Waiting for Perception on Crime to Change Is Not a Winning Strategy for St. Louis

Posted on by Scott Tanner

I’ve highlighted the progress St. Louis has made in reducing crime in recent blog posts. The improving data are positive news, and city leaders have taken several steps in the right direction to make this possible. While St. Louis still experiences high levels of crime well above the national average, things are trending in the right direction with homicide rates at the lowest in a decade However, even though crime is declining, that doesn’t mean that citizens’ perception of crime is changing.. Even if this trend of lower crime continues, it likely won’t significantly impact how safe people in the city feel. People don’t tend to make judgements of safety based on numbers alone.

In March of this year, KSDK 5 published an article titled “St. Louis leaders say crime is at a historic low, but public perception takes time to catch up.” The issue is that this isn’t necessarily true. Perception does not always “catch up,” although there certainly can be lag effects between the reduction in crime and the perception held by citizens. In fact, there are over 30 years of surveys from Pew Research showing that Americans believe there is more crime in the United States in the year they were surveyed than the year before. Violent crime rates have dropped by almost half over the span of these surveys beginning in 1993.

Even at the local level, citizens have misperceptions about crime and where it is occurring. Brookings surveyed people from some of the biggest cities in the United States, including Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. One of the most common complaints was fear of going downtown due to higher crime. Data show that downtowns accounted for a very small percentage of the increase in crime in these cities. For example, Chicago experienced a 48% increase in property crime between 2019 and 2022, but downtown only accounted for 6% of this increase.

The examples above demonstrate that numbers and time don’t always solve the issue of the perception of crime not matching reality. If St. Louis is to close the gap, it must start with the appearance of the city. Police Chief Tracy briefly mentions in a quote from the KDSK article that quality-of-life crimes need to be addressed.

Quality-of-life crimes (substance use, panhandling, etc.) have an impact on how people feel about a particular area. Former New York City police commissioner William Bratton believed this so much that he implemented “broken windows” policing back in the 1990s, which was intended to crack down on these lower-level crimes. The rationale behind this was that by preventing smaller crimes, it not only prevented worse ones from occurring, but also symbolized that the city had control over the area.

St. Louis would benefit from following in the footsteps of New York and addressing lower-level crimes. A short drive across the city is enough to see the number of panhandlers and abandoned buildings in the area. Downtown is a prime example of an area where worries of crime have contributed to empty buildings. Multiple restaurants downtown have closed or cut hours due to the lack of business this year.

Preventing these quality-of-life crimes and cleaning up the streets impacts where people choose to go and helps determine how safe they feel in an area. It’s intuitive that citizens will make judgements on levels of crime based on the conditions of buildings and what is occurring on the streets more than what data shows.

Public perception to is unlikely to shift based solely on crime statistics. 30 years of data demonstrate this. Instead, it would be more beneficial to take appropriate measures to clean up the streets regardless of how much crime numbers are going down, because people will always care more about their own intuition when it comes to safety rather than the numbers.

In St. Louis County, Who Will Audit the Auditors?

Posted on by Mike Ederer

A version of this commentary appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

When one thinks of no-show political jobs in Missouri government, most people (at least those with a knowledge of Missouri history) would think of the infamous Pendergast political machine of Kansas City a century ago. Giving out jobs to political supporters who rarely, if ever, were required to actually show up to work was a staple strategy of that machine (and many others). Over the past decade though, there has been another job reminiscent of the well-paid, no-show jobs of political yore: the St. Louis County Auditor.

In June, the St. Louis County Council fired the county auditor, Ms. Toni Jackson, for lack of work output after her office completed only two audits in her more than three years in the position. (The county auditor is one of the only jobs in county government that reports to the council instead of the county executive.) Jackson had been hired in 2021 after the council had fired the previous auditor, Mr. Mark Tucker, also for lack of audit output. How little work have the last two auditors been doing? A quick perusal of the St. Louis County Auditor’s Office website shows that the office has released just 13 reports since 2018. Many of these reports do not qualify as “audits.” For example, three of the 13 reports were short 2018 memos about pet adoptions.

By comparison, the St. Charles County Auditor’s Office released 13 audits in 2024 alone, many of them substantial. If you are keeping score, that is 13 audits in one year in St. Charles County, and 13 reports (including a few actual audits) over eight years in St. Louis County. As frustrating as the lack of production in St. Louis County has been, one almost has to admire the audacity of it all. In Tucker’s case, he also wasn’t properly qualified for the job, so some of the blame for hiring him was on the council. In Jackson’s case, she was well-qualified, at least on paper, so the fact that she didn’t do the work is all the more frustrating.

It’s not like St. Louis County government is so clean that it has no need for auditors. I know of at least two cases of county employees embezzling large amounts of money in the past two decades. A qualified (and courageous) auditor could have raised questions about the activities of former St. Louis County executive Steve Stenger, who went to prison for various nefarious activities right when the prior auditor was busily engaged in doing nothing. A state audit of Stenger’s criminal actions as county executive identified Tucker’s lack of qualifications and actions as one of the reasons Stenger got away with his activities for as long as he did. Stenger, a CPA himself, was well aware of Tucker’s poor record as auditor. The former county executive routinely criticized the council for hiring Tucker while quietly benefitting from Tucker’s inability (or desire) to track any of Stenger’s illicit actions.

There is a pressing need for quality audits in local government. In a review of New York State comptroller audits of New York municipalities between 2003 and 2009, 234 out of the 259 audits included reports of deficiencies and recommendations for improvements in internal controls. Twenty-five percent of those cities with internal control problems had funds missing or unaccounted for (though outright fraud or theft was likely not the reason in every one of those instances). Within St. Louis County, two unsupervised clerks were charged in 2023 with stealing $650,000 from the village of Flordell Hills.

One of the recent St. Charles County audits identified several county-operated phone lines that the county was improperly paying phone taxes on. (As a government agency, it is supposed to be exempt from those taxes.) The audit identified the oversight and the matter was corrected. Have the last two St. Louis County auditors saved taxpayers money with insightful analysis and helpful digging? Since it is impossible to identify problems by audits when you don’t do any real audits, we all know the answer to that question is “no”.

Unreliable auditors have compromised the effectiveness of St. Louis County government in recent years. While outside auditors have reviewed the county’s annual financial statements for accuracy, the lack of a proactive internal auditor has deprived county residents and taxpayers of the watchdog they need and deserve.

Tom Pendergast may have mastered the use of the no-show political patronage job, but it was auditors who helped end his reign and send him to prison for tax evasion. Government auditors aren’t going to detect waste, fraud, or errors with taxpayer dollars if they don’t show up to do the job in the first place. Hopefully, that simple requirement will be understood by whomever the council hires next.

“Just Let Me Write the Definitions”

Posted on by Scott Tanner

In The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s legendary biography of Robert Moses, Caro describes how Moses was fully capable of getting his way by writing things in legislation that none of the legislators understood, even as they passed it. In one example early in Moses’s career (which I am going to do from memory and not look through the entire 1,200-page book for), Moses wanted to take over control of water rights off of Long Island. So, he drafted a rather innocuous bill that contained an opaque reference to legislation from the mid-1800s about water rights off of New York, but which otherwise was written in the same manner as all other water rights–related issues that the legislature was familiar with in the 1920s. None of the legislators or their aides bothered to find and read that mid-1800s law (which was probably much harder to do before computers), so they voted on and passed a new law that they thought did X, when it in fact it did Y. Moses, of course, wanted it to do Y, and by the time the legislature discovered the difference it was too late to do anything about it.

This brings us to the recent Missouri Supreme Court ruling on whether or not counties can collect the sales tax on marijuana in incorporated parts of a county. The court ruled that counties can only collect the tax in the unincorporated parts of a county. This is what the state constitutional amendment said, so in that respect the court’s decision makes sense. However, the way the constitutional amendment was written had a different definition of “local government” than was previously used and generally understood in Missouri. Do you think most (or any) voters read to page 19 of a 38-page ballot description to see that, in this case, the definition of a county only applied to unincorporated areas?

Longtime former Missouri State Senator Clifford Jones used to say (I’m paraphrasing here), “You can pass any bill you want. Just let me write the definitions.” That is what the ruling by the Supreme Court is rewarding, and perhaps it had no other choice in the matter. We let initiative petition writers create a major change regarding how local governments operate, which very few people will see or understand, and then that change becomes law.

To be clear, county taxes are almost always collected countywide, not just within unincorporated areas. Yes, there are a few other exceptions, such as utility taxes, but that doesn’t justify initiative petition writers using obscurity as their ally, as in this case. (I am not disputing that a majority of Missourians wanted legalized marijuana. My concern is with the use of legal minutiae in initiative petitions to get other changes made at the same time.)

Missouri needs to reform initiative petition rules to make amending the Constitution more difficult. (In a future post, I will go into more detail about the specific reforms we need.) Otherwise, we will be subject to more well-funded, out-of-state efforts to change Missouri laws using seemingly popular ideas as cover for making major legal changes via obscure and unread ballot language. Did you read the 38-page document that accompanied the marijuana vote and described all of the legal changes? I doubt it.

Robert Moses would be proud of efforts to get what you want by secrecy. We are a republic, not a direct democracy, and we should act like it. Missouri needs initiative petition reforms.

Missouri’s Squandered Opportunity

Posted on by Elias Tsapelas

The first step toward finding a solution is admitting there’s a problem. It’s been obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention over the past half-decade that Missouri has a spending problem. The good news is that Governor Kehoe admitted as much when he signed the state’s budget bills before the start of the new fiscal year.

Longtime readers of the Show-Me Institute blog won’t be surprised by this admission, but hearing the governor finally acknowledge our state’s spending problem hopefully signals a coming course correction. This stands in stark contrast to Missouri’s lawmakers in recent years, who have largely ignored how out of control state government spending has become, despite all the data to the contrary.

Prior to state Fiscal Year (FY) 2026, which began on July 1, Governor Kehoe signed a $50.8 billion spending plan, which was about $2 billion less than what the general assembly sent him. It should be noted, and lauded, that the governor applied some fiscal sanity by vetoing more than 200 spending items. But it’s also important to keep perspective on our state’s current financial mess and how much work fixing it will require.

It’s easy to forget that as recently as FY 2019, Missouri’s government only spent a little more than $27 billion in total compared to the $50 billion for 2025. What’s changed? Missouri’s spending has exploded on almost everything: welfare, education, transportation—you name it, and spending on it probably increased.

In 2019, Missouri’s budget included a little more than $9 billion in general revenue funds (primarily state sales and income tax collections) and nearly $9.6 billion from the federal government. Today, our state plans to spend more than $15.6 billion in general revenue and $24.5 billion in federal funds. If you compare this to the state’s estimates for general revenue collections in the coming year of $15.3 billion, you can see that even after the governor’s vetoes, Missouri’s government is still expecting to spend $300 million more than it projects to bring in. That doesn’t even account for the high likelihood of supplemental funding requests later in the year, and that the state’s supply of federal funding is projected to fall by the billions.

Missouri taxpayers are stuck with a government spending far beyond its means. As recently as 2023, Missouri had nearly $8 billion in general revenue funds set aside that could have been saved for times of need, but instead the state has spent exorbitantly, whittling away at the surplus. Today, those excess funds have been almost entirely depleted. Governor Kehoe recently noted that without his actions to reduce spending, the state was expecting a billion-dollar shortfall going into the next fiscal year.

It’s hard to look at what’s happened with Missouri’s budget over the past five years and view it as anything but a squandered opportunity. Our elected officials managed to take historic tax revenue growth, unprecedented federal investment, and an $8 billion cash reserve and turn all that into a billion-dollar hole in the budget right as the state’s revenue forecasts are taking a turn for the worse. Going into next year, Missouri’s tax collections are projected to decline and there will be no more excess federal dollars to prop up the state’s unsustainable spending. It should go without saying that it is imperative that Missouri’s lawmakers finally get serious about getting the state’s finances back on track.

There’s no longer any dispute about whether Missouri’s finances are a problem. The better question is whether it’s too late to stop the bleeding. Perhaps the most important task for our state’s elected officials over the next year will be finding a solution that’s better than something akin to putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.

Statistics Shows Crime Numbers Converging for Major Missouri Cities

Posted on by Scott Tanner

The violent crime statistics in the cities of St. Louis, Kansas City, and Springfield tell a much different story today than they did 20 years ago. In 2005, it would have been unreasonable to compare Springfield and St. Louis on a per-capita basis for violent crime, but recent statistics show they are much closer as of 2023. Kansas City was also far below St. Louis in violent crime per capita in 2005, but that has changed.

Figure 1: Violent Crime Per Capita (St. Louis, Kansas City, and Springfield)

The chart below shows the violent crime per 100,000 people from 2004 to 2023.

Source: FBI Crime Data Explorer (CDE)

The violent crime statistic includes aggravated assault, homicide, robbery, and rape. The chart above displays the convergence in crime numbers between the three largest cities in Missouri. The specific per capita rates in 2023 for the respective cities are: St. Louis (1,439.3), Kansas City (1,483.1), and Springfield (1,178.1).

This would seem like good news for St. Louis when looking at the chart above and seeing a steady decline in violent crime, and it is, but it doesn’t change the fact that the city still ranks within the top 10 most dangerous cities in the United States by many metrics, along with Kansas City.

Crime being down in St. Louis is good. In my opinion, the bigger takeaway from this data is the fact that violent crime in Kansas City has remained stagnant rather than decreasing, and Springfield’s rate has steadily risen over the last 20 years. None of our major cities is close to being considered safe compared to similar midwestern cities like Des Moines or Omaha.

Omaha claims transitioning from its officers using only enforcement (applying the law) to also including intervention (stopping the crime taking place) and prevention (taking preventative measures before crime begins) has reduced violence. Other cities have studied Omaha in hopes of replicating its success, including Kansas City. Unfortunately, based on the data, it hasn’t yet made a difference in Kansas City.

St. Louis should be commended for the drop in violent crime in the city, but major Missouri cities still have a significant problem with violent crime. If we want to become a state that people want to live and work in, our cities need to prioritize fixing this problem.

Sun Fresh’s Struggles Were Predictable—and Predicted

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

The Washington Post just published a story on the failure of the taxpayer-subsidized Sun Fresh grocery store on the corner of Linwood Blvd. and Prospect Ave. in Kansas City. It’s an excellent piece, and one in which I was given the opportunity to participate. The author, Annie Gowen, included this:

Patrick Tuohey, co-founder and policy director of the Better Cities Project, has been critical of the Sun Fresh project. He says the store looks “great on paper” but does not have demand to support it. Plus, he noted, the neighborhood has other options because of a nearby Aldi store and the independent Happy Foods Center.

Kansas City officials hoped that subsidizing the grocery store would revitalize a long-neglected corridor. Ten years later, with the store on the brink of closure, city leaders are asking what went wrong. But they needn’t look far: the answers were visible from the start—and many of them were detailed in the very Show-Me Institute blog posts I wrote at the time.

Since 2015, I’ve chronicled the Sun Fresh project and argued that its shortcomings were structural, not situational. Here are the key arguments made then, all of which remain relevant now.

  • In May 2015, I wrote that “Kansas City government is going into the grocery business,” a move I called “a stunning development.” I noted that the city would lease the property to Sun Fresh for just $1 per year and that the entire project was heavily subsidized—a sign that market demand alone wasn’t enough to support it.
  • In the same 2015 post, I argued that grocery demand was already being met in nearby areas: “people who make a living running grocery stores by investing their own money do not think this [Sun Fresh investment] is a good idea.”
  • The next week, I conducted some shoe-leather reporting by driving around the supposed food desert. I found several grocery stores with well-stocked produce aisles, and marveled about how, due to the city’s use of various taxing jurisdictions, food in some of the city’s poorer neighborhoods was more expensive than in wealthier areas.
  • In May 2016, I updated the story of the subsidized grocery store, noting costs were ballooning, ending with: “In short, it appears that city leaders are planning to lose money investing in an already-failed venture in order to pursue a policy that has no evidence backing its effectiveness.”
  • The next month, I wrote that the USDA was becoming skeptical of the “food desert” idea itself. I also noted research showing that the mere availability of healthy food was not sufficient to solve the problem of unhealthy diets.
  • In March 2017, I pointed out that project costs continued to rise.
  • In December 2017, I summarized new research showing that the “food desert” premise was deeply flawed.
  • In October 2018, I highlighted a Kansas City Star piece indicating grocers are in the business of giving people what they want, not what someone else thinks they ought to have. The Sun Fresh store director told the paper, “You can pick apart any store that you want to on what they have or don’t have, but it’s about if people request these things or not . . .  We’re going to give our customers what they want. Not just what looks good.”
  • In July 2019, I wrote that there were signs the project was already failing. “Despite city-funded construction and dramatically subsidized rent, the store cannot pay its bills. The question now seems to be whether taxpayers should further fund this failing enterprise.”

The city’s logic was clear enough: offer fresh food options in a historically underserved area, and hope it drives neighborhood investment. The Star quoted then-Mayor Sly James as saying the Sun Fresh Market would be the “beginning of the revitalization of this entire corridor.” He was wrong. The policy approach ignored fundamental questions of market feasibility and safety. Even when intentions are noble, taxpayer subsidies cannot manufacture demand where it doesn’t exist.

Supporters may argue that this was an experiment worth trying. But experiments should come with contingency planning and humility—not endless subsidies. The city’s willingness to absorb risk that private firms declined should have been a warning, not a point of pride.

The real tragedy is that Kansas City could have directed those resources toward improving public safety, supporting neighborhood-scale entrepreneurship, or partnering with existing grocery providers willing to operate without public subsidy. All of those approaches would have been more fiscally responsible and, most likely, more sustainable than what the city did.

As policymakers consider next steps, they would do well to revisit the early warnings and lessons from Sun Fresh. The problem was never just about food access. It was about how we define, diagnose, and address the challenges facing our neighborhoods.

This was a foreseeable failure. Hopefully, our policymakers learn from it.

Medicaid Reform Incoming

Posted on by Scott Tanner

Ready or not, big changes are coming to Missouri’s Medicaid program. Earlier this month, President Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB) into law, and it includes some of the most significant changes to the Medicaid program in decades.

Back in May, when the concepts for the bill were still being discussed, I wrote about several of the proposals that I thought might be included. As a jumping-off point for a more in-depth discussion of the many reforms included in the OBBB, I thought it would be helpful to first compare what made it across the finish line to the ideas I discussed in my earlier post.

  • Rein in financing gimmicks: As I’ve discussed at length, states have recently been drastically increasing their reliance on Medicaid provider taxes in response to rising healthcare costs. The OBBB freezes state provider tax rates where they are today, prohibits states from adopting new ones, and begins lowering the maximum allowable rate from 6% to 3.5% over a period of years (excluding those for nursing homes and intermediate care facilities). Missouri’s current rate for its hospital provider tax is 4.2%, so this change could have an effect on the state’s budget in several years once the OBBB is fully implemented.
  • Work requirements: Instead of offering states the opportunity to try work requirements for their respective Medicaid programs, as has been proposed in the past, the OBBB goes one step further by requiring states that have adopted expansion to establish “community engagement requirements” for their able-bodied enrollees. These requirements largely exempt populations that aren’t considered working-age able-bodied adults, such as pregnant women and parents with dependents under the age of 14.
  • Reduce “enhanced” federal match: Decreasing the federal government’s skewed payment structure for the Medicaid expansion population was one of my only expected reforms that didn’t make it across the finish line. While this change was excluded, the OBBB does eliminate the temporary increase in federal payment share that has existed for several years, which was an effort to entice states to adopt expansion. It also reduces the federal payment rate for states that cover illegal immigrants under their Medicaid programs.

All told, the OBBB includes at least a dozen additional healthcare changes that will impact Missouri in one way or another that I haven’t mentioned above. It’s also important to keep in mind that much of the OBBB will not go into effect immediately and will be implemented in phases over the next decade. For many of the changes included in the bill, it’s far too early to confidently predict the effect they may have on Missourians or the state’s budget.

Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll dive deeper into some of these provisions as more information related to Missouri comes to light. Time will tell whether Missouri’s government is ready or capable of successfully implementing the reforms on the horizon.

A Freeze in July?

Posted on by Scott Tanner

As a former tutor at a Tennessee Boys & Girls Club, a recent headline caught my eye: the Boys & Girls Club, along with other after-school programs, is facing a funding freeze after the Department of Education decided to hold back around $6 billion across the country for review.

Missouri anticipated around $80 million from these frozen programs. The Department of Education’s budget summary suggests the funding for many of these frozen programs will be consolidated and given as a lump sum under the K-12 Simplified Funding Program.

This fund seems to be designed like a block grant, as it would allow states to spend money on previously allowable activities (such as after-school programs) but with fewer administrative regulations. This model is not unprecedented, as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is currently funded using a block grant, and there have been discussions about switching Medicaid to a block grant structure as well.

The department’s actions could signal that federal funding to states may continue to decrease, and there may be fewer strings attached to federal funding. That would mean that states, including Missouri, will have to decide which programs that rely on federal funding will be sustained, and to what extent.

Evaluating Deeper Budget Decisions

Missouri likely will need to make some hard budget decisions in the coming years. Prior to COVID, federal dollars comprised about 14 percent of Missouri’s total revenue for K-12 education. In 2021–22, an additional $1 billion in federal dollars ballooned that percentage to 28. In 2022–23, the federal share fell slightly to 25 percent. In my colleague Elias Tsapelas’ paper “Saving Federalism,” he notes that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s (DESE) inflation-adjusted federal spending was roughly 45% higher in fiscal year 2022 than fiscal year 2011.

This extra money is fizzling out as the pandemic spending evaporates and the Trump Administration continues to evaluate longstanding programs and rules. The changes at the federal level should incentivize Missouri to rightsize the budget by eliminating unnecessary or unhelpful spending. Establishing a Missouri Office of Government Efficiency would be a good initial step.

Beyond that, Missouri will need to take a more proactive approach to funding specific education programs. Should we increase funding for after-school programs at the expense of a program to improve teacher effectiveness? Before the recent federal policy shift, Missouri was largely guided in these decisions by what we could get federal money for. Now, DESE and school districts will need to set their priorities.

Here’s to hoping Missouri can rise to the challenge and prioritize programs with the greatest potential to benefit students.

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