ST. LOUIS — St. Louis Police Chief Robert Tracy said he doesn’t want to get a reputation for using his position to get media attention, so he prefers putting his commanders in front of reporters during high-profile incidents and issues.
And he said doing so means he is upholding his pledge to be transparent – one of the first things he said when he became the city’s top cop about 13 months ago.
On Thursday, he granted 5 On Your Side’s request for a one-on-one interview for the first time in months.
Here is a transcript of the chief’s full interview with Christine Byers, spanning everything from a bloody January, a high-profile incident involving officers slamming into a bar with a police SUV and the department’s refusal to release footage of a school shooting that happened more than a year ago.
You can also watch the full interview here:
Q: The department reported there were 890 commissioned officers. And I think you had said publicly there were 940. So which is it?
A: If you want to go day-to-day, that number is dynamic. It moves. And I count in my numbers police trainees, because I've been doing that every year because they get lost if we don't count them. So they are part of the department. So we're probably around 920 right now. If you take the police trainees out, it still only brings us down to about 900.
Q: And where should we be?
A: We should be at 1,224. That's our budgeted strength. And that's the number that when I came in, we sustained. The mayor believes that's the number we should be at. That's the number that I've asked to stay at. And, you know, we got to have that goal to shoot for and hopefully we can get there.
When I looked at the numbers over the last few years of where we used to be and how many people we were losing, we've slowed down the net loss 2023 compared to 2022 and 2021. So that's a sign that maybe things are slowing down because we finally got a raise after 3 ½ years. We got historic raises for all ranks…So the good work that these officers are doing are being recognized. And that helps with morale, because we were losing a lot of officers to other jurisdictions.
We were training them and they were going out to other jurisdictions because we're all competing against this for the same personnel. What we did do this year because of the economics that changed? Fourteen police officers that left here went other jurisdictions, they asked to come back, so we swore them in.
And we also changed the dynamic and how we recruit officers. We have a recruitment team. We're working with, Clarence Hines, the Academy Director. We're working with Harris Stowe. We're working with a youth academy this summer. We're trying to get the kids, get to the pipeline, so to speak, get to the schools. So we have a lot of plans in place to try to reverse what's been happening…. We weren't taking officers unless they were trained by us. And even if they left right now, these officers, if they have certification and post certification, which is in the state of Missouri or another state, we're willing to take them now. And there are officers now applying that have that certification. We'll fast track them into the academy.
And the great thing about getting other officers, the 14 that I talked about, we can put them on the street right away. As you know, it takes 18 months to train a police officer…I don't have 200 officers that came with me from the East Coast in my back pocket that we can assign. So we have to start somewhere…We have a human resource officer right down the hall from us. We're getting the list of people that are applying immediately instead of waiting for it. And it's still within the Civil Service Commission rules that we can start calling out in order. But getting to these people, bringing them in, getting them tested, getting the evaluations, the oral boards, we're capturing them as soon as the other places are capturing them. So at least we have an equal chance. If we wait too long, they're going to move on to another police department. Rightfully so. They have a lot of choices and we want to make sure that we're bringing them in.
So this process is going to take a long time. Are we where I want us to be? Absolutely not…That's going to take a little while to get to, and we’ve got to find creative ways to make sure we can keep the city safe, leverage technology, and do the things that these officers are doing with overtime. But they're doing a tremendous job and actually still driving down crime, making this place safe with a good plan.
Q: When you get down into the weeds on this manpower issue, the 3rd District yesterday had two cars for the entire district for the afternoon shift. How many should there be?
A: Well, if it's two cars, I have to take a look at that. But we also have supplemental cars that are out there. So I don't know where you're getting that information from. I'd have to take a look at it, because when I've been approached by some of these issues, we've had more cars out there. So I don't know where you get your information from. We would have to verify that.
And then when it was said overnight throughout the city, we found it was that there was a lot more cars assigned out there that was reported to you or reported by the news. So I would take a look at it. And you got to remember, we have discretionary resources out there with Mobil Reserve. We have a reserve. We also have anti-crime units. We also have different units that are out there that we could move to different parts of the city as needed, because we prepare day-by-day. The platoon command, the watch commanders. We look at the shifts and if we need additional personnel, we might keep someone over from the previous shift, might call somebody in, might bring somebody in from one of the specialized units, and make sure that they're answering calls for service so we can have enough police officers.
So we have to take a good look at all of that. When I look at how many people have to be out in these districts, I look at overall crime, I look at violent crime, I look for calls for service. And I make sure that…we have fair coverage across the city to make sure one place isn't losing more officers now, and we rebalance.
Q: That makes sense. But, I mean, two cars for an entire district, and there should be 10. How is that acceptable?
A: Well, once again, you asked me a question that I've went back and looked at some of the things that have been reported, and we go through our public information office and it wasn't true. So you have to give me a chance to take a look at that district, and I can get back to you when I answer with that. But we do have discretionary resources that we do bring it to make sure those calls for service and officer safety issues are addressed. And then I can use other units to make sure that we're filling in some of those gaps.
Q: Part of this issue too then becomes a secondary issue. Officers are getting opportunities to work overtime elsewhere. And there's a concern out there that the communities that can afford to pay for police are getting more policing. You said last summer that you were going to review the department's secondary policy. Has that been done and where do you stand on it?
A: Well, we get a report every day. The amount of hours that an officer can do after a shift or how many they can do a week is a report that comes to PeopleSoft. And in that report, we make sure that people they have to register to work these second secondary jobs.
Listen, a secondary job it's not unique to St. Louis. I've been in three other police departments. A lot of officers work secondary jobs, and there's no way that I would want to take that away. What I want to do is make sure that, we look at it, we make sure that we have good policy in place, and we'll follow a policy that officers aren’t too tired to do their primary job. So we have taken a good look at that.
Over time, every police department in the United States, even when you're at full strength of budgeted strength over time, it’s something that's been used and it's actually being used now. And this is not the first place that I've been in that you've been able to leverage overtime internally. And then officers can use things externally at the secondary jobs. When I was in New York City, I had five children. I had worked secondary up in the time I was a lieutenant.
Q: Have you done that review, though, of the secondary policy here at the St. Louis Police Department?
A: I have done that review. Every person every year that works secondary, I actually have to sign off on it for the approval. I get a prior approval from their supervisors. They make recommendations up to me. If they recommend that this person is still doing their job satisfactorily, then you know what? We'll sign off on it. If it affects the job that they're doing here, we got to make sure we take a good look at that if that's going to affect their primary job, which is the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.
Q: Are you able to fill the demand for the downtown overtime grant that pays officers $70 an hour?
A: We are able to fill some of that. There's always going to be some holes in somebody's schedules for overtime…. At $70 an hour, that made it attractive for people to start working with, so I see that's been pretty effective. And what it's doing is crime has and the omnipresence and the perception of downtown feels safer. And we've done other things, looking at cruising details where we use straight time officers and sometimes overtime officers. So it's not just the downtown officers, that's maybe three to four, a shift of maybe five. So they are making a difference. But we're using over time throughout the city. You know, even if you take a look at even some incidents, officers have been on overtime in some of those incidents and at different parts of the city. And I know the overtime, I can use in different parts of the city, and these commanders and these majors that oversee them have the authority to fill these overtime slots throughout the city.
Q: What is your opinion about bringing retired officers back to help out, maybe on more administrative tasks and things like that?
A: If we can put something together, I mean, I was just out in San Diego. I had to go to a chief’s conference, a major city chiefs conference to share ideas. And one of the biggest things all week long was the crisis in personnel and trying to hire police officers. I mean, some had $25,000 signing bonuses and still couldn't fill their ranks. Minneapolis has 900 budgeted police officers and they’re down to close to 500. We talked about what are we doing? What can we do better? When I was in San Diego, we had retired officers, and I kind of looked at that. I'm trying to have our people take a look. They came back and they were ambassadors, and they were able to do some of the things to free up the officers on the street. If I can get a good contingent that would love to do that, it's certainly something. Everything's on the table. We’ve got to think about those things.
Q: We just ended January with 20 homicides compared to 11 last year. What are you doing about it?
A: What are we doing about it? Well, overall crime's down. It doesn't take away from the progress that we've made in 2023, as you can see, we had some of lowest numbers in a decade. When you're looking at leveraging technology, looking at patterns, trends, trying to reduce the shooting incidents by picking up the shell casings, using ShotSpotter, naturally, homicides will come down because most of our homicides, up to 90% of our homicides are by gunshot. So we got to make sure that we're looking at the trigger pullers. Sometimes you can have a month that spikes. But we take a critical look. Just a few hours ago we were in this room talking about it. We talk about it every day. We talk about it at executive management meetings, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. So we review them, with a critical eye.
Are there things that are going on? Are they connected? Are they connected to another shooting? You can have a spike in some of these things where, your shootings aren't up, but your homicides are up. A lot of interpersonal things are going on. None of them we know of are connected. Now, when you look at them, you want to make sure if someone's going out and committing several homicides, each one of them had a different instance that we got good leads on.
And these were probably conflicts. Some over narcotics, other things between people that are known to each other where conflict resolution skills aren't that great. And being able to access a gun, they use them too quickly to resolve these incidents. And if they're up close and personal, and sometimes, when you're not close, shots fired become deadly. And I think that's what's happening, this month. So you got to look at all the things that precipitate it. And then what are you doing afterwards to make sure you can catch that person?
And, homicide detectives, did a tremendous job last year with a 75% homicide clearance rate, where the national average is around 60%. And when it comes to cities like ours that have gun violence, it's closer to 45%.
Q: One of the biggest, incidents that has happened in recent weeks affecting this department was the Bar PM incident. One of many questions from the public has been why weren't the officers given sobriety tests?
A: You want to talk about consistency in everything that you do. We have policy in place. You want to have consistency. These officers, if this accident happened down the street and didn't happen at an LGBTQ+ bar, which drew some attention because there was an arrest afterwards, no one will be calling for a toxicology test or a drug test or an alcohol test on our officers.
Q: Really?
A: No, I don't think so. Have they?
Q: If a police car on duty, ran into the front of a business or a building, any building of any kind like it did, I think people would want to know if the officers were tested.
A: We've had other we've had other accidents here throughout the year since I've been here and prior to me being here and nobody's called for that.
Q: Into a building?
A: Into a building, we've had accidents that sometimes these officers are going to call for service, sometimes things happen. These officers, when you look at it, we have a black box. We did an investigation on it. The car wasn't going more than 40mph. The video makes it look like it's going faster and that'll come out. This officer was distracted. This officer had readily admitted when he was distracted when he tried to redirect the vehicle, he lost control of the vehicle. And then it went into a building at 28, about 22mph, somewhat give or take, in the 20s. It wasn't intentional. It was an accident. And then when a supervisor gets on the scene, if a supervisor gets on the scene and they feel that there's something that's not right about that officer that needs it, they can make that motion (for a sobriety test). At that time, they were allowed to have that authority.
Q: Why not make it blanket policy?
A: I look at policy, the city policy and its police department policy. So we'll take a good look at it because there's a lot of questions at it. But the policy that I have in place was followed. And, supervisors spoke to that officer within 17 minutes after the crash. That I know because I saw that.
Q: But it's possible that the policy could change. I mean, you came here wanting to make things better, more transparent. Those were like the first words out of your mouth, right? So why not make it a policy to give officers sobriety tests when they're involved in accidents?
A: Well, we have to take a look at the whole city because everybody's driving vehicles throughout the city. So I have to look at city policy. We look at our policy and the policy is in place. They didn't call for it and that situation didn't call for it. I think the situation that happened afterwards and the media and the type of shining example on what happened after the incident makes us take a look at that. If we had an accident, that happened down the street, I don't think anybody be calling for that. I'm being quite honest. I don't think you would be calling for it either. And I have to follow policy. Why would I change policy and make an exception here? These officers have due process, and the officers on the scene have been supervisors. If they felt that there was a problem or they were under the influence, they have the authority then to call for a sobriety test under reasonable suspicion. And I would back them if they did that.
Q: There is video of that incident. When will that video come out? And when will we see the video of the CVPA school shooting?
A: Well, we have public records, closed records and Sunshine laws in the state. I don't make the rules in the state. I come into a state, and I abide by them. We have a policy in place to make sure that it was due process in these investigations and both these incidents. If you take a look at the Central Visual and Performing Arts shooting, where the officers did a tremendous job, a tragedy that happened, loss of life that happened there, we've looked at other places. And if you see a Department of Justice report that came out on that one in Texas, it was very critical, not on this one, because this is almost a textbook and how you should do it.
Q: So why not release the video?
A: Because we're not done with the investigation.
Q: Even the governor said you could release or you should release the video from Bar:PM.
Q: I think he qualified that there was a statement that went out there because I did read what the governor said. But then there was a statement after that, that was left out. And he says, ‘But I'm not there. That's their decision to make.’ So he was saying, ‘I don't know all everything that happened in that case.’ So he's leaving out the people that have that have all the information. So in all fairness to the governor, someone walked up on him, asked him about it, and then he also qualified his statement, but that never made it into the press.
Q: Well, you read about it.
A: I read about him saying that. But then there was other ones that put out his full statement, which kind of really softened what he was saying, and he wasn't directing us to do that. So in fairness to the governor, he made a comment, but he also qualified it and never made it into the press or some press.
Q: Do you have any other points you want to make that you think is important here? This is the first interview you've done one-on-one in quite some time. In fact, I think the last time I interviewed you like this was your first day. Or maybe week after.
A: Well, I'm not too sure about that. You and I have sat down and had other conversations afterwards. I wasn't in uniform yet, but it wasn't my first day, and we've had plenty of press conferences. I'm out in the community all the time. I go to dozens and dozens committee meetings and answer questions. There's reporters that can grab me at any time before and after, with the exception of maybe one incident that just happened recently, because it wasn't the time to do it. I have spoken to plenty of times before that. Just to be fair, and I do press conferences with the mayor on certain things.
There was a tragic incident of a mass shooting of juveniles downtown. You do press conferences at the time when you pull people in. But we have a professional public information office. They actually put information out and answer questions every single day. We do a stand up on Wednesdays with ranking officers and even at shooting incidents. I'm helping train my officers to get used to talking to the press. So if you're commander and you're an executive, they're right on the scene. They're giving information even up to an officer-involved-shooting.
So I think we've been very transparent as far as what we give out. If you look at our website, there's a lot of information that's on it. It's a little antiquated and we're updating that website. So a lot of things that I'm in here looking at, it's 14, 15 years old and that's a lifetime with technology. A lot of good information on that website. Behind it, there's more stuff that's going out in this website than I've seen in many other websites.…
I think a lot of things are being done and I’m accessible anytime people see me out there, there's reporters that can walk up to me and ask me questions when I'm out there. We try to make sure we're available if I can't be out there. And just like any major city market, I've been in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia we're following the same type of guidelines that I've been trained in. We have good public information officers. They get that information out. And if they don't, we're going to hear it from you. You're going to let us know.
But there's some things when it comes to investigations, there's some things I'd love to say. There's things I'd like to get out sooner, but there's some things I'm bound as far as not making sure that I compromise and investigation. I got to make sure that, when it comes to the circuit attorney's office and prosecution of cases, that if you can get a jury pool, if I put things too much information out, some of those things can affect those things.
So it's not just the chief's decision, although I do have authority on that. But I also check with all my partners to make sure that they're in a good place, checking with them and making sure I'm a good partner.
We're going to get that CVPA information out, that will be going out, as soon as we can get, we're ready to go on a lot of things and putting the video together. But we also got to remember something else. We’ve got families, there’s trauma, there’s children. We’ve got to check with the schools. We got to get everybody prepared for this. And I think we're forgetting everybody wants to see that video. You're going to see a lot of it. You can take a look at. That'll be out to everyone. But this trauma that happened to kids and families, that's going to retraumatize people. We want to prepare those families and prepare that school. And we had to anonymize the children that are in that school.
There's been a lot of work. We haven't shown it. But I want to tell you, I watched from afar. I watched that CVPA shooting and I watched when I was on the East Coast. They did tremendous job. My predecessor, Lt. Col. Michael Sack, he did a tremendous job on that, on giving out a timeline. So there's been a lot of things have been done on that…If you want to see the video, I want to get that out as soon as possible. I want to get it right. I want to make sure the investigation, hundreds of hours of video, and you're going to see that we have to make sure we do it right.
If it's a case like that or the other case that happened, that happened BarPM, we want him to stay consistent and I hope people can understand. It's not like I'm not trying to have people take a look at it. And I did make exceptions. I did have people come in and take a look at the video to at least get back to the community members. We had the LGBTQIA+ advisory board to the mayor come in. We allowed them because I can let them see it. I can't put it out publicly. They looked at it. So they make sure that if anyone has any questions, they can give them more information. And then we also had some elected officials take a look, and we've done that, we've done that for, in-custody deaths, and we've done that even prior to me being here in an officer-related shootings.
So I think we're trying to make sure we're with within closed records and then try and do a balance to try to be as transparent as possible. And when the investigations are over, I would like to get it out to you.
Q: It's hard to say though because the department, it has released body worn camera and surveillance footage and video evidence on cases before high profile incidences before you came.
A: Well, I'm following the same rules and being guided by the same, sunshine lawyers and everything that everybody had before me. So once again, I'm guided by the people and advisers and I'm following somewhat of the same system. So I'm sometimes surprised when people say that I’m doing it differently. That doesn't mean I can't change things, because I have to take a full look at these things. And I'm always open to this. I'm always open to these conversations.
Q: The video that was put together about you and, how you run the department, it was shown at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference and you took some heat from the Ethical Society of Police for not reflecting the diversity of the department. And the skyline in that video is from New Orleans. So how much input did you have on that video, and how do you want to respond to the criticism that it didn't reflect the diversity of the department?
A: I don't know if that was New Orleans…We had to get it ready very quickly. And when we put that thing together, there was a lot of things that were going in there. We have outdoor roll calls … We had all this that was supposed to going there. People could not put it together in time, and some of the stuff that was sent in couldn't be put into that that video. They were trying to get the information that we had and put it together, and we had one day to do that.
There was a diversity in that video. If you do watch it, we had subject matter experts what we want to hit, obviously myself, the chief, we talked about the crime fighting strategies. We had Clarence Hines, who's the head of our academy and what a really important job as one of our leaders to train the future police officers and get people in. There's diversity there. There’s the head of investigations. And then a Real Time Crime Center Sergeant. So there was four main people in it. And then if you look at some of the B-roll, we had diversity in there. We had diversity. But that was done quickly. And I've talked to the Ethical Society of Police. Listen, I don't want anyone to feel that they're not part of this department.
That's just one video, one video we're doing. We're just finishing up a video right now. We're working with Lucy Labs that, everybody ESOP even has a say in what goes on. And we asked them to make sure they take the lead on this, to make sure that we have everybody represented because I don't want anybody to feel like they were left out. And that was not intentional. And you know what? I heard them. I listened. I want people to feel like everybody belongs. So nothing was done, and we had representation in there, and we're going to continue to take a close look at that. And we have many videos that have come out. That's one of many. So you'll see that and everybody has input. That was done very quickly. And I think that was explained to them, because it had to be done in such a short timeline.
That's why you saw one of the mistakes that was put in there that you talked about a skyline. It was something I wish we would have caught, but it was it was put out. And when we caught a few things in there and we had them changed. But we really wanted those outdoor roll calls and, North Patrol and South Patrol in that and it didn't get in there. It’s unfortunate.