Public Safety:
Reconstruct The System
The start of the new year began for the City of St. Louis with a dark reminder of what 2020 left behind. We saw the highest homicide rate in 50 years with 262 murders, our rent prices went up by 22% in one year, and the coronavirus left many of our neighbors without jobs. As we move forward towards new growth, we need to build a new public safety system — a system focused on distributing city services equitably across all wards.
Immediate Priorities
Improve Traffic + Roads
We’ve seen numerous car accidents, countless cars speeding, and even death on our streets. You should be able to grow up and raise a family without worrying if you’re safe crossing the street. I support identifying opportunities to better manage the flow of traffic on high-traffic streets using a traffic study and investments in traffic calming.
Landlords + Tenants
It’s hard enough to ensure you have a roof over your head, but renters shouldn’t have to worry about the safety of their own building, too. I support ensuring rental properties in our area are up to code and safe to live in. I’ll also push to establish a Tenant Bill of Rights, like our neighbors in Kansas City did, protecting renters from slumlords.
Mental Health + Social Work
Our police force handles situations they are not adequately prepared for or even meant to handle. I support requiring unarmed first responders and mental health teams to respond to certain 911 calls. I also support programs like Cops & Clinicians for social work ride alongs and Cure Violence dedicated in de-escalation services.
CLose The Workhouse
The Workhouse is a violation of human dignity, a violation of human rights — one with an exorbitant price tag. It is a glaring failure of our city government to protect all of its citizens. I urgently support efforts to close the Workhouse for good, and support measures to decrease recidivism by rehabilitative programs.
Long-Term Solutions
The key is to stop funding “solutions” that only offer temporary fixes. We need to stop treating the symptoms and focus on the illness. #STL
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TREAT THE ROOT CAUSES OF CRIME
Homicide rates continues to rise and our efforts to curb those haven’t worked. The reason? We aren’t treating the illness; we are treating the symptoms. By focusing our efforts on combating poverty, housing insecurity, and substance abuse, we can find long-term solutions to halt this crisis and ensure lasting progress.
Protect Your Basic Support Systems
Millions of people lost their jobs during the pandemic, and many of them remain unemployed. If the pandemic taught us one thing, it’s that we must protect people by providing them with the essentials for living life. We need to ensure people have a place to call home that’s safe and we need to do our best to give them every opportunity to succeed.
PROVIDE YOU WITH
in-Depth EMERGENCY SERVICES
The current method of how we deliver emergency services to people in the community is highly flawed, plain and simple. It is unacceptable we’ve allowed inequity and discrimination to grow and fester this long. We need to expand the emergency services people can access when they call 911 to alleviate the potential of negative outcomes, and we need to do so with equity as the driving factor to provide exceptional responses.
Bill Stephens for 12th Ward Alderman 