St. Louis Launches Lawsuit to Block State Takeover of Police Force

ST. LOUIS — City officials on Monday sued Missouri in federal court in an effort to stop the state takeover of the St. Louis police department.

The lawsuit says the new state law enabling the takeover violates the U.S. Constitution by infringing upon city officials’ First Amendment rights and violates the Missouri Constitution in the way it mandates more spending on police.

Aldermanic President Megan Green, who is named as a co-plaintiff along with the city itself, said on Monday that city officials had to challenge the new law.

“We’re not going to go along with something we think is unconstitutional,” she said.

The filing marks the latest volley in the fight for control of policing in St. Louis.

Jefferson City lawmakers, wary of recent calls by some in the city to defund police and alarmed by hundreds of officers leaving the force, have worked for years to seize control of the department. City officials have mounted a desperate resistance, calling the plan a threat to much-needed reforms and progress reducing crime.

But new Gov. Mike Kehoe cast the plan as a way to revive the force, make people feel safer and stop residents from leaving the city. He signed the law late last month.

City officials then spent weeks carefully reading it, looking for weaknesses that could be exposed in court.

By late last week, they had homed in on two main parts of the bill:

The first part contains language broadly prohibiting city officials from interfering with the business of the new Board of Police Commissioners, and threatens any official who does with the permanent loss of their office and a $1,000 fine for each offense.

That language, the city says, is unconstitutional because it is so broad that it could feasibly prohibit Green exercising her federally protected right to speak out against or protest the board’s actions, or even petition for the new law’s repeal.

The lawsuit itself, the city says in the suit, could be interpreted as interfering.

The second part of the bill targeted by the city’s lawsuit is a requirement that the city increase the percentage of general revenue it spends on the police department to 25% by 2028.

That requirement mirrors language applied to the state-controlled Kansas City Police Department, approved by voters in a constitutional amendment last year.

But lawyers for the city say lawmakers goofed when they tried to apply the same rules to St. Louis. The language, they say, only applies to departments “established” by a state board. The St. Louis police department, they say, is already “established,” and is simply being taken over by a state board.

State officials brushed off the news in statements Monday afternoon.

Gabby Picard, a spokeswoman for Kehoe, said the governor would be appointing board members and a transition director to manage the takeover soon.

And James Lawson, a spokesman for the state Attorney General’s Office, said the office looked forward to defending the law in court.

“Rather than wasting taxpayers’ dollars on failed attempts to defund the police,” he said, “we would encourage city leaders to focus on building a safer St. Louis.”

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