St. Louis is currently on course to have fewer homicides this year than Kansas City, a change in how the two cities typically relate to each other in the grim statistic.
As of this past Sunday, St. Louis had 101 homicides so far in 2023. Kansas City had 128. Compared to this time last year, St. Louis has seen around a 20 percent decrease in homicides, while Kansas City has seen about the same percentage increase, according to criminologist Rick Rosenfeld.
"It turns out that St. Louis' drop corresponds with a drop that's occurred on average across all big cities," says Rosenfeld, who explains that big cities in the U.S. have on average seen a 12 percent drop in homicides so far this year. But Kansas City is bucking that trend.
Both cities saw homicides increase with the onset of the pandemic as well as the civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd, but while St. Louis homicides have fallen since their 2020 high, Kansas City is on pace to surpass its 2020 total.
Comparing the two cities' homicide numbers is not apples to apples. Although St. Louis's metro region is larger in terms of population than Kansas City's, Kansas City proper is significantly more populous than St. Louis City. This means the per capita homicide rate is still higher here than there.
Rosenfeld says that if the trends for this year persist in the next four months, the St. Louis homicide rate would end up being about 52 per 100,000 residents, and the rate in Kansas City would be about 38 per 100,000.
Rosenfeld says that absent some sort of "big exogenous shock" — like, say, a global pandemic — homicide rates in cities tend to change slowly year over year. Making predictions is fraught, he says, but when trying to forecast if a positive or negative trend in the murder rate will continue, he says "your best guess for next year is what happened this year."
About the two cities' divergent trends, Nick Desideri, a spokesman for Mayor Tishaura Jones, tells the RFT, "This disparity is further evidence that a state takeover of SLMPD would do nothing to make St. Louis safer. Local control is necessary to build public trust. Losing a single life to violence is a tragedy, and continuing to improve public safety remains a top priority, but we are encouraged by these trends."
Earlier this month, the Kansas City Council passed laws banning people from transfering a weapon or ammunition to minors as well as outlawing machine guns, silencers and so-called "converters" that can be installed on firearms to make them fully automatic.
Yesterday, St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones announced a raft of upcoming gun control and anti-violence legislation that she hopes to see passed in the upcoming session of the Board of Aldermen. Among the laws Jones says are in the offing are prohibitions on military-grade weapons, transfers or sales of guns to minors and banning insurrectionists and those convicted of hate crimes from having guns.
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