After three high-profile police car crashes in the past month, St. Louis Police Chief Robert Tracy acknowledged today — at least tacitly so — that his officers may need better training behind the wheel.
Tracy was at a press conference this morning along with Mayor Tishaura Jones and other public officials touting the drop in homicides last year to the lowest level in a decade.
"But let me be clear, we are not here to celebrate," Jones said. "One life lost to violence is one too many." She noted that she herself has lost four family members to gun violence since becoming mayor in 2021.
Still, on the homicide front, there was cause for optimism. A chart on an easel next to the mayor showed that last year's 158 homicides were down not just from the pandemic high of 263 killings in 2020, but also to below pre-pandemic levels.
Tracy, for his part, spoke about bringing back into the department officers who had previously left for other agencies or, as Tracy put it, "for greener pastures, or so they thought."
When it came time for questions from the media, virtually all of them were for the police chief. Tracy, who this week is celebrating one year with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, was asked about departmental transparency, his own availability to the media, and the police SUV that three weeks ago slammed into Bar:PM, an incident that made national news after the gay bar’s co-owner was arrested.
"I feel bad," Tracy said. "And I'm sorry that their establishment got hit."
Tracy said he was limited on what he could say about the incident because he is the "final arbiter" of the internal investigation into the officer behind the wheel of the SUV who hit the bar. But Tracy did say that because the officer has already admitted to some things, he could "go out on a limb" and say the investigation wasn't going to result in a finding of "no fault."
"They made a mistake," Tracy said. "And just because they made a mistake, it doesn't mean we don't hold them accountable."
About the body cam footage of the incident, Tracy said he was limited by the state Sunshine Law as to what he could release, an assertion that KSDK's Mark Maxwell pushed back on, noting that the footage's release was only barred by the police's own investigation — which Tracy has the authority to close.
Tracy cited the criminal prosecution of the bar co-owner, Chad Morris, as preventing the release of the footage.
In addition to the Bar:PM crash, police crashed another SUV this weekend in Downtown West and another one in December in north city — both dramatic incidents that left the vehicles upside down. Asked about those, Tracy said that each officer gets 40 hours of defensive training in the police academy, and when they become officers, they take part in a six-month evaluation wherein they are paired with a senior officer who assesses their ability behind the wheel.
"Maybe we should grade that a little harder," he said.
Tracy added: "I'm looking at the type of training, and I've sat down with the trainers. I'm looking nationally, I go to conferences, I talk to other chiefs, what are you doing to bring accidents down? Because more officers get hurt in car accidents, and so do other people, than probably any other thing."
Asked to grade himself overall, Tracy said he'd give himself a B.
"There's so much more work to do," he said.
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