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St. Louis has gotten bad.
But, some background is needed to understand why.
Back in the 19th century, in an extremely short-sighted move, the city of St. Louis voted to secede from St. Louis County. As a result, the city was never able to annex any territory beyond its 19th-c. city limits. If you look at the map of the metro area, it is a jigsaw puzzle of tiny hamlets that have incorporated in the past 100+ years out in the county.
So the city of St. Louis consists of the barren inner city, and a certain number of ethnic neighborhoods like the Italian neighborhood known as "The Hill."
The city has been in decay for a while as most of the affluent population either lives in old-money towns like Clayton, or out in "West County." There have been attempts to get people to settle back downtown as in other cities, but there is a chicken-and-egg dilemma where people don't want to live down there without businesses like groceries and pharmacies, and businesses don't want to open without patrons.
But even with all that, though St. Louis was not a bundle of roses, it was not the most dangerous city in America.
But across the river is a truly miserable place called East St. Louis, Illinois, a completely failed urban en y. East St. Louis was once a vibrant blue-collar town that was ripped apart by the installation of the Interstate Highway System right through it. It turned into a collection zone for disenfranchised and unemployed blacks, as blue-collar whites either fled to Missouri or up over the bluffs to towns like Collinsville. Factories were abandoned in place, existing even today as overgrown ruins, putting most of the remaining black population out of work. Unemployment soared over 50%. Of course, crime soared too. Fast forward to 2004 or so, and the only functioning businesses in ESL were the drug trade and strip clubs.
Now, the local officials in ESL were all wrapped up in the drug trade too, and not really interested in controlling crime to any degree, so gangs ran unchecked. The Illinois State Police would attempt to investigate crimes, but neither local officials nor the populace were interested in cooperating.
ESL was so bad that the first thing a resident would do upon finding a job was move the out of there, usually to Belleville or Granite City. However, as black folks moved out there, the criminals that preyed on them followed, and the crime problem spilled out further into Illinois.
So the folks out in what is called "Metro East" raised a ruckus to Springfield (the state capital of IL) to do something about this. What the state elected to do was have the Illinois State Police take over patrols from the useless and corrupt East St. Louis Police Department.
This has been working pretty well, as crime is down in ESL. The flip side is that the criminal element simply jumped across the river into the north side of St. Louis, MO to ply their trade. So, the long-standing ESL crime problem is more and more the problem of St. Louis, proper.
Last week, I was driving to North Jersey and made a wrong turn and ended up in Camden. You should have seen me driving, I immediately hit the automatic locks on my car, stared straight ahead at red lights, and drove at about 70 mph to get the out. I was too scared to even stop by a gas station and ask for directions!
