Weed and Seeds of Frustration

The Weed and Seed program had a meeting last night at the Five Star Senior Center at 2832 Arsenal.

Lt. Boxstruck conducted the police report:

and later, the meeting broke into small groups:

Larcenies, car thefts and burglaries continue to rise, and there was a spirited debate on the issues of problem properties and juvenile law.

The main problem with problem properties is that the process to get them "shut down" can be a two-year process with many intermediary steps that drain time and resources from the citizens and city bureaucracy. To make it even worse, the process of "shutting them down" is neatly sidestepped by a new owner acquiring the property. Once a new owner buys the problem property, the long process has to start anew, from square one.

Therefore, drug houses that rotate owners frequently (and this happens often) have little chance of getting shut down and boarded up. There is no clear end to this loophole outside of legislation to close said loophole, but this would put an enormous, (and some would say) an undue burden on any new owner legitimately trying to clean up a property. They would inherit all the legal troubles with said property, making the prospect an unattractive one and potentially driving away upstanding new owners.

Another bone of contention was the current law dealing with juveniles. The juvenile laws binding St. Louis are mandated by the State, and have gone unchanged since they were first written. Since juveniles CANNOT BE CHARGED with city code violations, they are often "ex-booked" , or simply released to their parents, even in the case of relatively minor felonies.

According to the police, juveniles know this, and are free to get away with all manner of nuisance and property crimes with little or no penalty. Again, and again, Aldeman Ortmann had to remind the frustrated crowd that the only way to change juvenile law was to lobby state reps and senators-- an answer nobody wanted to hear.

Crime is an insidious force that wreaks havoc on communities on many different levels. This leaves everybody frustrated. The community is frustrated with the Police, who in turn are frustrated with the law, and seemingly, there is nowhere to turn for immediate satisfaction to the problems at hand.

It would seem that this is a golden opportunity-- both in the instances of juvenile law and problem property managment-- for some enterprising State Rep, Senator, or Alderman to introduce legislative changes to fix some of these issues.

The people and the Police are oh so weary.