DOYLE MURPHY
St. Louis has seen a roughly 20 percent drop in crime in 2023 compared to this time last year.
Last month was a relatively peaceful one by St. Louis standards. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department tells the RFT they recorded only seven homicides in November — a number significantly lower than recent Novembers in the city.
In November 2022, the city saw 17 homicides. That number was 25 in November 2020 and 18 in 2019.
In fact, to find a November with seven homicides you’d have to go back to 2018. To find a November with fewer, you’d need to go all the way back to 2012, when the city recorded six.
The stats from last month come amid what the mayor’s office has said is a citywide 20 percent drop in homicides relative to this time last year. Thus far the city has seen 146 homicides this year. By the end of November 2022, the city had already seen 193 killings.
The good news comes as Robert Tracy approaches his first-full year as chief of the SLMPD. Tracy, who was brought in from Wilmington, Delaware, said on the day he took the reins of the department that he felt “a palpable sense of hope and potential.”
The numbers are part of a national trend: American cities writ large are seeing a drop in homicides this year, though St. Louis’ decline has significantly outpaced the average.
Rick Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, previously told the RFT that forecasting a city’s crime trends is always fraught. However, the good news for St. Louis looking ahead to 2024 is that drops in crime tend to lead to more drops in crime — and vice versa.
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