Feature

By DOYLE MURPHY

Republicans all the way up to the president unloaded on St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner this summer as she investigated and then charged a wealthy pair of married lawyers for pulling guns on protesters.

“Kim Gardner owes every single family who has had a loved one murdered an explanation on why she has acted on the McCloskey case instead of theirs,” Missouri

Governor Mike Parson tweeted.

“This is part of a troubling pattern of politically motivated prosecutorial decisions by the St. Louis Circuit Attorney …,” wrote U.S. Senator Josh Hawley in a letter calling on U.S. Attorney William Barr to investigate Gardner.

“It’s a disgrace,” President Trump told a conservative news website. 1ormally, the ȴling of a loZleYel felony would not merit mention in St. Louis, much less nationally. But Mark and Patricia McCloskey were already on their way to Joe the Plumber status, joining the pantheon of randos plucked from obscurity for the latest campaign narrative.

The couple appeared on Monday in a video for the Republican National Convention, warning

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KIM GARDNER Continued from pg 12

that anyone living in “quiet neighborhoods” was in peril from “radicals” who wished to “abolish the suburbs.” (Note: The McCloskeys don’t live in the suburbs.)

“Not a single person in the outof-control mob you saw at our house was charged with a crime, but you know who was?” Mark askded in the video. “We were. They’ve actually charged us with felonies for daring to defend our home.”

On June 28, the husband and wife were dining on the east patio of their fortress-like mansion when protesters started to march past on their way to Mayor Lyda Krewson’s home. In the McCloskeys’ telling, they were faced with a violent “horde” and had little choice but to arm themselves, lest they be murdered with their dog and their opulent house set abla]e. 7heir account conflicted with a livestream video that showed no signs that marchers intended to harm the couple or even noticed them until Mark, carrying an A55 rifle, began shouting, “Get the hell out of my neighborhoodȋ 3atrica shuɛed onto the lawn, panning across the crowd with a pistol as demonstrators shouted at them to put away their guns. After about ten minutes, the crowd moved on. But video and photos of the rich white couple brandishing guns at a diverse group of protesters went viral.

For the left, the incensed, armed McCloskeys couldn’t have been more on the nose as mascots of white privilege and rage. But for conservatives furious about nationwide protests after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, the McCloskeys became instant folk heroes. And when Gardner stepped into the morality play the next day by announcing she intended to investigate the McCloskeys, Republican politicians eager to talk about anything other than the coronavirus had their villain.

Kim Gardner has repeatedly taken on explosive cases since taking over in 2017 as St. Louis’ top prosecutor.

She inherited the case against Jason Stockley, a white exSt. Louis cop who was ultimately acTuitted that September of ȴrst degree murder in the point-blank shooting of a Black 24-year-old named Anthony Lamar Smith. Prosecutors’ theory was that Stockley planted a gun on Smith after killing him, but Judge Tim

Missouri Governor Mike Parson is trying shi decisions on murder cases. | TOM HELLAUER

othy Wilson rejected that argument. Wilson’s verdict, which included a written explanation that an “urban heroin dealer not in possession of a ȴrearm Zould be an anomaly,” sparked the most intense protests in St. Louis since Ferguson. However, aside from pissing off the St. Louis Police Ofȴcers Association, *ardner’s role was overshadowed by the clash between activists and police.

The situation would be different in )ebruary 20, ȴYe months after the Stockley verdict, when Gardner dropped a bombshell, ȴling a felony inYasionofpriYacy charge against then-Missouri Governor Eric Greitens for allegedly taking a photo of a mistress while she was partially nude and then threatening to release it if she revealed their affair. A second charge of computer tampering alleged the Republican governor illegally used a donor list of a nonproȴt he founded for his political campaign.

It was a bruising case — for Greitens, who resigned in March 2019 as part of a deal to drop the tampering charge, and Gardner, who found herself playing defense against accusations of misconduct lodged by the governor’s powerful attorneys.

The Greitens prosecution took criticism of Gardner to a new level, introducing her to a broader audience of right-wing antagonists across the country. In St. Louis, she continued to clash with the police union, showing a willingness to charge cops in shootings that outstripped her predecessors. In August 2018, word leaked out to the public that she kept an “exclusion list” of more than two dozen city police officers Zhom prosecutors didn’t trust to present cases or testify at trial. That kicked off a new battle with the police union and its mouthpiece, Jeff Roorda. In a radio interview in September 2019, Roorda called the prosecutor a “menace to society” and said she should be removed by “force or by choice.”

As far as the union was concerned, Gardner was a leader in a war on police. As she prosecuted cops — or refused to accept cases from officers on the e[clusion list — crime had surged out of control, they claimed.

It isn’t just the police union that has pushed the narrative of a city overrun by criminals coddled by a soft-on-crime prosecutor. Conservatives in Missouri politics, who’ve long made a sport of scaring their constituents with nightmare tales of St. Louis violence, keyed in on Gardner as a foremost practitioner of catch-and-release law enforcement.

When the McCloskey case hit, they blasted the charges as an assault on the 2nd Amendment and an example of wildly misplaced priorities at a time when St. Louis homicide totals were rising.

“It’s created a real problem on the streets,” state Attorney General Eric Schmitt told former NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch on her show in July while discussing Gardner’s record. “It has emboldened criminals. They think they can get away with literally murder.” T here has been a lot of murder this year in St. Louis.

As of Monday, 172 had been killed, compared to 128 at this time in 2019. The city is on pace for its deadliest twelve months since the bloody days of the early 1990s.

To make matters worse, according to Parson and Schmitt, there is a “backlog” of murder cases going unprosecuted by Gardner. In an August 10 news release, the governor cited police statistics showing charges had been issued in just 33 of what was then 161 homicides in the city. But the implication that Gardner was sitting on a backlog of 128 murders is, at best, grossly misleading. That’s because it leaves out a key piece of the equation: arrests. As of August 14, police officers had arrested  people in homicide cases and charges had been issued by the circuit attorney in 34 cases, according to a department spokeswoman. The St. Louis police force’s clearance rate for homicides has hovered between 30 and 40 percent in recent years, well below the national average of 62 percent in 2018, the most recent year available. Explained another way, prosecutors can’t charge murder cases they never see.

It is true that Gardner turns away more homicide cases than her predecessors, and her prosecutors lose more of the felony cases they take to trial. So far this year, Gardner has sent back ten homicide cases, according to police statistics. +er office’s trial conviction rate for felonies, which includes more than homicides, is slightly better than 50 percent. By comparison, Jennifer Joyce refused to issue charges in just one murder case presented by police during her ȴnal tZo years as circuit attorney, and the office’s felony conYiction rate at trial was better than 70 percent. (Gardner points out that trials account for a tiny fraction of the volume of cases, and her overall felony conviction rate, which includes pleas, is 97 percent.) What that says about differing standards for issuing cases — or the working relationship between police and prosecutors — is up for debate, but it doesn’t show a backlog of cases in the circuit attorney’s office.

That hasn’t stopped Parson and other Republicans from making it a talking point as they head toward an election in November. In July, the governor called a special legislative session to debate a series of measures, including the elimination of residency rules for St. Louis cops and creating an expanded avenue to try kids

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IT CAME TO HIM, OF ALL PLACES, AT A LENDER’S OFFICE.

e graduated from college a couple years

Hago, and thought he had everything: money, a steady job, a degree. But it was there in that lender’s office where Gavin Morale, 29, had a life-changing realization that gave him what he long thought he was missing: a purpose.

Morale, 25 years old at the time, needed an auto loan to buy a new car.

The lender looked at him from behind her desk disapprovingly. Morale needed at least a 610 credit score to receive a loan for a new car. His score was 608.

“You should dispute,” the lender told him. What was she talking about? He barely knew what his credit score was, much less that he could dispute it.

Almost five years later, Morale’s life is credit. After that day in the lender’s office, Morale immersed himself with information on how to improve credit scores and how to be financially literate—something he now uses his social media platforms to educate people about.

“When you have bad credit it determines everything: where you stay, the type of car you get approved for, the interest rates on your loans,” Morale says. “I want to make sure people don’t get denied opportunities just because of a number.”

After his auto loan rejection five years ago, Morale spent months researching how to increase credit scores and how to dispute them. He says he became fascinated with dispute letters. He filed a dispute with Credit Karma but nothing became of it so he wrote his own dispute letter, and it worked. He then filed dispute letters for his mom and a few friends, all of which worked.

These days, Morale is helping a lot more people than just his friends and family lower their credit scores.

Morale’s passion for financial literacy led him to start Resolved Credit Solutions this January. There, Morale not only repairs credit scores, but also teaches lessons on sales and business. He says he’s helped thousands of people boost their credit scores. As a result, they’ve bought cards, homes and started businesses. He even got his real estate license so he could know the ins and

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outs of home buying so his clients could get approved for home loans.

Morale’s success in finance eventually led to his acceptance into the evolutionary business council, a national group of entrepreneurs that helps business leaders bring positive change to the world.

Outside the realm of business, Morale’s fervor for financial literacy spread even to his creative endeavors. In 2018, he wrote a book called “The Man in Her Dreams,” part one of a fiction trilogy centered on the main character, Zoey Belford, as she navigates a successful career in business while also trying to find, as the title suggests, a man she dreamt about but never met.

Once he started getting into credit, he began using the name “Morale” inspired by “morals,” instead of his legal name, “Glanton.”

Whether he’s writing the next chapter in his fiction trilogy or at work at Resolved Credit Solutions, Morale is ready to spread the word about financial literacy. To contact Gavin Morale at Resolved Credit Solutions, call (314) 526-7903 or email info@resolvedcreditsolutions.com.

KIM GARDNER Continued from pg 15

as young as twelve as adults. Less than a week after Gardner rolled to an easy victory in the Democratic primary, all but guaranteeing she’ll win reelection in November, Parson moved to add another piece — new powers of the attorney general to take over St. Louis murder cases under certain circumstances.

Under the proposal, the attorney general could pick up murder cases 90 days after police present them if the circuit attorney has yet to issue charges and the chief law enforcement officer reTuests that the attorney general intervene.

“This proposal is not about taking away authority,” Parson said in a news release. “It is about ȴghting Yiolent crime, achieYing justice for victims and making our communities safer.”

It would, however, provide for a scenario where the attorney general could prosecute cases that Gardner’s prosecutors have rejected as too weak or are still waiting on additional evidence for. She says the key to building cases is building trust with the community, so that witnesses and victims feel comfortable working with investigators. Inserting the attorney general won’t speed up the process, she says.

“It takes time, and there is no time limit,” Gardner says. “This is not a TV show.”

The governor’s proposal assumes that the bottleneck in murder cases lies in the circuit attorney’s office and Yiolent crime is up as a result. %oth are Tuestionable conclusions.

Criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, a professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, has studied the surge in violent crime during the pandemic — not just in St. Louis, but across 27 cities. He doubts that anything Gardner is or isn’t doing is behind the increase.

“I think it’s unlikely,” he says. “That might be the case if we were only seeing the rise in St. Louis, but we’re seeing the rise in many other cities across the country.”

Across the twenty cities where homicide data was available, homicides increased 37 percent in late May and June, and aggravated assaults increased 35 percent across seventeen cities, according to a recent report authored by Rosenfeld and UMSL graduate student Ernesto Lopez Jr.

Even accounting for the usual uptick in violence that tends to come with summer, the increase is signiȴcant. 5osenfeld notes that it comes during a time of upheaval, not just from the pandemic but widespread protests that followed George Floyd’s death.

Something else has happened during the pandemic in St. Louis: A lot of the face-to-face policing stopped. Car stops, building checks and other activities that police categorize as “self-initiatedȋ dropped sharply. 7raffic Yiolations alone fell by more than 90 percent as police changed their strategies in hopes of slowing the spread of COVID-19. In an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, police Captain Renee Kriesmann said officers Zere temporarily instructed to not pull over vehicles or stop pedestrians unless a serious crime was being committed. The paper noted that in the police department’s 4th District, which includes downtoZn, police reported no traffic violations in July, compared to 265 during the same four weeks in 2019.

Police have since resumed selfinitiated activity, but it’s too early to say whether that will make a difference on August’s numbers. In July, the city recorded 55 homicides, more than double the 22 killings in July 2019.

In an interview, Rosenfeld says there could be other factors at play. It’s possible that populations that have typically had fraught relations with law enforcement are even less likely to call them or work with them as police protests continue across the country. Time will provide more clarity about the cause of the increased number of killings, but Rosenfeld and Lopez write that controlling COVID-19 is a good place to start:

“In our view, subduing the COVID-19 pandemic is a necessary condition for halting the rise in violence. In addition, both the rise in violence and social unrest are likely to persist unless effective violence-reduction strategies are coupled with needed reforms to policing.”

After Kim Gardner charged the McCloskeys, she said she receiYed a flood of racist emails and even death threats. In an interview with the Washington Post, she compared it to the old Ku Klux Klan terror campaigns.

“This is a modern-day night ride, and everybody knows it,” she told the newspaper.

Adding Trump’s criticism to the fray — Parson said at a news conference in late July that he had to explain to the president that the governor didn’t have the author

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KIM GARDNER Continued from pg 17

ity to remoYe *ardner from office ȃ further intensiȴed the criticism she’d faced since becoming St. Louis’ ȴrst %lacN circuit attorney, she says. She considers it part of poZerful politicians at the state and federal leYel trying to ȊinMectȋ themselYes into the duties of a local prosecutor.

ȊAnd you haYe to asN yourself, Ȇ:hy Zould they do that"’ȋ *ardner says in a phone interYieZ. Ȋ:ell, , NnoZ Zhy. ,t’s a Zay to cause fear and diYisiYe rhetoric, and to distract from their failed leadership to respond to the &O9,' pandemic.ȋ 3arson spoNesZoman Kelli -ones says there is nothing personal or political about his interest in St. Louis crime, and she defended his reTuest to let Attorney *eneral Eric Schmitt start prosecuting some of the city’s homicides.

Ȋ7his proposal is not about taNing aZay authority,ȋ -ones says in an email. Ȋ,t is about ȴghting Yiolent crime, achieYing Mustice for Yictims, and maNing our communities safer. Under the proposal, the &ircuit Attorney still has full and fair opportunity to prosecute murders.ȋ &hris 1uelle, a spoNesman for Schmitt, also insists there is no political motiYe behind the attorney general’s support for 3arson’s proposal.

Ȋ7his is purely about obtaining Mustice for Yictims, protecting our communities, and prosecuting Yiolent crime,ȋ 1uelle Zrites in an email. Ȋ7he Attorney *eneral Zas born and raised and represented the St. Louis region, and cares Yery deeply about Zhat happens to the &ity of St. Louis. )ighting Yiolent crime should not inYolYe personalities or politics.ȋ

Schmitt stands out among the circuit attorney’s critics. After the 0c&losNeys’ shoZdoZn Zith protesters, he hit the conserYatiYe talN shoZ circuit, calling her a Ȋrogue prosecutorȋ Zith an Ȋabysmal recordȋ on Yiolent crime.

A former state senator, he and *ardner haYe clashed repeatedly. Schmitt blasted her early in the pandemic Zhen she ZorNed Zith public defenders to identify do]ens of defendants for recommended release from city Mails in hopes of heading off an outbreaN among inmates and Mail staff.

And Zhen four cops Zere shot and a retired police captain Nilled during rioting and looting that folloZed nonYiolent police protests in early -une, he tZeeted a Yideo of a burning car.

Ȋ,n a stunning deYelopment, our office has learned that eYery single one of the St. Louis looters and rioters arrested Zere released bacN onto the streets by local prosecutor Kim *ardner,ȋ Schmitt Zrote in the tZeet, Zhich has been retZeeted more than 2,000 times. ,t Zasn’t true. Only a fraction of more than 0 people arrested had eYen been referred to the circuit attorney at the time of Schmitt’s post, and then only on charges of stealing. 3olice released the rest Zithout applying to prosecutors for charges.

AsNed if the attorney general has corrected the tZeet, Schmitt’s spoNesman 1uelle says in an email, Ȋ, can’t comment on the A*’s personal 7Zitter account or directly on that tZeet, but , Zill say that SL03' presented cases for prosecution to the &AO, and they refused to prosecute any of them immediately. :e’re glad that after the Attorney *eneral made comment on this situation, the &AO did ȴnally charge some of those offenders. 7he &AO also had a policy in place preYenting the police from presenting cases for property damage resulting from looting and rioting.ȋ

On the day of the tZeet, *ardner responded in a Yideo statement.

Ȋ,’Ye noticed that the attorney general is tZeeting Tuite a bit about looters and rioters and not about the fact that Ze haYe a history of police Yiolence in this city and nation,ȋ the prosecutor said. ȊAnd that has caused people to taNe to the streets yet again to demand accountability and change in our criminal Mustice system. ,t is clear that he does not care about Mustice or safety or the needs of this community. +e Must Zants to launch a politically motiYated attacN against me, eYen if it means misleading and lying to the public.ȋ 7he dustup Zas a precursor to the battles *ardner Zould ȴght after the 0c&losNey arrests 5epublican officials claiming she’s letting criminals off easy *ardner ȴring bacN they deliberately miss the point.

Ȋ:e neYer talN about the goYernor Zho Zas a senator, and an attorney general, Zho directly caused a lot of the Yiolent crime in the city of St. Louis by gutting our gun laZs,ȋ she says. Ȋ:e neYer talN about hoZ they haYe a history of not funding education, a history of cutting access to health care as Zell as social serYices that Ze all NnoZ could address the root causes that driYe indiYiduals to the criminal Mustice system. %ut Ze neYer report on that. ,t’s, ȆKim *ardner is the cause of crime.’ȋ n