by Chris Black
Looks like municipalities have found a solution to the problem of surging black violence: stop counting.
When the final numbers showed that St. Louis had reduced its murders last year while other big cities were hitting records, city officials said their success was due to smart use of crime data and effective anti-violence programs.
But over the past two years, St. Louis has quietly lowered its murder count in another way: classifying more than three dozen killings as what are termed justifiable homicides, sometimes in apparent violation of FBI guidelines for reporting crimes, a ProPublica/APM Reports investigation found.
St. Louis has seen a big decline in murders — from 263 in 2020 to 198 last year. But more people are dying violently than the city murder total acknowledges https://t.co/J92ZUoenH6
— ProPublica (@propublica) May 3, 2022
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