ST. LOUIS, Missouri — St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones' office is in damage control mode after someone at City Hall released thousands of text messages from her personal cell phone, some of which raise questions about her views on gun laws.
The messages were released earlier this week under an open records request.
"Chicago has strict gun laws as well but that doesn't deter gun violence," Jones texted in a group chat to her father Virvus Jones and advisor Richard Callow on March 21. "It's about investing in the people."
On the surface, the mayor's private remarks appear to contradict some of her public statements calling for stricter gun control laws in Missouri.
"Our state's lax gun laws make our challenge even more difficult," Jones said after a mass shooting in downtown St. Louis last month. "The legislature's lack of action on gun safety laws encourages the proliferation of guns on our streets and puts our responding officers directly in harm's way," she said.
Missouri Republicans pounced on the mayor's remarks as evidence of her hypocrisy on the issue.
The mayor's office issued a statement through one of her spokesmen on Friday afternoon seeking to clarify her position.
"Gun laws are just one part of the solution," Jones spokesman Nick Desideri said. "There’s a difference between deterring behavior and making it harder to get firearms and weaponry; for example, there’s no doubt that gun laws in the blue region around Newark help reduce violence as opposed to here."
In her private text messages, the mayor also made a reference to prolonged community investment delivering a significant reduction in violence in Newark, New Jersey.
"Newark, NJ has the same size population, same size police force, and similar racial demographics, yet had 50 murders in 2022," the mayor wrote. "I visited these programs first hand and I know that they work. We just need the will…."
She sent that message to Callow and her dad along with a link to a story published in The Nation, which found the city of Newark achieved a 60-year low in violence after ramping up funding in violence prevention programs.
In other portions of her text exchanges, Jones' messaging appeared more consistent with her public rhetoric.
"We have way too many guns on our streets and no way to take them away," she lamented in a text message on May 10.
The day prior, she mocked a "crazy editorial" from Republican Senator Cindy O'Laughlin, who called for improving education, workforce training, and greater economic development to reverse the currents of desperation that sweep teens toward crime.
O'Laughlin also issued a civic call to action for city voters.
"I’m hopeful that the folks that have decided to remain in the City of St. Louis, despite the rampant crime, will choose more wisely when it is time to elect a new prosecutor," O'Laughlin wrote.
The mayor's takeaway was that O'Laughlin's op-ed "basically says 'Thanks for staying in STL even tho we’re responsible for the horrific amount of guns on your streets.'"
After speaking at a crime summit with other county law enforcement officials in Ferguson, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell came to Jones' defense.
"If you take someone's text messages, you don't get the full context of what they what they mean," Bell said. "And I've talked to Mayor Tishaura about this issue a lot of times. And she believes in common sense gun safety laws, just as I do."
He spoke with reporters moments after calling on state legislators to enact tougher gun laws.
"We gotta get the laws changed," Bell told the crowded room at Ferguson City Hall. He claimed gun safety advocates ran into roadblocks in Jefferson City when they tried to build support for a law banning kids from carrying guns in public.
"The only oxygen in the room was about the Circuit Attorney's office," Bell said. "Now that those changes have been made, I'm hoping those conversations can commence again, because I do feel like it's something we can address."
Did Bell think Jones' comment hurt the effort to move gun legislation through Jefferson City?
"I don't think an individual text should stop what we see when we see more mass shootings than days in 2023," he replied. "I don't think one text taken out of context would change that, particularly when we know what the mayor feels on that."
In addition to cleaning up the fallout from the release of the mayor's text messages, her aides are also taking steps to remove them from public view.
The records were initially released through a government transparency portal after 5 On Your Side and the St. Louis Business Journal filed separate Sunshine Act requests in May seeking her communications pertaining to the political appointment process for a new Circuit Attorney.
City attorneys who regularly manage records requests gather the relevant materials for review and redaction before releasing them for public inspection.
In this case, someone gathered all of the mayor's text messages with her father and Richard Callow dating back to January, long before Gardner announced her resignation, and dumped them into a 135-page PDF document. Another 37-page PDF document contained messages with billionaire businessman David Steward. Both documents were uploaded to the city's transparency portal in their entirety, with limited redactions.
Two days later, someone removed the PDFs from the city website and replaced them with shorter, redacted versions.
On Friday afternoon, Mayor Jones took ownership of her comments, and said the release of that many personal text messages, including several vulgar insults of her colleagues in city government, was an accident.
"I’ve never been one to hide my feelings," Jones said. "Through an honest mistake, text messages between my family and close friends were released to the public. Sometimes my words can be terse, and my text messages speak for themselves. I understand the impact of some of my comments, and will contact the relevant parties to ensure productive dialogue moving forward."