If you were to guess that St. Louis was the most dangerous city in Missouri, you would be correct. You would also be correct if you assumed it would rank within the top ten most dangerous cities in the United States. The rankings can vary slightly depending on the website and the metrics used, but St. Louis ranked near the top of nearly every one of them. The Kansas City Star article linked above uses a report from U.S. News and World Report for 2024–2025. The rankings were determined by FBI crime reports of each city’s murders and property crime per capita. The same list had Kansas City at eight.
St. Louis has a reputation for being a violent city. Crime issues have helped push people out in droves and deterred newcomers from settling in the area. St. Louis City’s population has decreased by over 30% since the 1980s, and the number of vacant downtown buildings has increased substantially. The Wall Street Journal went as far as to call downtown a “real estate nightmare.”
Although St. Louis continues to rank among the most dangerous cities in the country, efforts have been made to solve the ongoing crime problem, beginning with the replacement of former St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner in 2023. Gardner exacerbated the crime issue in several ways, including having an exclusion list of police officers who were not allowed to bring cases to her office and creating a massive backlog of more than 6,700 cases that awaited charging decisions. The current St. Louis Circuit Attorney, Gabe Gore, has since cleared all cases in the backlog.
More recent efforts include House Bill (HB) 495, signed by Governor Mike Kehoe into law in March. This legislation transfers control of the St. Louis Police Department to a state-appointed board. The governor has already made five interim appointments to the six-person board (the mayor is the sixth member of the board). In addition, a $45 million 911 dispatch center broke ground last year in St. Louis with the goal of improving response times. In St. Louis, only half of the 911 calls in 2022 were answered within the national standard of 10 seconds.
It is unclear whether these efforts will have positive impacts on public safety in St. Louis, but what is clear is that violent crime in the city is down. It was down 7.8% in 2024 compared to 2023. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department (SLMPD) reported homicides were down 6.3 % in 2024. It is worth noting that crime is down across the country, so this may be part of a larger trend.
The fact that St. Louis has lower violent crime and homicide rates is a positive sign, but time will tell if the city can sustain this success and lose the moniker of being one of the nation’s most dangerous cities.
