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St. Louis, Mo., Crime Strategies Unit Uses ‘Moneyball’ Crime Fighting

Social media analysis is only part of broad new efforts on the part of law enforcement agencies and prosecutors in St. Louis to address gun crimes.

(TNS) — One morning last week, at a laptop computer in a windowless room on the second floor of the Carnahan Courthouse downtown, an assistant St. Louis circuit attorney named Martin Minnigerode was clicking through Facebook pages. The images were displayed on a 60-inch monitor mounted on a wall. Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce and about 10 members of her staff watched as messages and photographs popped up. None of the people in the photographs appeared to be more than 25 years old. They were kids hanging out, or in some cases, posing with semi-automatic weapons, or in one case, posing with a semi-automatic handgun and a pile of cash.

“Where do you suppose that money came from?” someone asked.

“Aw, he and his crew probably had a carwash,” someone cracked.

“A lemonade stand,” someone else suggested.

Mr. Minnigerode halted at one photograph of half a dozen kids. He clicked on one face: “This guy’s dead,” he said. He clicked on another: “This guy’s in jail.” He clicked on a third: “This is the guy we’re looking at.”

Amazingly, young people who rob, steal and shoot each other have the same social media habits as people who don’t. Privacy? What’s that? This is where they advertise themselves and seek respect.

Ms. Joyce was demonstrating the work of her brand-new Crime Strategies Unit, which is building profiles of social networks of those involved in gun crimes. She was fine with disclosing the nature of the unit’s work. Apparently the social media urge is too strong for some people to ignore.

“They’ll sit in the courtroom and tweet about their cases,” she said. One defendant, out on bond, tweeted that he wasn’t going to show up for his sentencing, adding a profane hashtag about the judge. The prosecutor showed the tweet to the judge, who was not amused. The defendant’s now in jail.

Ms. Joyce borrowed the idea of deep data analysis from Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney. In his office, it’s known as “Moneyball” crime fighting.

Social media analysis is only part of broad new efforts on the part of law enforcement agencies and prosecutors in St. Louis to address gun crimes. There’s a joint federal-local task force with money fronted by the FBI, involving federal, city and St. Louis County law enforcement agencies and prosecutors.

“The FBI, in a way I have not seen them before, has become totally focused,” said Police Chief Sam Dotson, who gave credit to William P. Woods, the special agent in charge of the St. Louis office.

Because of what Ms. Joyce calls Missouri’s new “disastrous Amendment 5” gun law — creating an “unalienable right” to carry weapons — the U.S. attorney’s office has taken on some 70 cases where a convicted felon has been arrested for possessing firearms. At least one state judge has ruled that Amendment 5 gives felons the right to carry weapons, but in federal court, the same crime carries a minimum five-year sentence.

Ms. Joyce, the city’s top prosecutor for 15 years, has decided to devote whatever time she has left in the office — she’s been noncommittal about seeking a fifth term next year — to an all-out war on gun crime. She’s now sending prosecutors to homicide scenes to interview witnesses. Borrowing another idea from Mr. Vance, she now has a prosecutor interviewing suspects. She’s created a website, www.StLouisGunCrime.com, with up-to-date statistics, case studies and suggestions for ways citizens can help.

And perhaps most significantly, she’s taken the lead on a “focused deterrence” crime-fighting strategy that will be rolled out next month.

In January, this page reported on the concept of focused deterrence policing and how it worked in Kansas City, where homicides dropped 23 percent in 2014. The impetus for those editorials was a 32 percent rise in homicides in St. Louis in 2014, when 159 were reported. Things are worse this year, with 87 homicides recorded through Thursday. That’s up 52 percent over the same period last year.

Focused deterrence was developed 20 years ago by David M. Kennedy, who directs the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He told us in January:

“Every city will find that whatever levels of homicide or serious violence it has is driven by a very small, distinctive street population, or a population of groups that drive the violence. From formal gangs to no-name crack crews to little robbery sets, these groups are very fluid and inchoate, but there are always groups that drive the violence.

“If you look across the city and audit the groups, well under one-half percent of the population, usually two-tenths or three-tenths of 1 percent, will be responsible for 60 to 75 percent of the homicides.”

Using modern data analysis, along with the collective old-school experience of street cops, prosecutors and probation officers, those individuals can be identified. Their social networks can be mapped.

“Everybody has a social network,” Ms. Joyce said. “You have one, I have one, people have friends. If you’re the type of person who thinks it’s cool to carry a gun, you’re probably associated with people who think it’s cool to carry a gun.”

If you’re that type of person, odds are that law enforcement now has, or soon will have, your picture and pictures of your friends. Odds also are pretty good that you’ve got a previous conviction and are on probation or parole. So later this summer, a cop or a prosecutor or your parole officer is going to invite you to a meeting.

There you will be given options. People from social service agencies will be there. Folks with job training and education offers will be there. Folks from your neighborhood will be there, along with moms of homicide victims who will tell you what it’s like for them. You will be told that people care for you.

However, there’s an iron fist inside the velvet glove.

“In Kansas City, they find ways to pressure guys into it,” Ms. Joyce said. “They told these guys, one each from 60 gangs, they must have repeated it a hundred times: ‘Here are the rules. The first group that commits a homicide, the first body that drops, we’re coming after you and your friends. The group that does the most violence, we’re coming after you.’”

Probation may be revoked, major and minor crimes will be prosecuted and so will minor ordinance violations, building code violations and civil issues like failure to pay child support.

“It’s the low-level stuff that gets them,” Ms. Joyce said. “If your mom is stealing cable, and that gets cut off, it’s worse than 10 years in a federal prison because that’s right now.”

Ms. Joyce warned that things “may get a little worse before they get better,” but they will get better. “This is a crockpot, not a microwave,” she said.

“But if all we do is arrest people and send them to the penitentiary, and don’t do anything about what’s causing these issues to emerge in our communities, we’re never going to solve it,” she said. “This is a huge problem that’s threatening the city. If we don’t talk about it, we can’t understand it. And if we don’t understand it, we can’t solve it and stem it.”

©2015 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.