Against the Trend

Late one night, off McPherson Avenue in St. Louis, a man with sports shirttails at half-mast, strolled casually through a dark alley. He was a perfect target for a mugger. A tall hoodlum with a heavy club appeared, and with one whack, sent the man reeling. As the victim struggled to his knees, the assailant swung back to strike again, stopped when he saw the fallen man draw a revolver. "I'm a policeman!" cried the victim. "Drop that club!" The mugger stared for a moment in astonishment, then turned and ran. The cop, Otto Hirsch, fired once into the air, shot again and nicked him in the side. In a few moments, Hirsch and fellow members of St. Louis' crack decoy squad had rounded up the mugger and three cronies.

Cutting the Rate. In 15 months, judo-trained St. Louis cops, disguised as derelicts, lurching drunkenly through the streets of the city--sometimes accompanied by policewomen in frumpy wigs and bedraggled dresses--have made nearly 300 arrests by luring hoodlums to attack.

In high-crime districts, a 61-man mobile reserve patrols constantly, reporting daily to the city's police crime-analysis staff at headquarters. The staff studies the reports for patterns and trends, can sometimes predict crimes before they happen.

Last year the analysts back at headquarters sifted information about three armed robbers, made an educated guess as to where the trio would strike next. Sure enough, the men were picked up right where the analysts said they would be.

The cops also use dogs to help them track down criminals; one German shepherd, specially trained to sniff out narcotics, recently led officers to a cache of marijuana hidden in a meat freezer beneath ten pounds of frankfurters. The techniques are unusual--and so are the results: last year the average crime rate in U.S. cities with a population of more than 25,000 rose 2%; in St. Louis, however, it dropped a surprising 11.9%.

Behind this startling success is a wiry, hard-driving civilian named H. Sam Priest, who is president of the city's police board. Though his job is only part time (and pays only $1,000 a year), Priest, 56, spends almost half of a seven-day work week on police matters, devotes the rest of his time to his other job as president of the Automobile Club of Missouri. His successful innovations in St.

Louis go far beyond the decoy squad system and crime prediction. When he first served on the police board from 1946 to 1949, he reorganized record keeping with an eventual saving to the city of $100,000 a year in clerical salaries. Today every telephone call to police headquarters is tape-recorded, every crime is punched onto cards and classified by date, time and location.

Reducing the Force. Since he went back to the police board five years ago. Priest has brought in top consultants, such as famed Criminology Professor (University of California at Berkeley) Orlando W. Wilson, now Chicago's police superintendent (TIME, March 7, 1960). Today, Priest gets advice from the privately supported Governmental Research Institute in St. Louis and from Washington University Psychologist Philip DuBois. He has raised police morale and efficiency with higher salaries and by instituting informal skull sessions for district commanders and their men.

St. Louis' achievements in law enforcement rebut the perennial argument of many politicians who claim that better policing can only be gotten by enlarging the forces. There are, in fact, 119 fewer cops in St. Louis than there were when Priest took over.

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