Silence from the hands up, don’t shoot T shirt sellers.
Via STL Today
A woman in the West End neighborhood who looked outside to check on a car alarm was shot in the chest Monday morning, five hours before St. Louis police were scheduled to blanket the neighborhood with more patrols.
The woman, 36, was conscious as paramedics rushed her to a hospital, where she was listed in critical but stable condition.
She had heard a car alarm sounding at about 5:15 a.m. Monday in the 5900 block of Horton Place. The woman looked outside and saw four men tampering with her car, said Police Maj. Gerald Leyshock. They saw her and fired shots in her direction. One of the bullets came through her window and hit her in the chest.
Police have made no arrests in the case and had no suspects. Police say she didn’t know the suspects.
St. Louis kicked off a new wave of police patrols in that neighborhood at 10 a.m. — an effort announced last month. Some officers are in uniform, driving marked police cars; others are in unmarked vehicles wearing plain clothes.
Leyshock briefed officers at roll call on the Horton Place attack. “Even if it seems like a somewhat insignificant arrest that you happen to make in the next 24 to 48 hours, please be questioning everybody you have contact with. Someone knows about it in that neighborhood. I’d like to clean that up.”[…]
After the North Patrol effort this week, officers will focus on the Dutchtown neighborhood for the third hot-spot location.
Dotson said studies have shown that the increased patrols don’t push criminals into other neighborhoods. He said most criminals work in areas they feel comfortable in, not move elsewhere.
“What we’ve seen is that when we put this kind of increased pressure, this intense pressure, on a neighborhood, the neighborhood shuts down,” Dotson said. “We don’t displace the crime.”
Every couple of days, Dotson said, commanders will re-evaluate the data and see what’s working. Employees in the department’s crime analysis unit found hot zones two days ago, and those maps were distributed to the supervisors of each squad working the hot-spot initiative.
Dotson said hot-spot policing is part of the way the police department does business and the city plans to keep it up — “maybe not every week but a couple times a month in different neighborhoods all over the city,” he said. “We have to maintain this.”