St. Louis police department hides key details about homicide cases from the public
2020 was a bad year for killings in St. Louis.
The city nearly broke a 30-year-old record for the number of homicides in a year. It had the highest homicide rate among the nation’s large cities. And as killings have increased from 2018 through 2020, the percentage of homicide cases closed by the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department has declined. In 2020, detectives solved only a third of the city’s homicides.
With a growing number of killings going unsolved, the police department has shielded critical information from the public.
For months, St. Louis Public Radio and APM Reports, an investigative team with American Public Media, sought data from the department to better understand how often St. Louis police solve homicides. Under Missouri’s public records law, the requests covered information about each case, including victim name, age, race, location of the crime and whether an arrest was made.
https://news.stlpublicradio.org/law-order/2021-11-22/st-louis-police-department-hides-key-details-about-homicide-cases-from-the-public