Living and driving in downtown ºüÀêÊÓƵ, you get used to certain things. Speeding cars, screeching tires, blown red lights and stop signs. It isn’t unusual to see cars with temporary registration tags that are a year or two out of date, flouting the law in bold black print. When I pull out of my parking garage, I always look both ways even though it’s a one-way street, because I know that drivers here often consider street signs to be mere suggestions.
But the one thing I almost never see down here is a police car pulled over behind a driver, lights flashing. For the most part, it doesn’t happen. I have no evidence that it’s an official police policy, but it’s at least an unwritten one: Hands off downtown. Don’t mess with anything but the most major of crimes there. Let the rest go.
And now that ostrich-like approach has cost a teenager her legs and plunged ºüÀêÊÓƵ into yet another national image crisis.
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The story of Janae Edmondson, the 17-year-old volleyball player from Tennessee, is one of those tragedies that takes more of the air out of your lungs with each additional detail: A star high school athlete with a bright collegiate future, visiting ºüÀêÊÓƵ last weekend with her parents for a volleyball tournament downtown, walking with them back to their hotel — and having her life irrevocably devastated in a few brief seconds by a reckless criminal who shouldn’t have even been there.
Daniel Riley, 21, allegedly sped into an intersection, blowing by a yield sign and hitting another car, which pinned Janae, ultimately necessitating the amputation of both her legs. And the derailment of a future that will never be the one she’d planned.
Much has rightly been made of the fact that Riley was out on bond on a robbery charge, and that he had violated the terms of that bond dozens of times, yet he wasn’t rearrested because (brace yourself) Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner’s office screwed up. (Gardner says a judge refused her requests to revoke bond, but there’s no written evidence of any such request.)
I long ago lost patience with my fellow liberals who have defended our indefensible city prosecutor for years. I could spend the rest of this column, and multiple others, recounting all the ways that Gardner’s determined incompetence has undermined justice and enabled crime in ºüÀêÊÓƵ, making life here less safe for underprivileged citizens in particular. But that’s well-trodden ground lately. Suffice it to say that anyone who still thinks Gardner belongs in that office is either blindly partisan or utterly uninformed. Or a criminal.
But Gardner’s not the only one who dropped the ball here.
Riley’s lawyer’s nervy assertion that he wasn’t speeding is belied by the fact that his car flipped and landed far from the crash. That doesn’t happen at 30 mph. There’s also security video out there loudly confirming this was no fender-bender. Though distant and blurry, it’s hard to watch and listen to.
But if you do, listen especially to the screeching tires and revving engine right before the impact. Anyone who lives here will tell you those sounds echo downtown all the time. Day and night. With virtually zero police response.
It creates a feeling of living amid unchallenged chaos. The kind of chaos that can make a young bond violator with no valid driver’s license believe he can illegally zoom around crowded city streets and face no consequences. And if not for the crash, he probably wouldn’t have.
I don’t know if this is the mayor’s office or the cops themselves or both, but you can almost (almost) understand the apparent rationale for the hands-off approach downtown: Nobody wants a riot because a traffic stop escalated into another police-involved killing. But that’s an argument for better policing, not less policing.
In a city that has one of the highest murder rates in the country, it might sound odd to focus on traffic enforcement at all.
Or maybe not.
There’s a once-respected social theory that has fallen out of favor, having been poisoned by, of all people, Rudy Giuliani. It’s called , and it’s worth talking about here.
The theory says that allowing minor lawbreaking to go unaddressed — vandalism, fare-jumping, traffic violations — creates a lawless atmosphere that emboldens some people to commit more serious crimes. Conversely, goes the theory, fair and consistent enforcement of those minor laws creates an atmosphere of order that makes criminals less brazen.
Unfortunately, when Giuliani instituted the theory as New York City’s mayor in the 1990s, he combined it with a more sinister policy known as “stop and frisk,†which amounted to random police harassment of young Black men. Those who defend broken windows theory have argued it was never supposed to be that; it was supposed to be more like today’s notions of “community policing.†But the theory has never recovered from the Giuliani association.
So call it something else. But for crying out loud, start enforcing traffic laws downtown before another teenager loses her legs. Or worse.
Kevin McDermott is a Post-Dispatch columnist and Editorial Board member. On Twitter: @kevinmcdermott. Email: kmcdermott@post-dispatch.com