Mayor Jones proclaims a St. Louis resurgence | Political Eye

As we say at the EYE, “whatever it is, it ain’t,” and despite what you may read or watch elsewhere, this week was in several ways an overwhelmingly historic and a mostly-positive week for our city. 

Let’s see what’s happened so far:

Granted the week had a bumpy start, for Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner who avoided one contempt order on Monday morning while catching the ire of yet another city judge. Mere hours after Judge Scott Milikandecided to not hold Gardner in contempt, Judge Michael Noble entered another “show cause” order against Gardner, summoning her (or a designated agent) to personally appear before his court Thursday to answer for yet another prosecutorial absence at a trial for a violent felony.

Gardner’s office has faced a recent series of harsh public setbacks, including the public exit of another of her three remaining assistant prosecutors able to appear in court and her assistants unable to make quadruple-booked court appearances. The back-to-back contempt hearings underscore the woes of the beleaguered office, where both the legal and support staff have been depleted since Gardner took office in 2016.  We may even be at a “constitutional crisis” level of staffing shortage when you consider the shortage of attorneys who are even able to appear at bond hearings for defendants detained in the City Jail awaiting trial.

Assuming that each of the 635 current detainees could afford to pay their bonds (while also assuming that every detainee was given a bond amount), there would still be a pretrial detention crisis because the Circuit Attorney’s office simply lacks attorneys who can appear at hearings to set and/or reduce bonds. Defense attorneys have raised concern for years, as Gardner’s office repeatedly files criminal charges, pushes them to trial, and drops those charges, only to refile them the next day and continue the detention of sometimes innocent persons. This is untenable, unsustainable, and should be concerning for every one. 

We still maintain firmly that removing Gardner as Circuit Attorney is ultimately the sole discretion of St. Louis City voters, and the Missouri Attorney General has no business making up rules to try to force her out of office.

On Monday morning, Judge Milikan found that Gardner’s office allowed a murder case to “fall through the cracks;” later that afternoon, Judge Noble asserted that the staffing shortage in the Circuit Attorney’s office “thwarts and defeats the authority” of the court. 

While Judge Noble was writing his “show cause” order, advocates gathered outside of the St. Louis City Justice Center to raise public awareness that there has been a 30% increase in the city jail’s population since the beginning of the year. According to the Freedom Community Center, city prosecutors requested that 92% of all criminal defendants brought before a judge for their first hearing be denied bond. This approach might make sense under a fully-staffed Circuit Attorney’s Office, but considering Gardner’s office’s inability to make appearances scheduled months in advance, we see the likelihood of avoidable anguish and civil rights transgressions against detainees. Chief Public Defender Matthew Mahaffey reiterated that this trend disproportionately harms Black men detained while waiting for trial. The average detention in St. Louis City Jail currently exceeds 300 days.

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In stark contrast to the afternoon, on Monday evening the St. Louis City Reparations Commission held its first meeting of a year-long process to consider one of the nation’s more extensive reparations programs to compensate Black St. Louisans for the generational damage caused by slavery and Jim Crow laws. After all, St. Louis is renown for mass-scale erasure of Black neighborhoods, failed public housing projects like Pruitt Igoe, and the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision that held that the Constitution did not extend citizenship rights to people of Black African decent. Our region perfected redlining and block-busting, segregating schools through privatizing public education, and police-for-hire.

Needless to say, the city has a lot of history to examine, redress, and properly recompense. During Monday’s meeting, residents called for reforms to the criminal legal system, increased mental health support, and access to quality, affordable housing.

Fulfilling one of Mayor Tishaura Jones’ campaign promises, the St. Louis Reparations Commission will focus on evaluating “the history of slavery, segregation, and other race-based harms” that are unique to our city. The Commission is charged with developing tangible recommendations that repair systemic harms caused historically by the City.

Monday’s meeting set forth the Reparations Commission’s process and anticipated timeline, and while monetary payouts to eligible residents may be on the table, the Commission will aim to propose systemic, larger-scale reforms that remove barriers and create greater opportunities for Black St. Louisans as descendants of enslaved persons.

The next public meeting will be held on May 22. The EYE looks forward to progress of this important commission.

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On Tuesday evening, Mayor Jones delivered her State of the City address on the Saint Louis University campus in the very same room where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a 1964 speech before a crowd of nearly 4,000. Mayor Jones quoted Dr. King’s address from nearly fifty years ago, “there’s nothing new about poverty, what is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.” Noting how similar the social and economic conditions of 1964 are to those in 2023, Mayor Jones remarked, as Dr. King did, that “as long as there is poverty, the temptation for crime deepens. That social isolation, economic deprivation, poverty, and ignorance breed crime and the conditions for it, no matter what color you are.”

The Mayor’s State of the City address planted a flag for St. Louis, defiantly declaring that St. Louis has “99 problems, and the state stepping in and taking over our criminal justice system ain’t one.” Mayor Jones called for a regional approach to address the root causes of crime, and she pointed out the despicable attempts by the state legislature to take over our police department and prosecutor’s office as well as the state’s attacks on pregnant women, the LGBTQ community, and the teaching of racial history in public schools. “To Jefferson City, diversity is dangerous, history must be buried, and our centers of learning – our beloved libraries and schools – cannot be trusted,” Mayor Jones proclaimed. “If Ruby Bridges was strong enough to endure racism, our children are strong enough to learn about it.”

We are encouraged by all these important events, not just for their historic value but to also take hope from our city’s ongoing transformation. As Mayor Jones noted, for the first time in a very long time, the City’s top leadership is not in conflict, but is collaborative. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and “long-term, transformative change” doesn’t happen overnight. While this alignment in itself is noteworthy, within the greater picture of this week, and despite the naysayers, we can see the stormy skies parting for more sunny days ahead of St. Louis.

Reader alert: A new book you might want to read shows some remarkable parallels with the past in today’s political environment, including the hubris of those who seek to exploit white rage and extremism, rampant in Missouri and nationwide in one of the country’s major political parties and some of its most influential leaders including Donald J. Trump. The title is A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan.