Earlier this year, the Missouri House of Representatives debated a bill, HB 1481, that would strip the St. Louis Police Department of its autonomy and place it under the control of a central committee based in Jefferson City. By the way, my Republican opponent supported this bill. HB 1481 includes some disturbing provisions on how the police force in St. Louis should be run:
It gives a central committee based in Jefferson City - not St. Louis - the power to appoint and organize the St. Louis police force, set salaries, and establish ranks.
The central committee would control and enforce officer discipline and seize all police assets, funds, and property from the city.
Most absurdly, the central committee would have the power to penalize city assembly members if they dared to interfere with the committee’s authority. The penalty? Disqualification from holding any public office or job in the city.
This last point really sticks in my craw. The plan is to take absolute control of St. Louis's police department and intimidate anyone who stands in the way.
To make matters worse, the city of St. Louis is expected to fund the police department, but to what extent it is funded is decided by a central authority. This is a blatant power grab by a Republican Party that, despite its “small government” rhetoric, is doing the exact opposite by expanding government control. Forcing taxpayers to fund this authoritarian scheme while punishing those who resist is a clear case of “Taxation Without Representation.”
Note that I don’t live in St. Louis, and District 97 - where I'm running for the House of Representatives - doesn’t cover any part of the city. Still, I’m alarmed and horrified by this raw attempt to grab power from residents nonetheless because if it can happen in St. Louis, it can happen anywhere.
Look at who backed this power grab: HB 1481 was introduced by five Republicans in the Missouri House of Representatives, and every single Republican present - including my Republican opponent - voted for it before it was passed to the Missouri Senate, where it thankfully died. You can bet they will propose it again in the next legislative session.
Republicans argue that taking over St. Louis's police department is their way of addressing “high crime in the city.” But what they don’t tell you is that, per capita, St. Louis ranks 47th in crime rates in Missouri. Potosi, Missouri, with just over 2,500 people, has nearly four times the crime rate of St. Louis. Springfield, Missouri, has roughly 170 thousand residents and a crime rate about 1.5 times higher than that of St. Louis. Will the Republicans in the state legislature seek to take over their police department next? I wouldn’t put it past them.
This is unacceptable. We must push back against the extremists in the Republican Party who seek to turn our state into a centralized police state, where we’re forced to pay for a police department over which we have no control.
So, how do we fix this power grab? We must break the Republican supermajority in the state legislature. There are enough Democrats on the ballot this year to do exactly that. It’s our only defense against a runaway authoritarian regime taking over our state.
A final note: Let’s step back and look at the bigger picture. You can consider each state in the union a crucible for experimentation, where desirable results will quickly scale up to the federal level. You’ve heard a lot of talk about the Republican Party’s Project 2025 and its authoritarian effect on our national government. But what you may not realize is that many of the tenets of Project 2025 are already in play right here in Missouri and other states such as Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Florida. You see it play out right here in Missouri when the Republican Party keeps trying to break our unions. You see it play out when the Republican Party completely removed women’s reproductive freedom and threatened the rights of women, minorities, and LGBTQ. You see it play out when books are banned from our local library. If we don’t stop this insanity on our local level, you can bet we’ll soon be fighting it on a national level. And by that time, it may be too late.
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