(ConservativeFreePress.com) – In St. Louis, Missouri, law enforcement force has had to battle against staff shortages and budget cuts following the rise of the defund the police movement. Currently, the city is considered one of the most dangerous cities in the United States as there are over 1,000 unsolved murders in the city.
In 2019 and 2020, St. Louis was one of the cities that had the highest murder rates of any American city per 100,000 residents. Among those killings was St. Louis Police Capt. David Dorn lost his life during the protests that had erupted after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
However, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department (SLMPD) has stated that they have had some success in lowering the crime rates. According to their reports, there has been a 21 percent reduction in homicides in 2023 when compared to a year earlier. Still, over the last decade, there were over 1,000 murders carried out that were unsolved in the state.
The Murder Accountability Project founder Thomas Hargrove noted that his group compiles data on unsolved homicides and has found that from 2013 to 2022 there were 1,903 homicides in the city. Out of those cases, 1,068 remain unsolved. This means that the solved homicide rate is close to 44 percent. This is according to data from the FBI and the local police.
Hargrove in an interview with Fox News Digital revealed that St. Louis’ clearance rate is much lower than the national average. He added that between those years the average clearance rate was between 55 and 60 percent and that St. Louis is far below the average. However, as he pointed out major inner cities will often have a clearance rate below 50 percent, so the city is not much of an outlier.
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