Investigative Reporting

The police department has struggled to solve homicides, partly due to shoddy detective work, staffing shortages and eroding community trust.

These St. Louis families have been waiting for years in hopes of getting answers after their loved ones were killed. While parents, siblings and others say police seem to have forgotten them — they have not.

The city’s homicide unit has dealt with short staffing, long hours and a ballooning DNA backlog.

Several officers in the homicide unit faced internal complaints that they slept on the job, failed to get key evidence and lied to superiors.

In the past decade, police solved fewer than half of the homicide cases with Black victims and two-thirds of the cases with white ones.

Getting and interpreting homicide clearance data involved litigation, complex analysis and patience.

In one of America’s deadliest cities, police have struggled to solve killings due to staffing shortages, shoddy detective work and lack of community trust.

Only 16 investigators are looking into child abuse and neglect claims in St. Louis and St. Louis County. The head of the Missouri Children’s Division says that number should be closer to 60.

People living near a company that did work for the Navy had no idea that a toxic solvent, disposed of improperly, had made its way into their drinking water – until a public apology from the state in 2019.

It was common knowledge in the nursing home business, but perhaps not to the families trusting those facilities with a loved one’s care.