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Union workers at SIU Edwardsville plan a 'Day of Action' Thursday.

The former warehouse has been renovated to house staffers from the front office and creative team.

It was less than a year ago that a young rapper who grew up in St. Louis dropped her first single and saw her entire life change. The catchy rap track "Bing Bong" went viral on TikTok and, in a short period of time, labels were circling, rising star rapper Sexyy Red was collaborating with her on a remix and the artist — who calls herself BlakeIANA, a variation on her real first name, Blake — was performing in arenas.

A bit over a year ago, catastrophe struck one of St. Louis' most loved barbecue restaurants. Since opening in 2008, the Shaved Duck (2900 Virginia Avenue) had been a favorite of both its Tower Grove East neighbors and food writers across the U.S. Guy Fieri even named it Missouri's best barbecue. But the terrible cold snap that gripped St. Louis around Christmas of 2022 caused a pipe in its building to burst.

Republicans thwarted an effort to add rape and incest exceptions to Missouri’s near-total abortion ban on Wednesday but were unable to push a bill to bar Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid reimbursements to a vote. Under Missouri law, abortion is illegal except in cases of a medical emergency when “a delay will create a serious […]

The post Republicans block attempt to add rape, incest exemptions to Missouri’s abortion ban appeared first on Missouri Independent.

The nod of the nation's preeminent gun rights advocacy group to incumbent Bost represents a blow to Bailey, who has made gun rights a centerpiece of his insurgent campaign.

by Lexi Churchill and Lomi Kriel

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is produced in collaboration with The Texas Tribune and the PBS series FRONTLINE. Sign up for newsletters from The Texas Tribune and from FRONTLINE.

After a teenage gunman killed 10 people at Santa Fe High School in 2018, Texas lawmakers mandated that all school police officers receive training to better prepare them for the possibility of confronting a mass shooter. The law, which required that such training occur only once, didn’t apply to thousands of state and local law enforcement officers who did not work in schools.

Four years later, officers who descended on Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School, a vast majority of whom were not school police, repeatedly acted in ways that ran contrary to what active shooter training teaches, waiting 77 minutes to engage the gunman. An investigation published in December by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE revealed that about 30% of the 116 state and local officers who responded in May 2022 did not get active shooter training after graduating from police academies. Of those who had, many received such instruction only once in their careers, which at least eight police training experts say is not enough.

As part of the investigation, the news organizations conducted a nationwide analysis to examine active shooter training requirements and found critical gaps in preparedness between children and law enforcement. While at least 37 states require active shooter-related drills in schools, typically on a yearly basis, no states mandate such training for officers annually.

Instead, decisions about active shooter training are often left to individual school districts and law enforcement departments, creating a patchwork approach in which some proactively provide such instruction and others do not.

The month after the news organizations’ investigation was published, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s office released a scathing report that detailed a slew of failures during the Robb Elementary response. While visiting Uvalde, he told reporters that law enforcement agencies should immediately prioritize active shooter training.

The federal report recommended that officers receive eight hours of such instruction annually. Only Texas, however, comes close to meeting the Department of Justice’s suggested standards, according to the newsrooms’ nationwide analysis. Last year, the state mandated that all officers, not just school police, take 16 hours of active shooter training every two years.

About a dozen states also increased training requirements after the Uvalde shooting, but many continue to fall short of what police training experts say is needed.

The gaps in training requirements begin before officers’ first day on the job.

While police academies in nearly every state require some form of active shooter training, five states — California, Georgia, Ohio, Washington and Vermont — do not require it for all recruits. A spokesperson for the police standards agency in Washington did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Vermont police standards agency said the police academy curriculum is being reviewed but she could not comment on whether it will expand active shooter training to all officers. Officials with police standards agencies in the other three states said they are considering adding active shooter training to their police academy curriculum.

Once officers graduate from police academies, the lack of training requirements becomes more pronounced.

Only two states — Texas and Michigan — have laws that require active shooter training for all officers once on the job. While Texas requires recurring instruction, training in Michigan is given once after officers graduate from police academies. Some states mandate active shooter training one time in a particular year, leaving out officers who were not employed at the time. Other states require training only for school police, as Texas did before the Uvalde shooting, and only two of them — Illinois and Mississippi — require it more than once.

Source: State laws and regulations compiled by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE.

While a majority of states require frequent active shooter-related drills in schools, 13 don’t require such instruction. They include Colorado and Connecticut, which had two of the worst mass shootings in history: the 1999 Columbine school massacre and the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. Spokespeople for the school safety departments in both states said districts are conducting drills despite the absence of a state mandate but did not provide records that confirm their assertions.

Active shooter training can be expensive, but state lawmakers should commit to providing the necessary instruction if they want law enforcement to be better prepared for a mass shooting, police training experts said. John Curnutt, assistant director at Texas State University’s Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center, said Uvalde is a “horrible example” of when training was needed but hadn’t been practiced enough.

“There’s a higher price that’s paid than the one that we probably could have paid upfront to get ready for it,” Curnutt said.

The table of information below is best viewed on our website.

View the rest of this table on our website. Source: State laws and regulations compiled by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE. Information is current as of December 2023.

About This Research

To confirm the most up-to-date active shooter training requirements for law enforcement and schools across the country as of 2023, we contacted education departments and law enforcement standards agencies in every state. We examined both state laws and regulations.

In our analysis of schools, we included all mandated lockdown and active shooter drills, though some education departments said other types of drills can help prepare students and staff as well. In addition to the 37 states that explicitly require active shooter-related drills, we noted several others that have laws mandating safety drills but allow districts to decide which types of drills to conduct. We did not include those in our total count because the options could range from active shooter drills to earthquake drills.

For law enforcement, we collected information about how many hours of active shooter training are required for recruits going through police academies and for officers once they are on the job. We also asked for statewide data showing how many officers had taken such courses, but few states could provide that information. While we included only states’ current training mandates, four states — Alabama, North Carolina, Maine and Pennsylvania — required officers to train in a particular year but then not again, meaning that only those who were employed at that time received the one-time instruction.

Sammy Hagar continues to add to his business ventures outside of music. The rocker just announced that his first-ever beer, Red Rocker Lager, is expanding into California. The beer, described as a golden,…

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Progressives are being bolstered by Arab American and Muslim groups who are organizing in record numbers.

Another in a series of hearings with pharma CEOs takes place today.

The young girl was ejected from the vehicle, according to MSHP.

Ohio and Pennsylvania residents want the tools to study long-term health impacts from the 2023 freight train derailment. But East Palestine hasn’t seen the money.

Biden has diversified the bench by many metrics, but corporate-side attorneys still fill most federal judgeships.

Four-hundred-year-old acequia systems of the Southwest are changing how communities cope with water scarcity.

Climate activists led the charge against LNG exports, but they’re not the only ones celebrating Biden’s pause.

The resulting costs to society could be as high as $8 billion.

A new federal initiative will shed light on the opaque and rapidly growing cryptocurrency mining industry.

Here's a great story about cybersecurity company Fortinet Inc.: A widely reported story that 3 million electric toothbrushes were hacked with malware to conduct distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks is likely a hypothetical scenario instead of an actual attack. ....Fortinet, who was attributed as the source of the article, has not published any information ...continue reading "You are safe from your toothbrush . . . for now"

A CBO report published today says that economic growth over the next decade is likely to be higher than previous projections. Why? Mostly because of the surge in immigration over the past couple of years. So hooray for immigration? Not really. I suspect CBO's estimates of net immigration are too high, but even if they're ...continue reading "Does immigration really boost GDP?"

EDITOR’S NOTE: In order to bring a plurality of voices to our storytelling, the Missouri Historical Society frequently asks guest writers to contribute to History Happens Here. The views and opinions expressed by guest contributors are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Missouri Historical Society, its affiliates, or …

Continue reading "Celebrating Lunar New Year in St. Louis"