Missouri on the verge of taking over St. Louis police, a return to Civil War-era policy
Missouri took control of the St. Louis police department just before the start of the Civil War, a gambit by state leaders to prevent the city from rising up against their conspiracy to align the state with the Confederacy.
The arrangement persisted until 2012, when 64% of Missouri voters approved an initiative petition returning control of the department to local leaders.
This week, the legislature is poised to reverse that vote, seize back control of the department and put it again in the hands of a board appointed by the governor.
The Missouri Senate could approve a state takeover bill as early as Monday. It would then go back to the House for a final vote to send it to Gov. Mike Kehoe, who has declared the idea a key piece of his public safety agenda.
The move caps a push for state control that began almost immediately after voters weighed in more than a decade ago, with Republican lawmakers arguing the return of the department to local hands was a failed experiment.
State Sen. Nick Schroer, a Defiance Republican who sponsored the police bill, pointed to crime figures and population decline in St. Louis as the driving motivation behind the push for change.
'We're finally answering the call, finally backing the blue and not defunding it,' he said, later adding: 'It's going to be a game changer when it comes to public safety and moving our state in the right direction.'
Critics of the legislation point to statistics showing a drop in violent crime in St. Louis under local leadership. They say Kansas City has fared no better despite being under state control since the 1930s.
'Someone who doesn't live in my district and wasn't elected by the people of my district wants to take away control of the police department,' said state Sen. Karla May, a St. Louis Democrat, later adding: 'Where were you when we had the highest crime we've ever had under 152 years of state control? The hypocrisy is real.'
A filibuster by St. Louis senators fizzled last week after Democrats won concessions from the GOP super majority, including on the makeup of the state board that would run the department.
'After leading a filibuster that lasted nearly 10 hours, it was no longer feasible for Sen. May and I to continue our filibuster for the next two and a half months,' said state Sen. Steve Roberts, a St. Louis Democrat.
Under the bill, St. Louis would join Kansas City as the only major U.S. cities with a police force under state control.
The board running the department would consist of the mayor and five commissioners appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate.
Several provisions were removed from the original bill at the insistence of Democrats, such as a mandated minimum number of officers required to be on the police force and an immediate requirement for the city to put 25% of its general revenue toward the department.
Instead, the size of the force will be determined by the board, while the city's budget commitment will be phased in. The original bill also included a role for the police union in choosing up to four members of the commission, an idea Democrats insisted be removed.
Democrats managed to add provisions banning the shackling of pregnant prisoners, establishing a fund for exonerated prisoners to receive restitution from the state and limiting what jails and prisons can charge inmates for phone calls.
Republicans also agreed to remove a provision that broadened the definition of rioting, a change Democrats feared would have wide ranging unintended consequences.
But the major focus of the legislation was control of the St. Louis police department.
The move had support from St. Louis police unions, who argued the department was mismanaged under local leadership. But most importantly, it was a major priority of the new governor, who highlighted his support of the proposal during his first State of the State address in January.
'As the economic powerhouse of our state,' Kehoe told lawmakers, 'we cannot continue to let crime kill growth in the region and drive businesses and families to move outside of our state's borders.'
St. Louis leaders have pointed to a drop in overall crime in the city, including a major decrease in the number of murders. But GOP lawmakers question the statistics and note that the city continues to lose population.
The bill's likely passage this week comes days after St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones finished a distant second in the first round of balloting in the city's mayoral primary. Alderwoman Cara Spencer garnered 68% of the vote, setting up a showdown with Jones in the April 8 runoff election.
Through a spokeswoman, Kehoe said the potential change in city leadership doesn't impact his support for the state takeover bill.
'Increased oversight and accountability of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department with a citizen board is an important tool to improve public safety in St. Louis,' the statement said, 'regardless of who wins the April 8 election for mayor.'
The success of the GOP push for state control of the department led to a heated back-and-forth between Roberts and the mayor.
Roberts laid the blame for the bill's success at Jones' feet, saying it has become clear that she 'no longer enjoys the confidence of the people in this building.
'She couldn't even be bothered to reach out to the senator who represents nearly the entire city of St. Louis,' he told reporters Thursday, 'nor could she engage with her natural Democratic allies.'
Jones called Roberts a liar and accused him of trying to cozy up to a Republican governor for some future job opening.
'The senator is using the mayor as a convenient political punching bag to distract from the fact that he has not been at the table and is unwilling to stand up for the City of St. Louis in any meaningful way,' Jones' spokesman said in an emailed statement. 'Good luck to him on whatever appointment he is currently seeking from Gov. Kehoe.'
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is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here. In the public imagination, Stephen Miller is the dark heart of the Trump administration — a pulsing mass of anti-immigrant hatred behind its most aggressively authoritarian moves. But what if there's a different story to be told — that Stephen Miller's obsession with deportations isn't helping President Donald Trump secure control over the country, but actively undermining it? Take Trump's militarization of Washington, DC, as an example. The move is puzzling, in that it's authoritarian in principle but ineffective in execution. While seemingly designed to expand Trump's ability to control the American public, the on-the-ground deployments are doing nothing to repress protest — in fact, they're assuredly generating far more resistance than they're suppressing. So what's going on? The best answer I've found is a recent piece from Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council (and Vox alum). Looking granularly at the details of the operations in DC, Lind found they heavily focused on immigration enforcement — things like forcing DC police to cooperate with ICE and setting up checkpoints to try and trap people they think look like migrants. 'Every day since the federal takeover, DC residents have posted videos of federal agents — often with a mix of uniforms or no official badges at all — in patrols, staffing checkpoints, or going after people. And the people they've been going after have largely been (apparent) immigrants,' Lind writes. (Her findings are supported by recent on-the-ground reporting from the Wall Street Journal.) This is, I think, a viciously cruel policy (not to mention a waste of federal resources). But it is also a very ineffective policy when it comes to consolidating authoritarian control. Undocumented migrants do not vote, but the administration's ceaseless efforts to deport them en masse is galvanizing street protests and tanking GOP support among Latino voters. This is Miller's influence on policy made manifest: obsessed with deportations, he has done everything he can to turn the federal government into a deportation machine. And it's actually hurting the overall Trumpist cause. Stephen Miller is doing authoritarianism wrong I wrote a book about how democracies become autocracies. One of my central findings is that, for would-be autocrats, it is exceptionally important to maintain democratic appearances. If you are too openly authoritarian before consolidating enough power, you're likely to galvanize a potent wave of popular resistance. The paradigmatic recent example is South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol's attempted power grab in December. Instead of subtly chipping away at Korean democracy, Yoon simply declared martial law overnight and tried to arrest opposition leaders. The result was an immediate street uprising and a parliamentary vote nullifying the martial law declaration. Yoon was impeached and is currently on trial for insurrection, a crime punishable by life imprisonment or death. The paradigmatic counter-case is Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. After winning power in 2010, Orbán and his Fidesz party made a blizzard of confusing changes to Hungarian law designed to make elections less competitive and bring the courts to heel. They then spent years expanding their power, using financial and regulatory pressures to take control over the press and civil society. Today, the electoral deck is so stacked in the ruling party's favor that even a wildly popular opposition leader may not be able to win the 2026 elections. Yoon and Orbán represent poles we can use to evaluate the Trump administration's authoritarian effectiveness. The more Trump acts like Yoon, attempting to nakedly assert the powers of a police-state ruler in a democracy, the more likely he is to generate meaningful pushback. The more he acts like Orbán, hiding behind a legalistic veneer, the more insidious the threat becomes. By this metric, the most dangerous developments of the Trump administration have been his attacks on universities, his successful shakedown of CBS, his push to get Republican states to do pre-midterm gerrymandering, and the Supreme Court's willingness to bless his mass firings of federal employees (at least temporarily). All of those developments tangibly affect American democracy. Each chips away at a key institution — civil society, the free press, fair elections, and limits on executive power — that prevent authoritarian consolidation. Each moves Trump meaningfully closer toward building an Orbán-style regime (even if the United States is still pretty far off from the terminus). But the militarized immigration crackdown championed by Miller doesn't advance that goal in any meaningful way. It combines the optics of authoritarianism — sending masked, unidentified armed men into the streets of American cities — with a lack of actual repressive capacity. Look, for example, at this recent video of DC residents (in my old neighborhood) chasing off unidentified federal agents. The feds are armed and masked, but the protesters are totally fearless. Why? Because unlike an outright authoritarian state, where demonstrators are repressed with deadly force, Trump's guys aren't authorized to fire indiscriminately on crowds. Their show of force is just that — a show. And people on the ground, in DC and LA before it, are calling their bluff. Miller's crackdown is good at two things: deporting undocumented people and terrorizing the communities they live in. I find this abhorrent: he is hurting innocent people, and the US writ large, for no good reason. But the fact that Miller's policy is morally terrible does not mean it is contributing to Trump's broader authoritarian project. In fact, its naked cruelty and thuggishness are the best reasons to think it's counterproductive. Back in November 2019, Stephen Miller said in a meeting that deporting immigrants was his reason for living. 'This is all I care about,' he said, per the New Yorker. 'I don't have a family. I don't have anything else. This is my life.' That same month, Miller got engaged to his now-wife Katie. The level of monomania on display there, an obsession with immigration so total that it erased his own fiancée, has been even more vividly on display in this administration — where he has personally redirected ICE officers responsible for disrupting organized crime to arresting random construction workers at Home Depot. I don't think Miller is thinking carefully about whether his deportation campaign is contributing to Trump's authoritarian consolidation of power. I think he just wants to deport people, and the consequences be damned. Mostly, those consequences are horrific. But if there's any silver lining, it's this: Miller is helping awaken millions of Americans to the true nature of their current government.
