Increase the salaries to attract and hire police officers

If you want STL to be safer, we need a full staff of cops. If you want people to not speed thru our streets, you need a full staff of cops. If you want crime to be reduced, you need a full staff of cops. If you want the 4th of July to be safer next year, you need a full staff of cops. If you want the cops to show up when they are called, you need a full staff of cops. If you want high speed police chases to stop, you need a full staff of cops to set up roadblocks. If you want STL to be safer, we need a full staff of cops. You will never have a full staff of cops until the cops in the city make as much as the cops in the county. The cops in the city make $10,000 less than the average for the area. In Brentwood, the cops make about $90,000 a year. In the city they make $65,000 a year. Which job would you want? Be honest. Brentwood cops have it much easier and get paid more. How about Clayton, Ballwin, or Arnold? Even University City pays their cops more, and while UCity is a hard place to be a cop, it isn't harder than the city. No municipality has it harder than the city for being a cop. Not Jennings, Florissant, Chesterfield, St. Charles, Town & Country or Ladue. If you are a cop in Ladue, you spend most of your time breaking up parties by teenagers and you get paid more than the cops in the city. The cops in the city need to get paid more so that we can have a full staff of cops. Right now, we have 900 cops, and we need 1200 cops. If we gave each cop in the city a $10,000 raise that would cost us $9M. If we hired another 300 cops (already figured into the budget) and gave them the same raise, it would cost another $3M. That's $12M a year to get us fully staffed with cops, which would solve about a hundred problems a day for the city. It's worth it. We tried "defund the police" and it didn't work. It was a terrible idea politically and practically. We need a full staff of cops. For what it's worth, I think we should focus heavily on black females to fill out the 300. If we added 300 black women to the police force, the entire force would change dramatically. Think about it. Fund the police! It's time to make STL a safer city.

No way. Not until there is accountability on their job performance, audits when a complaint comes in about their unethical behavior, and they actually start doing their jobs. Had one police officer have outside witnesses of a man hitting a woman at the cardinals game, woman wanted to press charges and the officer said to get out of the area or he would arrest her instead. I asked for a police report number so I could take her to the police station and maybe get more help. Nope, told me there wasn’t a report number because at one point the woman said she didn’t want him to get in trouble. So, no, I don’t want to give more money to this corrupt system. Other cities have started focusing on community policing with actual professionals who are in the mental health field. Let’s start there. Or with other social programs that will stop crime at the source.

Absolutely no additional money should be spent on police. End of story.

If people don’t feel safe, they will not visit or live in the city, which hurts everyone by reducing our tax base. I am 100 percent in favor of hiring more police officers to reduce response times, have a more visible presence in our neighborhoods and discourage crime.