Readers Overwhelmingly Support Reduction of Police Districts
In the unscientific poll last week readers gave approval to Police Chief Sam Dotson’s reduction in police districts:
Q: Your thoughts on the number of St. Louis Police districts being reduced from nine to six
- Good move, better distribution of officers 53 [76.81%]
- Won’t make any measurable difference in reducing crime 9 [13.04%]
- Unsure/No Opinion 5 [7.25%]
- Other: 2 [2.9%]
- Should’ve stayed with 9 districts 0 [0%]
- Should’ve increased the number of districts to match wards 0 [0%]
Here’s the two “other” answers:
- No change in crime; but less expensive for the City
- Probably won’t reduce/ increase crime, but it MAY reduce some operational costs.
It’ll be interesting to see if it has a measurable impact on crime statistics. Regardless, I do think it’ll boost the perception of improved law enforcement.
— Steve Patterson
I know that downtown is a special case and gets extra patrols, but I think it is a bad idea to continue having downtown in the same district as one of the worst districts in north city. They have more important things to worry about than car cloutings, but car cloutings are a problem downtown, and don’t get some county guy started on his freinds cousins former boyfriend who got his car broken into in 1995 and has never been in the city limits since. Also steve, have you noticed the broken window on the office of the downtown community improvement district? That’s a great example for the rest of downtown, and its only been like that for about 5 years.
I like the new distribution. I live in district four and have always felt the boundaries were too small and artificial. Every district has its own issues, district 4 which now is Downtown, Midtown, and much of the riverfront have similar issues in being areas of development and require a different type of policing perhaps than district have 5 which is more established, or district 6 which is plagued by gang violence. I like to think that the North areas now included in district 4 and 5 will someday become more a part of the development of St Louis. I don’t believe that thinking that just placing an artificial boundary between downtown and the North was actually doing anything to contain crime in one area or another. The biggest issue I believe crime wise is the flow of violence coming into the city from East St. Louis. With the limited flow points for traffic across the river I would think that this would be fairly easy to contain.