The mayor of St. Louis, Missouri, wants to defund the police department and close the local jail while the city has the highest murder rate in the country.
St. Louis had 87 homicides per 100,000 residents in 2020, which is the worst murder rate in the nation, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported in January.
The figure exceeded the previous top rate of 69 homicides set in 1993 when the soaring number of killings made local and national headlines. 262 total killings over the last year also brought the city's homicide rate 30 percent higher than any of the past 50 years, although the population dwindled in that same time period.
What can a black woman mayor do for you?
Wait what?
"We still have two separate police unions – one for Black police officers and one for White officers," she told the British outlet last Tuesday.
I can't tell if that's just a generalization or a fact, and if it's a fact, it needs to be addressed in another way.
So now how overcrowded will the other jail have to become before she re-opens the closed one? Dangerous territory there, overcrowding a jail in an already toxic system, in a city ready for race relations to change.