() Crime is on the decline in St. Louis, according to the local police department, which has reported a 50% reduction in homicides from 2020.

The drop comes months after Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe signed a bill appointing a state board to govern the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, citing a need to restore order and encourage economic growth.

“It’s 50% reduction from what we were in 2020. I call that progress very difficult,” police Chief Robert Tracy said. “Of the 85 murders that we have right now, you try to tell a family member a crime is being reduced, in their world, it isn’t because they’ve lost a loved one.”

For more than a century, control of the St. Louis Police was under similar state oversight, with the Board of Police Commissioners, made up of the mayor and a group of commissioners appointed by the governor. 

That Civil War-era arrangement was overturned by voters during the 2012 election, and the City of St. Louis had retained exclusive authority over the department since 2013. In March of this year, state lawmakers passed a bill returning oversight to the state.

In recent years, St. Louis has earned a reputation as one of America’s most dangerous cities. Like many U.S. cities, St. Louis saw a spike in crime after the COVID-19 pandemic, hitting its highest murder rate in more than 50 years in 2020. In 2024, the city’s homicide rate was one of the highest in the country at 57.9 per 100,000 residents, which is 11 times higher than the national homicide rate.

joined Tracy for a behind-the-scenes look at how his team has been working to turn those numbers around starting with a real-time crime center equipped with more than 5,000 cameras throughout the city.

“You’re going to see a lot of locations where we do have cameras and where we do the chasing,” Tracy said. “They can take it, and they can try to find cameras in the areas to try to see if they can get ahead of it … a shooting, a robbery, a carjacking.”

But it may be some time before residents feel a change in the city.

“We’ve got a lot of foolishness going on. We’ve got kids getting killed every day. We have accidents every day,” said St. Louis resident Tony Steven. “You know, we just have a whole lot that’s going on that we need to get resolved.

Some residents said they’d still like to see more police officers in their neighborhoods.

“I’m always cautious. Always watching, looking around. There need to be more police to get more places faster,” said Sandra Webb, a resident of St. Louis.

According to Tracy, the department is about 80% staffed, which makes policing challenging. He said an increase in pay could help attract more officers to join the department.

“One way to recruit officers, you have to be competitive through economics, and that’s pay. We’re in the middle-to-low range for this region. Very difficult,” Tracy said.

According to a recruiting website for the department, the starting annual salary of a St. Louis Metropolitan Police officer is $53,196. In nearby Chicago, the starting salary for officers is $61,782.

While Tracy acknowledged there is still work to be done, he assured residents and visitors that St. Louis is safe.

“We have safe neighborhoods, but some of them get a bad reputation only because we have a higher percentage of people that are causing the problem,” he said.