This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 7, 2011 - Astonishingly, certain Missouri statutes directly affecting St. Louis, dating back to the Civil War, have remained in force into the modern era. The genesis of these statutory provisions was the fear by outstate Missouri, largely Confederate at the time, that St. Louis would mobilize militias on the Union side to attack Confederate regions of the state. While control of the city Police Department has received the most notoriety, the Civil War hangover has hindered other St. Louis institutions.
When the city's Public Library System began its renaissance in the 1980s, it encountered a big problem. Because the library is a separate political subdivision of the state, its powers derived from state statute. Having just received extraordinary support from the voters of the city of St. Louis through a significantly increased property tax, the library discovered that Missouri law prohibited it from issuing debt of any kind.
This legal prohibition deprived the library of the use of low-cost, long-term tax-exempt debt to assist in funding its branch expansion throughout the city. In fact, the practice of the library for many years had been to wait 3-5 years to try to accumulate cash, which the library would then spend down to zero to build or renovate a branch in one of the many city neighborhoods it serves. This method of providing services and facilities throughout the city relegated the library to, at best, mediocre status, as it could never reach its goals.
In the mid-1990s, to its great credit, the Missouri General Assembly repealed the antiquated Civil War era debt prohibition that had restricted the library. It was patently clear to the General Assembly that the fear of using bond proceeds from the library to fund a militia to attack outstate Missouri was a "bit farfetched" in 1995.
Since repeal, the library has issued long-term bonds on several occasions, which succeeded in galvanizing dozens of city neighborhoods with new or substantially modernized branches. These have become de facto community centers for those neighborhoods as well as centers of learning. Today, the St. Louis Public Library System is perennially ranked number 1 or 2 in the nation by its peers. Freed from the shackles of the Civil War statute and strongly supported by city residents, the St. Louis Public Library System stands at the top of United States public library systems.
Why should the St. Louis Police Department be any different? The fear of attack on the rest of the state by the Police Department is absurd. I am not aware of any major urban area in the United States that does not have a police commissioner, chief or superintendent who is not appointed by the city, usually by the mayor. In Missouri, with the odd exception of Kansas City, virtually all municipal police chiefs serve by appointment of the mayor or city council; and if the voters don't like the Police Department performance, they vote the politicians out of office.
No substantive policy rationale exists for the current Police Department structure in the city of St. Louis. The issue is simply one of politics. It is time to put aside pettiness, learn from the public library experience and repeal the Civil War era statute. The real problem is that Americans view St. Louis as the most dangerous city in the United States. Definitional semantics aside, perception trumps reality. Like the Library, St. Louis should shed mediocrity and swap its status as the No. 1 crime capital to having the No. 1 Police Department.
J. Joseph Schlafly is senior vice president of Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. Inc. and a member of the board of the St. Louis Beacon. The opinions are his own.