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St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones is rethinking policing, public safety: 5 things podcast

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USA TODAY

On today's episode of 5 Things: The essential question is this: can Mayor Tishaura Jones bring her citizens forward with her vision of change for the St. Louis Police Department? Political correspondent Philip M. Bailey reports.

Hit play on the podcast player above and read along with the transcript below.

Shannon Rae Green:

Hey, there. I'm Shannon Rae Green, and this is 5 Things. It's Sunday, June 13th. These Sunday episodes are special. We're bringing you more from in-depth stories you may have already heard. I'm filling in for Claire Thornton. She'll be back soon.

Shannon Rae Green:

Many of the greatest true stories are complex and nuanced. The mayor of St. Louis has a vision for how to rethink and reframe the way policing works in her city. So can Mayor Tishaura Jones bring her fellow citizens along? Will people who live in a city with one of the highest violent crime rates hear her out? These questions and their answers are what makes what you're about to hear one of those great true stories. Phillip M. Bailey is USA TODAY's political correspondent, and he reported this story to search for these answers. Here's Phillip.

Phillip M. Bailey:

Mayor Tishaura Jones at the outset of her administration I think wanted to signal to her supporters and to the city her effort to reimagine public safety. So, where that starts primarily is she signed an executive order basically streamlining complaints against police officers. She was very critical of it saying it's an example of how the system is more to protect bad police officers than to protect citizens. That was a very fairly easy thing to do at the outset, but I think it was definitely meant to send a signal to supporters, the city, and probably to the rest of the country that, "I know that I'm here for a specific purpose and it's to rethink how we interact with and look at police."

Phillip M. Bailey:

So soon thereafter, Mayor Jones, who was the former treasurer in St. Louis, so she has a background in fiscal policy, earmarked and wanted to amend the city budget and the police budget by reallocating $4 million, which has certainly sparked some conversation in the city. She's basically taking these 98 vacancies for years and using that and allocating that to different services saying that that's a better way for crime prevention. It's going to be a tough balancing act for her, but she has not shied away from it. She is very open about, "We need to do this differently. We cannot do this the same, whether it's for a public safety standpoint or from a police violence standpoint."

Shannon Rae Green:

Phillip traveled to St. Louis with video journalist Hannah Gaber to ask more questions of the mayor.

Mayor Tishaura Jones:

If you lead with prevention then you can totally change the outcomes, and we've seen other cities start down this pathway. Miami, Denver, Portland, Oregon, have all started down this pathway of deploying the right professional to the right call, making sure that we triage those calls in the proper manner so we can get the people the help they need and also free up police to do police involved work.

Shannon Rae Green:

You can hear Phillip in this next clip ask the mayor about what Defund The Police means to her. This question is crucial because these three words mean different things to different people.

Phillip M. Bailey:

When you hear Defund The Police, that term, what does that mean to you?

Mayor Tishaura Jones:

That means transforming our public safety system to invest in things that make people safe. Because when people say, "Well, you defunded the police," I turn around and ask them, "Well, how do you think our current system is working? Is it working for you? Is it working for anybody else? Are we safer with the current system?" So we need to transform it to do things that will actually make people safe, deploy the right professional to the right call, have more access to victim services, to try to deescalate when that shooting happens. We took a million dollars and we're investing it into victim support services, mental health counseling, childcare, and other victim support systems. So when that shooting happens, then we're able to surround that family with the things that they need so we don't further escalate a situation and retaliation.

Shannon Rae Green:

I asked Phillip what officers and what people who represent them think about these changes. He interviewed Jane Dueker, who is the attorney for the St. Louis Police Officer's Association.

Jane Dueker:

Our officers would love nothing more than to be able to do community policing, spend time with the constituents, spend time with citizens, get to know people, but we don't have the officers to do that. We're not even answering all the calls. We're on track to have the highest murder rate on record. In 2019, there were 500,000 calls for service in the City of St. Louis. That's almost double the number of calls than there are people in the city. Since 2015, those vacancies have been funding overtime in order to keep current services. We have 1,300 officers, and at most in the entire city there's about 54 to 60 officers on the street in any given shift. That is completely unacceptable. It's not safe for the public. It's not safe for the officers.

Phillip M. Bailey:

Police unions and others, and I'd say this includes a great many Democratic mayors in cities, more officers on the streets is a sign of how safe your city is. But for Mayor Jones and others, the thought is that, "No, police officers on the street has nothing to do with your individual safety." Jane Dueker, who is certainly an advocate for her police union and believes in public safety, her and Mayor Jones do have one place of agreement, which is that police should not be social workers. They cannot solve the problems that many people are calling police for to handle. They might be the last resort, police, but they're not the problem-solvers of those things.

Phillip M. Bailey:

So the question we have is, will we see fruit? Will we see a blossom of Tishaura Jones' vision? That will take some time to figure out. She's asking for that patience. I asked Mayor Jones, I said, "Aren't you worried at all that a police shooting of an African American resident or continued skyrocketing crime is going to make even people who voted for you go, "You know what? We need police. We need police officers. We need more of them. Now is not the time to experiment?" I think that's the first political test for her is, she's committed, but can she keep the community that voted for her, can she keep them committed to this vision of, "Things may get worse. We may hit 300 homicides in 2021 in St. Louis, but we didn't get here overnight, and we're not going to get out of it overnight."

Mayor Tishaura Jones:

From open positions that have been open for decades, we know from the chief himself that he was having problems filling these positions for years and that the number of police had been steadily declining for the last two decades and are still declining. So we need to ask ourselves as a city of a little less than 300,000, do we need 1,200 uniform officers? Which is the largest of any city our size.

Phillip M. Bailey:

Okay. Let's unpack this Defund The Police, the slogan of certain... Let me start by saying this. Do you like pizza? I like pizza. I think most people like pizza, but I'm sure there's some people who don't like pizza. Imagine saying to someone or someone saying to you, "I don't like pizza, Shannon. I don't like it. But you know what I like? I like dough baked with tomato sauce and cheese and vegetables and different things sprinkled on top of it." And you look at that person and go, "That's a pizza." In politics, slogans matter. They influence how people think. Defund The Police does not poll well even amongst Democrats, even amongst African Americans, older African Americans in particular because those grandmothers and those aunts and those elders in those communities, in St. Louis, in Chicago, in Detroit, in Philly and Atlanta, if you talk to them, they do not like the idea of no police, which is what Defund The Police, people think that means.

Phillip M. Bailey:

And it's an activist term. I tell people all the time, "There's a difference between activists and voters and people." Activists tend to be much more politically engaged folks. They tend to be further to the right or to the left politically. They're not average people. Average people aren't necessarily voters. They may have an opinion. You explain it to them. "OK. I like that. I don't like that." But voters tend to be not more conservative, I think more practical is the term. They've seen people make promises. Younger voters tend to be a lot more idealistic, but middle age and older voters are like, "Just keep the trains running, keep my Medicaid paid, keep my social security check right, and just keep things the way they are, even if I do believe in these loftier goals." I think that's something that applies to conservatives and liberals, people on the far-left and far-right alike.

Phillip M. Bailey:

So, Tishaura Jones, when confronted and we ask her, "When you think about Defund The Police, what comes to mind?" She's like, "I don't agree with Defund The Police. I think it's not something that I agree with, something that we're trying to do here." The president and CEO Michael McMillan of the St. Louis Urban League is the same way. He's like, "It's a terrible slogan." That's why one of the most important folks we talked to in this story was Alderwoman Marlene Davis, an African American woman who represents a majority African American district on the North Side. She says, "I don't hear my constituents saying to me, 'Defund the police.' They're not asking for that." I think she's absolutely right, because for those African Americans, not all, but for those Africans-Americans who are necessarily more voters and who are plugged into government, they're thinking about, "Yeah, I don't want the criminal element to run." That's what they think of when they think of Defund The Police.

Phillip M. Bailey:

But, again, when you talk to folks like Tory Russell, who's a St. Louis organizer, who's a hardcore radical African American, who certainly is someone who believes in Black liberation and sees police as something that cannot be reformed, cannot be fixed, he absolutely says that, "Yes, we need to work towards a society where we don't need the police, where we need to abolish police." This is the friction that I think Tishaura Jones, on the left at least, people like her will always face. People don't like pizza, but they liked the ingredients. Because, polling that we've done at USA TODAY has shown the same thing. You poll people and say, "Defund the police?" they don't like it. But then when you say, "Do you support reallocating significant resources from police budgets into other crime prevention strategies?" "Oh, yeah. I'm for that." Well, that's what Defund The Police is, right?

Mayor Tishaura Jones:

This will not happen overnight, and I need grace and space and opportunity to get things done. I tried to level set coming out the gate what the expectations are. I think for the most part, people realize that. They realize that St. Louis didn't get here overnight. The reason why St. Louis is the way it is, is due to generations of policy-making decisions where racism has permeated all of those policy-making decisions and have held total swaths of our entire city behind. They know that we didn't get here overnight and it's going to take several terms, and long after I'm gone, to see some of the fruits of our labor.

Shannon Rae Green:

If you want to dig into more of the reporting that Phillip Bailey and video journalist Hannah Gaber did on the ground in St. Louis, check out the mini documentary and story that they published. I added a link in the show's description. If you like this episode of 5 Things, write us a review on Apple Podcast and tell us what you liked about it. Thank you for listening. I want to thank Claire Thornton and Taylor Wilson, my colleagues on the 5 Things podcast team who host this show. It's honestly a dream to work with the both of them. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with 5 Things You Need To Know for Monday. I'm Shannon Rae Green. I'll see you next time. Until then, keep up with me on Twitter, where I'm @ShannonRaeGreen.

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