St. Louis mayor, chief admit wrong crime figures

ST. LOUIS -- Mayor Francis Slay has often pointed to 2003 police statistics as an indication that St. Louis is becoming a safer place. He still believes it is, despite acknowledging Thursday that those figures were wrong.

In fact, not only did crime not decline to historic lows as was initially believed, the crime rate rose 4 percent in 2003, Slay and Police Chief Joe Mokwa said at a news conference called in part to respond to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch top-of-page-1 story about the error.

Mokwa called the initial report an "honest mistake," blaming a change in the way officers file reports. He also apologized for failing to alert Slay to the error earlier -- Mokwa learned of it in June but didn't tell the mayor until Tuesday.

"I wish I would have yelled from the rooftops that this was happening," Mokwa said. "But I didn't want to diminish what was happening in 2004."

Both men emphasized that crime is down sharply this year in all major areas -- except murder. And while 100 murders have been committed so far compared to 74 all of last year, it's still on pace to be the second-lowest total in four decades.

"St. Louis is a safer place than it was three years ago," Slay said. "It is a safer place than it was last year."

The crime figures released in the spring were widely reported as an indication of St. Louis' resurgence. Though car thefts were up, murders hit a 41-year low, robberies were down 18 percent, assaults were down 13 percent.

Violent crime down

Police officials later realized they had failed to count 5,760 crimes, though the number of murders cited in the original report was off by only one.

In years past, officers dictated crime reports to a typist. Starting last year, they used computers and were responsible for handling their own reports. As a result, many were filed late, Mokwa said. In other cases, reports got lost in the shuffle from officer to supervisor to records-keeper.

The department corrected the figures in its report to the FBI in July, but too late for the bureau's often-cited annual crime survey. And the department made no effort to publicize the changes.

"I do wish we had made this public before, but it does not erase the fact that this department and this city are making progress," Slay said.

In fact, new statistics -- Mokwa insisted steps have been taken to ensure their accuracy -- showed that while murders are up in 2004, violent crime overall is down 17.6 compared to a year ago, and property crime is down more than 22.6 percent.

Most notable was auto thefts, down 22 percent from a year ago when thieves were stealing, on average, a car an hour.

For two years, the department has focused on reducing auto thefts. Police have given away or sold at discounted rates thousands of anti-theft devices. They've made 1,500 arrests since the start of 2003, partly through the use of unattended "bait" vehicles with satellite-based tracking systems that can, by remote, kill the engine, lock the doors and trap the suspect inside. A surveillance camera stashed inside the vehicle even records the action.

The thefts are more than a nuisance. Several people have been killed in accidents involving stolen cars, including officer Michael Barwick, who died in 2002 during a pursuit. In October 2003, a stolen pickup driven by a 13-year-old boy fatally hit a seventh-grade girl.

In February, officer Dan Drago was shot while working undercover when suspects realized they were being followed.

Even Slay has been victimized. A year ago, someone stole his son's Jeep Cherokee from outside the mayor's home.