Kayla Reed is the executive director and co-founder of Action St. Louis.
Editor s note: This is part two of a collaboration between The Missouri Independent and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting looking at how the fight for police reform in St. Louis has evolved. Read part one.
The race was too close.
Kayla Reed, co-founder and executive director of Action St. Louis, curled over her desk. Her long, dark locs created curtains around her body as she used one hand to search election results on her cellphone. With the other hand, she hopped into a Zoom call on her laptop.
Commentators have pointed to a resistance to change among officers and an inability to garner community buy-in as reasons for the slowdown in progress in Baltimore.
Part of the problem, as seen with Baltimore, is that federal intervention does not appear to guarantee lasting change. Research shows that Department of Justice regulations aimed at reform only slightly reduce police misconduct. There is also no evidence that national efforts targeting the use of force alone mitigate police killings.
Community-led reform
One beacon of hope is the Cincinnati Police Department. Twenty years ago, residents in Cincinnati experienced events similar to what many cities have faced in more recent years. An unarmed Black man, Timothy Thomas, was shot dead by officers in 2001, sparking widespread unrest. It led Cincinnati to enter into a different model of reform: a collaborative agreement.
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Thousands of St. Louis-area residents have weighed in on a new jobs plan that aims to chart the region s growth over the next 10 years. The group behind the plan released an updated version on Wednesday that took those comments into consideration.
Greater St. Louis Inc. released its
updated jobs planfor the St. Louis metropolitan area Wednesday morning. That’s after reviewing a wave of public feedback some might say blowback following the first plan’s release in December.
The newly formed economic development group laid out a 10-year road map that focuses heavily on a strategy to beef up the region’s core in an inclusive way that also reduces racial disparities in income and wealth. But
Success stories of U.S. cities that have reformed their police suggest community, officer buy-in might be key | Opinion
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The guilty verdicts delivered against Derek Chauvin on April 20, 2021, represented a landmark moment – but courtroom justice cannot deliver the sweeping changes most Americans feel are needed to improve policing in the U.S.
As America continues to grapple with racism and police killings, federal action over police reform has stalled in Congress. But at the state level there is movement and steps toward reform are underway in many U.S. cities, including Philadelphia; Oakland, California; and Portland, Oregon.
The other is the abolishing of local residency requirements for city employees, including police and firefighters. I think this has had a major deleterious effect in Ohio since the state government pre-empted municipal home rule to achieve this a number of years ago, and the Ohio Supreme Court upheld it. Now in the cities that have the highest crime rates, the safety forces tend to be staffed with officers from distant suburbs. They can be viewed (and sometimes act like) invading forces rather than feeling themselves to be, or behaving like, members of the community.
I heard a good interview on NPR with a police officer who bucked that trend by moving into the neighborhood he serves. Will find that link and post it.