St. Louis Metropolitan Police

The St. Louis Police Partnership Program connects participants and their families with officers through monthly home visits and resources like jobs, education and housing.

A federal lawsuit alleges St. Louis sheriff's deputies told the Jefferson County man he could not protest in front of the Civil Courts Building — a public area — due to department policy. No such policy seems to exist.

Ramon Chavez-Rodriguez faces felony charges including DWI death of a law enforcement officer, exceeding the posted speed limit and operating a vehicle on a highway without a valid license.

The officer, David Lee, was responding to a separate crash on eastbound Interstate 70 near Grand Boulevard when the car struck him on Sunday morning.

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.

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.