Aggregator

ST. LOUIS COUNTY: The St. Louis County Police Crimes Against Persons detectives are currently investigating a probable murder/suicide in the 16800 block of Manchester Road which resulted in the death of two adult males. On April 19, 2022, at approximately 11:35 PM, St. Louis County police officers from the City of Wildwood Precinct responded to a call for service for a shooting in the 16800 block of Manchester Road. Officers located two victims suffering from apparent gunshot wounds. The preliminary investigation has revealed two adult males were involved in an altercation in the parking lot. The suspect shot the victim, then turned the gun on himself in an apparent murder/suicide. Both suspect and victim were pronounced deceased on scene. The investigation is very active at this time. Additional information will be disseminated as it becomes available. Please contact the St. Louis County Police Department at 636-529-8210 to speak with investigators if you have any information

Continue Reading

A man who says he is an employee of a federal prison in Illinois was arrested on a federal charge of attempted enticement of a minor.

A construction project is expected to produce several loud. "booms" that people will be able to hear in several St. Clair County towns.

The city is outpacing the national average.

Apparently, it’s not enough to prevent hundreds or thousands of people with “no known affiliation” with terrorist groups from flying — a list that includes children who have yet to enter kindergarten. Even though the TSA long ago admitted (albeit, not publicly) the threat to airline flights was almost nonexistent, it still needs to look […]

The Energy Collective is the latest step in a goal to have net zero carbon emissions across Anheuser-Busch AB InBev's supply chain by 2040.

Newly retired, the former Blues captain is getting into the restaurant business.

by Karim Doumar

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our data newsletter, which you can sign up for here.

One of the most basic functions of data journalism is to independently verify government officials’ claims.

So when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and state officials started to boast that Operation Lone Star — a now multibillion-dollar initiative launched in March 2021 to battle cross-border crime — had resulted in thousands of arrests, multiple drug seizures and numerous referrals of unauthorized immigrants to the federal government for deportation, we asked for the underlying data. It was immediately clear that examining the operation’s achievements would be a challenge.

ProPublica’s joint investigative unit with The Texas Tribune partnered with The Marshall Project to collect and analyze the data state agencies were keeping about the operation and report out the findings. I chatted with Marshall Project data reporter Andrew Rodriguez Calderón to learn more about how the newsrooms used data to identify questions about the state’s narrative surrounding Operation Lone Star.

(By the way, The Marshall Project is an investigative newsroom focused on criminal justice. It produces incredible work that you can get it in your inbox by signing up for one of these newsletters.)

As Calderón told me, Texas’ Department of Public Safety sent records about Operation Lone Star last summer in response to requests from our reporters. But the data the agency initially gave us was a mess.

There were two releases that came from three different departments with dissimilar ways of recording arrests and charges. In most cases, each row of the data represented one charge (and it’s important to note that an arrest can result in multiple charges), but the way the charges were entered was not standardized or easy to understand. This made it nearly impossible to analyze.

A small sample of data the state provided last summer.

“We were trying to reconcile all of those datasets to turn them into one master representation,” Calderón said.

Four reporters — Calderón and his Marshall Project colleague Keri Blakinger, along with Lomi Kriel and Perla Trevizo from the ProPublica-Texas Tribune partnership — spent hours combing through thousands of rows and manually comparing the arrest data with the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report and the Texas penal code in order to standardize the charges and then group similar charges into buckets.

That meticulous data review was both frustrating and galvanizing for the team of reporters, who wondered how Abbott and other state officials had drawn the conclusions underlying their nearly weekly public statements.

“We hadn’t been able to shape this data to be able to say something about it. So how were they doing it?” Calderón asked as he explained the process.

In November, the state sent the reporters new data that standardized the charges, making it easier to analyze. DPS officials asked reporters to ignore the previous data the agency released, saying it only included charges from some of the counties conducting arrests. The new dataset covered charges from Operation Lone Star’s launch in March 2021 through November, and it included counties beyond the border.

Now, the rows included a column classifying each charge as a felony or a misdemeanor, and there was a column with standardized charges. This meant that Calderón could run a simple script to help categorize the charges into groupings.

“Part of the goal of cleaning the data was for us to be able to classify them as drug charges or vehicle charges or violent charges or traffic offenses, that sort of thing,” Calderón said.

The state later sent us a second comprehensive dataset, which went through December, and then a third, which expanded the time period through January.

We used the third data set to conduct the analysis. Bolstering this data with additional reporting led us to these conclusions about the state’s claims:

• The state’s data includes arrests and charges that had no connection to the border.
• The arrest data includes work done by troopers stationed in the targeted counties before Operation Lone Star’s launch.
• Arrest and drug seizure data does not show how the operation’s work is distinguished from that of other law enforcement agencies.

In response to the findings, the governor’s office maintained that “dangerous individuals, deadly drugs, and other illegal contraband have been taken off our streets or prevented from entering the State of Texas altogether thanks to the men and women of Operation Lone Star.” But DPS and Abbott have provided little proof to substantiate such statements.

And the team found another wrinkle in the state’s narrative as it conducted its analysis. Reporters compared the three different datasets with one another, looking at how the data changed over time.

Calderón compared the different datasets the team had received from the state using what’s called an anti-join function.

A join function takes two datasets, finds matching rows and combines their columns. An anti-join does the opposite. Instead of adding sheets together, it analyzes two sets of similar data and outputs only the rows that are different between them.

Using this function, Calderón found that by the time DPS gave the news organizations the third dataset in January, more than 2,000 charges had been removed. The state stopped counting them toward Operation Lone Star after the news organizations started asking questions.

Asked by the news organizations why such charges were not excluded from the operation’s metrics at the start, DPS officials said they are continuously improving how they collect and report the data “to better reflect the mission” of securing the border. The officials said it wasn’t valid to say charges had been removed.

But in the explanation at the bottom of the story, reporters clarify:

The constantly changing nature of the database is not unique to Operation Lone Star. Methods for comparing datasets are commonly used and actively studied. It is valid to analyze changes in such databases (with the appropriate caveats) and to describe them as additions or removals. DPS itself told reporters the department “identified offenses that should be removed” in a December 2021 email about changes to Operation Lone Star data collection.

Basically: We stand by our analysis.

Being systematic about data and documenting every step might take time on the front end, but it makes the process more transparent, easier to replicate and stronger overall.

Major League Soccer doesn’t kick off in St. Louis until 2023, but some of the team’s biggest fans will have another reason to get pumped next month. St. Louis City SC is inviting those who were first in line to put down a deposit for general reserve season tickets to pick out their seats in person. The soccer club will offer some ticket deposit holders the chance to tour the under-construction and newly named Centene Stadium, on track to be completed late this summer. They’ll then get to…

Mayor Tishaura Jones delivered her first State of the City address two days before the first anniversary of her historic inauguration. She discussed investment plans to transform this city into the vision she once had growing up with roots in north St. Louis. She feels the city's best days are still yet to come. "Every child deserves to grow up in a safe, loving community like I did," Jones said. Jones delivered the address on Tuesday at Harris-Stowe State University, tackling the City's issues,…

Engineers at St. Louis University and members of the St. Louis Blues Blind Hockey Club are working on improving the puck for visually impaired players. It’s a deceptively complicated engineering problem.

A St. Louis-based real estate investment firm is expanding to Colorado, its first market outside the Midwest.

Mission Taco Joint, Hi-Pointe Drive-In, Hot Box Cookies, 2nd Shift Brewing, Steve’s Hot Dogs, and more are all getting in on the cannabis-inspired food holiday.

ST. LOUIS - Wednesday is 4/20, also known as Weed Day, and a couple of local businesses have specials in honor of the annual event. Mission Taco Joint is teaming up with the dispensary Proper Cannabis. They will hand out a limited number of GMO tacos. The restaurant's popular portobello mushroom taco has been renamed [...]

Scott McDowell, founder and owner of the Olney, Illinois–based business, comes up with new styles of birdhouses every spring.

Missouri would pay its full share of public school transportation costs for the first time in more than 20 years under a budget proposal approved Tuesday by the Senate Appropriations Committee. The committee added $214 million for school transportation to the $114 million included in the record-setting $46.5 billion budget plan approved by the Missouri […]

The post Record Missouri budget grows as Senate adds spending, House works on $1B tax credit plan appeared first on Missouri Independent.

ST. LOUIS - The St. Louis area sees a cool and wet start Wednesday morning. Showers and storms are expected throughout the day. It will also be windy and cool with highs in the upper-50s. Expect scattered showers and storms Thursday with high temperatures in the 70s. Some showers are expected early Friday, but it [...]

The show features the score from the Jurassic World films combined with projection and practical scenery to make the audience feel like they are on Isla Nublar.