Calverton Park is disbanding its police department. It’s a step in the right direction.

Wexler, a former Boston police officer, is now executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, one of the nation’s premier agencies dedicated to improving the effectiveness of law enforcement.

In 2015, Wexler came to St. Louis to announce the results of a study of policing in the region. One word underscored the report’s findings: fragmentation.

“The fragmentation of the police force into 60 separate police agencies, many of which are extremely small, creates inefficiencies and uneven delivery of police services to area residents. … Fragmentation in the St. Louis region is extreme,” the report says. “This is a dysfunctional, dangerous, and unsustainable situation.”

Among the recommendations was a massive consolidation of police departments in St. Louis County. The report even envisioned an “ideal world” in which the region’s two largest agencies, the St. Louis Municipal Police Department and the St. Louis County Police Department, would merge.

Why were these suggestions so important?

Think about the constant focus on crime in the city center. City police sometimes have trouble responding to crimes quickly because their forces are spread thin. So they resort to overtime and private funding. But go to a Cardinals game or St. Louis City SC and what do you see? Police vehicles from all over the region, paid for with taxpayer money and private donors, to provide additional security.

Why is this not an everyday model?

This kind of collaboration would happen more often if fewer agencies were competing for tax dollars. The county’s police union recently raised the same recruiting and force reduction issues that have plagued the city for years.

As Wexler tells me, these problems are nationwide.

“We have a staffing crisis in the American police, from small agencies to medium agencies to large agencies,” he said this week in a telephone interview. “The American law enforcement system is made up of 18,000 agencies. Eighty percent of them are 50 officers or fewer. It’s very fragmented. Anything we can do to pool resources is a step in the right direction.”

Nine years after the report on St. Louis’ fragmentation and 10 years after the Ferguson uprising that inspired it, there has been some progress. Last month, Calverton Park voted to disband its police department. That follows similar moves last year in Velda City and Bel-Nor, and other consolidations in recent years in Pine Lawn, Charlack and Kinloch.

One of the greatest values ​​of the Save a Life Now! initiative, managed by the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, is that leaders from across the region — from multiple counties in Missouri and Illinois — are talking about a common strategy to fight crime and reduce homicides.

This is the kind of regional collaboration Wexler researchers urged nearly a decade ago. The failed Better Together process, which tried to merge the city and county, failed, perhaps because it tried to do too much. But some of the same goals seem to be slowly developing in a more organic way.

Wexler’s goal of police consolidation echoes that of social justice advocates. For example, the nonprofit law firm ArchCity Defenders recently released a brief calling for the consolidation of all municipal courts into one courthouse. The idea builds on reforms that came out of Ferguson, which reduced incentives for courts and police to use them as revenue generators for cash-strapped cities.

“If we want to introduce lasting change to this system, we need to act more boldly and transform the legal landscape of the commune for good,” the ArchCity report concludes.

Consolidation — of police agencies and the municipal courts they serve — could serve two purposes: freeing up police officers to better combat crime hotspots; and reducing the use of municipal courts to deepen poverty, especially among black residents of northern St. Louis County.

The decision by Calverton Park officials sets the direction for the St. Louis region, and perhaps the entire country.

“We have a serious workforce crisis across the country in 2024, and you would think there would be a push for consolidation, but that’s not the case,” Wexler says. “There’s no other country in the world that has this kind of inefficiency.”