Police Reform

Seven years after Ferguson and months after the George Floyd murder verdict, police reform has stagnated. The legal system remains stacked in favor of police. The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting funded a team of a dozen college journalists to take a broad look at the issues.

The omnibus public safety bill received overwhelming bipartisan support, and includes more than 40 provisions that will affect how police, corrections officers, and prosecutors do their jobs.

A ban on chokeholds, expanded police background checks and higher pay for most county sheriffs are in the bipartisan, compromise bill.

State Sen. Holly Rehder, R-Sikeston, has been trying to pass a prescription drug monitoring program since she was first elected to the legislature nine years ago.

St. Louis Public Safety officials say they plan to hire a new food service to prepare meals for inmates at the City Justice Center. Leaders say this is one of the first steps in addressing repeated complaints about the jail.

As Kayla Reed and a new generation of local leaders saw each of their reform efforts fail to curb police violence in the St. Louis area, they soon realized that what they really had to overcome was the police union’s political force in local elections.

It’s been more than six years since Michael Brown’s killing made St. Louis the epicenter of the most promising civil rights movement since the 1960s. Yet despite stacks of studies and seemingly unprecedented public support for change, St. Louis has not seen a single substantive victory for police reform, thanks in large part to an influential police union and a larger police apparatus that has stymied accountability.

On "St. Louis on the Air," the Legal Roundtable discussed the most important developments in the past month involving the area's judicial system, including two 8th Circuit rulings on qualified immunity and lawsuits over Missouri's Sunshine Law.

Activists hope the data will attract more attention and action on issues of police brutality and the need for reform.

“Hopefully we are doing our ancestors proud in the work that we are doing here,” state Rep. LaToya Greenwood said.