On March 26, Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe signed into law HB 495, ending local control of the city of St. Louis’s police department. The bill disempowers local elected officials, including current Mayor Tishuara Jones. Authority to oversee St. Louis police will now rest with a five-member board. While one of those seats will be reserved for the Mayor, the other four seats, and supermajority control, will be directly appointed by the governor. Along with Kansas City, Missouri, St. Louis will now become one of only two major U.S. cities which do not have authority over their own police forces.
St. Louis is 43% Black with a Black mayor and many Black political leaders. This bill is imposed by a white and Republican-dominated state apparatus. It distances police control from the very people who will be impacted, making it harder for working class communities to hold St. Louis police accountable for their actions.
In addition to ending local control in St. Louis, the bill also mandates that the city spend 25% of its budget on the police department by 2028, requiring an additional $41 million for the police per year. This means that instead of investing in already underfunded areas like access to quality education, health care and housing, more taxpayer dollars will be funneled into an already over-funded police force, regardless of the will of the people of St. Louis.
Further, the bill also escalates the attacks on immigrants state-wide in Missouri. It contains a provision which “requires every law enforcement agency in the state to submit to the Department of Public Safety information pertaining to the citizen or immigration status of any person arrested for an offense that is reportable under current law.”
Struggle for police control goes back to Civil War
This will not be the first time that St. Louis’s police force has not been even nominally accountable to the residents of the city. For more than 150 years, from 1861 until 2012, the state of Missouri controlled St. Louis’s police department. The origins of this peculiar arrangement are rooted in the racist politics of the Civil War and the efforts of pro-slavery and secessionist forces in the state to limit the power of of the Union loyalists in the city.
Missouri famously joined the United States as a slave state in 1820, however, 40 years later, when the U.S. Civil War broke out in 1861, Missouri held a convention where delegates overwhelmingly voted to remain in the Union. This was against the desires of Gov. Claiborne Jackson, a pro-slavery politician who desperately wanted his state to join the Confederacy. He even secretly corresponded with Confederate president Jefferson Davis on an ultimately unsuccessful plan to seize the St. Louis armory and deliver its weapons to the Confederacy. This became known as the Camp Jackson Affair.
In 1859 however, St. Louis elected an abolitionist and pro-Union mayor, Oliver Filley. St. Louis was also increasingly the home of German immigrants who, inspired by egalitarian and often socialist ideas, were fiercely anti-slavery. It was Governor Jackson’s desire to limit the power of these forces, and to attempt to ensure the victory of his secessionist scheme that led him to propose the state takeover of all organized armed forces in the city of St. Louis, including the newly formed police force.
This state of affairs then persisted until 2012, when a popular referendum was introduced, Proposition A, where nearly two-thirds of Missourians overwhelmingly voted to dismantle the state-controlled board. Despite this clear mandate from the voters of Missouri, the governor and the Republican-dominated state legislature have now returned to the Civil War-era state of affairs. This trend of ignoring the democratic will of the voters follows similar attempts to undo the effects of Proposition 3, passed by Missourians in 2024, which supported the right to abortion in the state.
St. Louis is a plurality Black city, with a Black mayor and many Black political leaders; it also tends to reject the conservative politics of the rest of the white and Republican-dominated state political apparatus. Thus 2025 has clear echoes of 1861 in the political machinations and motivations that have prompted this removal of home rule power once again.
Capital and the state
Ultimately, this bill means fewer rights for the working class and more power for politicians who are unaccountable to the communities they claim to serve.
Whether under state or municipal control, police serve the interests of the upper class in society, and are a mechanism for maintaining power and control. The question is not about whether the police will continue to target, harass, and brutalize oppressed communities, crack down on peaceful protesters or terrorize communities of color like Ferguson. The issue is that this bill now makes it even harder to hold police forces accountable by distancing their power from the very people who are impacted.
Kehoe and his fellow Republicans have claimed that this measure is about public safety. However, the police department’s own statistics show that “crime” in St. Louis, and violent crime in particular, has been on a downward trend over the past five years. In a January interview with St. Louis Public Radio, the governor was unmoved by these facts. He stated instead: “The data that I’m watching is will businesses feel safe enough for their employees and their customers to invest in St. Louis?” He added that he would not be satisfied “until the business community says, ‘This area is safe and I’m going to invest capital in it, I’m going to build my business there.’” For Kehoe, the measure of public safety is not whether or not regular St. Louisans feel secure and comfortable in their communities, but what is dictated by the needs of capital.
In 2017, it cost an estimated $66 million for St. Louis to maintain nearly 25,000 vacant properties — a combination of abandoned buildings and vacant lots, most of which are privately owned. Meanwhile, the city also has over 2,000 unhoused individuals as of 2024 — a figure that is likely under-reported and which has grown in recent years. The extra $41 million dollars per year that now must be spent on the police could help provide stable housing and revitalize the housing market in St. Louis. This could provide safety and security for the vast majority of residents of the city, but it may not align with what the “business community” wants for the city.
A better way
By signing this bill, the reactionary forces in Missouri have shown clearly that they have no regard for the democratic will of the people. The priorities behind HB 495 are not about serving the community — they’re about deepening systemic inequality. The way to safer communities is not to move control over our city’s resources to state-elected officials, nor is it to wait for politicians to shut down right-wing reactionary forces and combat the social and economic divides that plague St. Louis.
The solution is neighborhoods coming together and making democratic decisions at a grassroots level that they have the resources and the power to implement, including what their taxes fund. The solution is to put the people directly in control of their community safety, including community control of the police. A revolutionary reorganization of society that empowers this model of governance is possible under socialism.
