St. Louis struggled to solve homicides. Could it have lessons for Minneapolis?
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As crime soared during the pandemic, many weren't getting solved. In 2020, more than half of homicides went unsolved in Minneapolis, according to local media reports.
The city of St. Louis has also struggled to solve homicides. Last year, a multipart investigation from St. Louis Public Radio and APM Reports looked into why.
MPR News producer Gretchen Brown spoke with St. Louis Public Radio reporter Rachel Lippmann about what the investigation found, hoping it might shed light on murders in both cities.
MPR News has requested clearance rate data from the Minneapolis Police Department.
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Why did you want to look at clearance rates in St. Louis, and what were you hoping that might show you?
Clearance rates are the easiest way to measure the success of a police department. How are they doing at solving crime, at getting the answers as to who committed the crime?
I understand that St. Louis law enforcement actually fought to keep that information private, and that APM Reports actually had to file a lawsuit so you could look at this raw data.
That's correct. Yes, the department decided to make this argument that clearance status was a closed record, meaning it was not sunshinable. And when a department does not want to give you records that it has previously made public, your journalistic spidey-sense begins to tingle.
We were happy that APM Reports was willing to take on filing a lawsuit to shake free these records.
Can you walk me through some of your findings?
We actually had been working on a theory that homicide clearance rates in the city of St. Louis began to drop after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014, which led to, of course, growing mistrust among police departments all throughout the St. Louis region.
The trend had actually started before that, but what we ended up finding is that over that decade — that period from 2014 to 2023 — is police solved fewer than half of the nearly 2,000 homicides that had occurred in that decade period.
What were some of the contributing factors as to why crimes are not getting solved?
The mistrust of police is a big one. If they don't see police solving the crimes, they know that the individual who has committed them may still be out in the community. They are worried for their own safety.
It did lead to, occasionally, people deciding to take justice into their own hands and go out and commit violence against the people they believed were the perpetrators. That, of course, just continues to build on a cycle.
We found that the department, even as homicides were spiking, cut funding to that important unit. We found major backlogs in DNA, and we also found that some of the officers who were in the homicide unit were perhaps not the top officers within the department. Some of them did not do basic investigative steps. Others were just ill-equipped to be in that unit.
Because there was some resistance initially from law enforcement to give you this information, I'm curious how they responded to your reporting, if at all?
When we published, they did not make a person at any command level available to comment.
Obviously, during the pandemic, lots of cities saw a spike in crime. And since that time, it's begun to level out a bit in many places. In St. Louis, have crime rates or clearance rates changed in any significant way since your reporting?
We did find that in the last two years of that data we looked at, trends had begun to improve. In 2022 and 2023, homicides did begin to go down, and the department was able to solve about 56 percent of the killings that occurred in those two years. The trend is continuing into 2024 and into 2025.
Correction (Oct. 3, 2025): An earlier version of this story misspelled Rachel Lippmann’s last name.
