subject of an investigation.

A grandmother walking home from the store with her grandchildren. An Ethiopian refugee who worked as a convenience store clerk. A brother and a sister, killed three hours apart.

With a little more than two months left in the year, the city of St. Louis has already reached 120 homicides, the total number of murders reported in all of 2013.

That’s 120 victim’s families, assailant’s families, and neighborhood blocks that will never be the same, said James Clark.

“There was a time when we only heard gunshots at night. We now have neighborhoods where gun violence is both expected and accepted,” Clark said.

Clark is the vice president of community outreach for Better Family Life, a St. Louis-area nonprofit whose projects include the Put Down the Pistol Initiative. He said recent shootings in downtown St. Louis before a Cardinals game suggest gun violence is becoming a more brazen.

“We have very loud indicators that this thing is spiraling out of control,” Clark said. “As a city, we have to make some bold decisions. We’ve got to be in our neighborhoods where the violence takes place.”

The 120-homicide mark represents a 30.4 percent increase from this time last year. The numbers come from Uniform Crime Reporting statistics, which are reported by police departments to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The number does not include accidental deaths, suicide or self-defense.  

In a survey of 50 states that adjusted for population size, African Americans in Missouri were most likely to be the victim of a gun-related homicide. The survey used mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control. Whites were about 15 times less likely to be the victim of a gun-related homicide.

As a metro area, St. Louis has struggled with murders and gun violence for years.

In 2012, service providers and elected officials from the city of St. Louis, St. Louis County and East St. Louis convened a Regional Youth Violence Prevention Task Force to reduce violence committed by youth under the age of 24. In 2013, the group published a Community Plan that included job training initiatives, increasing access to mental or behavioral health services and reducing the availability of guns.  

Homicides reported in the City of St. Louis, according to Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, by year. The 2014 year-to-date number is as of 10/27/2014.
Credit Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics / FBI
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FBI
Homicides reported in the City of St. Louis by year, according to Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics. The 2014 year-to-date number is as of 10/27/2014.

Access to guns, both legally and illegally, is a huge factor in the homicide rate, according to Captain Mike Sack of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police.  

“There’s just an availability of firearms out there. Oftentimes, the wrong people have them and they resort to the use of those firearms to resolve their differences.”      

As Commander for SLMPD’s Crimes Against Persons and Property unit, Sack is often involved in investigating homicides to bring charges against the perpetrators. But in many cases, Sack said, potential witnesses refuse to come forward to police because they fear they’ll be targeted.

“There’s been this ‘no-snitch’ mentality across the country for more than a decade,” Sack said. “What it really does is it impacts the victims. It impacts the people living in the community. Because what happens is those suspects and those individuals who are willing to engage in violence are able to continue bullying a neighborhood by threatening them.”