In early 2021, reporters from St. Louis Public Radio and APM Reports began an investigation — later joined by The Marshall Project — into why the St. Louis police department has struggled to solve homicides in one of America’s deadliest cities.
It would take three years to unearth the answer, mostly due to the department withholding critical information from the public. The resulting series, which included five digital stories, four radio pieces and a photo essay, revealed not only the depth of the police department’s failure to solve homicides but also the causes of that failure.
St. Louis residents had long known that police struggle to close homicide cases, but they didn’t know why that was happening.
To find out, reporters Rachel Lippmann from St. Louis Public Radio and Tom Scheck from APM Reports requested detailed records—location, date, and victim race and age—on the city’s homicides going back two decades. The department refused to release that information, claiming that the “closed” or “open” status of a particular homicide case was part of an “investigative” report that was exempted from disclosure.
The reporting team disagreed, arguing that the department had released such information in the past and was shielding these critical records from the public at a time when the city’s homicide rate had spiked.
APM Reports and St. Louis Public Radio enlisted help from attorneys at Washington University in St. Louis law school’s First Amendment clinic. APM Reports eventually decided to file a lawsuit against the department.
After 18 months of litigation, the city conceded that the information was public and settled the case. The department began turning over records in June 2023.
Obtaining the information was just the beginning. The department’s records included a variety of data sets and individual incident reports. To create a comprehensive database, APM Reports data reporter Jennifer Lu and two interns meticulously cleaned, joined, manually entered and validated clearance records for thousands of homicides, a process that took months. (No artificial intelligence was used in this project.)
Those records showed that detectives had solved less than half of the city’s homicides in the previous decade, and just 31% of homicides in 2019, a low point for the department.
Our analysis also revealed that though Black people made up 90% of those killed, police disproportionately solved homicides of white victims.
We found three main causes for so many unsolved cases: A lack of trust between police and the community; the department tolerating detectives with troubling track records, and a shortage of staffing and funding.
