Ask virtually any store manager at the Saint Louis Galleria about shoplifting, and you’ll invariably get two responses: One, it’s out of control; and two, it’s gotten exceedingly worse since August 2006, when MetroLink opened a stop just 500 yards from the high-end shopping center.
In the first six months of this year, Richmond Heights police made 345 arrests at the mall. That’s nearly double the number of arrests made in all of 2005, before MetroLink opened its Shrewsbury line.
More alarming are the numbers of juveniles (kids under the age of seventeen) arrested at the mall. This year police are on pace to take 276 juveniles into custody for shoplifting and other offenses — a sevenfold increase over the 39 kids arrested at the Galleria in 2005.
“I know it’s not politically correct, but how else do you explain it?” comments a frustrated Galleria store manager who, like many Galleria shopkeepers interviewed by Riverfront Times, says her employer prohibits her from officially speaking for the company.
I had to go out to St. Louis for work in 2001. It stayed at the The Roberts Mayfair Hotel. I walked over to the mall. Most of the stores were closed. There was gangs hanging out in the mall. I did not feel very safe. I left right away. This does not surprise me.
I find this hard to believe. After all, increased access to suburban amenities will only serve to teach inner-city youth the ethics and secrets to social and economic success. These spokes-people must be mistaken and the reporter must have an agenda to print such dreck.
When OB is king, this kind of coded racism will come to it’s well deserved extinction - with a bullet in the back of the head. Get ready for REAL change we can all (well, some of us) live with!
Rode the Metrolink from Shrewsbury to Busch Stadium in July. The trains were packed after the game. A contingent of black males drinking Hennessey boarded the train and commenced to yell and curse. It was a stark contrast. Order and civility from the station at the stadium.
Disorder and animal behavior up to where the line splits off to the airport. Order and stability out to shrewsbury.
I will never ride again and neither will my parents nor the people they speak with.
State law prohibits Metro from fining anyone under seventeen caught riding the train without a ticket. As the train arrives at the station, Dante and his friends walk past the guard and climb aboard. The doors close, and they're gone.
"Don't write a story," implores Peggy Hou, owner of Chinese Noodle Café, located next door to Pi on the eastern edge of the Loop. "You'll scare away business. Everything is fine." (Pi owners declined to comment altogether.) One business owner willing to speak is Rubina Patton, proprietor of Diversity Gallery and the Culture Café situated directly across the street from The Pageant. An African American and a licensed clinical social worker, Patton says it pains her to know that many of the teenagers involved in the attacks in the Loop are black. "I don't care what color you are, you need to behave," she says. "I don't want this blown out of proportion, but it needs to be addressed."
I wouldn't have guessed. /s
"I don't care what color you are, you need to behave," she says.
Imagine that.
State law prohibits Metro from fining anyone under seventeen caught riding the train without a ticket.
WTH? Ghetto thug provision ?
Over the years Virginia Beach and Norfolk Virginia have discussed "light rail" . VB essentially said they didn't want the light rail to extend to the oceanfront because they didn't want thugs riding in from the Norfolk ghettos.
Norfolk is now building the light rail and recently VB is thinking about having it extended to include stops in VB. This is after 20 years of saying, "No Way".
These fools caused the problems due to their Liberalism, their “embracing diversity”. In fact, they even say so. Note these gems from the article.
“State law prohibits Metro from fining anyone under seventeen caught riding the train without a ticket. As the train arrives at the station, Dante and his friends walk past the guard and climb aboard. The doors close, and they're gone.”
What these Liberal fools have done is provide free “urban mass transit” services - free rides for criminals.
Worse yet, when a cop catches juvenile criminals riding free, he is powerless to do anything about it. This is a perfect example of failed Liberalism creating and enforcing a policy of No Consequences For Anti-Social Behavior.
KEWL! Even Dippy the Hippy, stoned as he always was, knew better than that!
Then the Big Sh*tty Liberals want to claim anyone who doesn't accept the criminal behavior swarming off the ‘mass transit’ refuses to “embrace diversity” and is “racist” when they point out that black teens from the ghetto are committing the majority of the crimes.
If the criminals were sent to jail for long periods of time, the rest (and the large majority) of both the black teens from that ghetto and the rest of the public could enjoy the malls and urban areas.
When shop owners won't demand the sentences, and are unwilling to see the thieves jailed, they are contributing to their future problems.
PS Running thieves, or violent thieves, could be legally shot. I suggest paying a bounty on any thief so killed, and suggest the cost of a year of prison expenses as the reasonable bounty.
Non-violent thieves could be sentenced to enforced labor until they had produced enough pay back the stolen property, the costs of the law enforcement program, and any ‘supervision’ deemed necessary to determine that the criminal had become a self regulating citizen safe to allow on the streets.
It's happening here now, too. The local 'rat/peace/love/social justice/media machines have imported and enabled a thug presence that is now firmly entrenced and officially blessed.
Yes, all the joys of forced marxism the communists who destroy all of us have planned. May God have mercy on those who seek after His right ways in Christ Jesus our Lord and Saviour.
The rest will drive America into the ditch as the blind are leading the blind.
Similar thing happened to Century Three Mall in the South Hills of Pittsburgh, PA. It’s a city bus transfer station. Seemed like every day and night was Thugs R Us. Over 1/3 of the stores are empty and the rest can’t be far behind.
The country can’t solve this problem without working of the busted families and rotten education system that cause it.
You’re either in favor of civilized society or you’re not. We don’t have to tolerate bad behavior in the interest of “fairness”.
Try telling that to twelve-year-old Dante and his friends Recee, sixteen, and Unique, nine. On a recent Friday evening the three friends from North St. Louis County are walking through the mall when they're stopped by Galleria security and escorted to the door.
As he leaves the mall property, Dante takes a moment to stomp the life from a begonia plant spouting from the Galleria's manicured flower beds. He hurls a traffic cone into the street and tosses a sandbag from a construction site onto the sidewalk. "I'm angry," concedes Dante. "How are they going to kick me out of the mall? It's racist."
Maybe, Dante, you'd like to ponder a moment on why you and your friends are getting kicked out of the mall?
BTW, the comments section on this article is pretty enlightening as well.
City trains move the gang crime to the suburbs, so more people can share fair.
"I thought for sure it would pass, and then someone on the MetroLink campaign made the decision to advertise that the train would connect Mid Rivers Mall with East St. Louis," Aytes recalls. "That pretty much killed it right there. Soon you had people saying MetroLink riders would come to St. Charles by train and leave by car — stolen car."
Ten years later and a growing number of Saint Louis Galleria and Delmar Loop merchants worry that St. Charles voters may have been right: that maybe MetroLink actually enables criminals, especially teenage lawbreakers.
So pretty much the way I understand it was that there was a proposal to link MetroLink from the 'hood to the shopping malls but the people who shopped at the malls were concerned about the crime that this would bring (imagine that) so they voted against the measure. Then the government went ahead and built the link despite the proposal being killed by the voters? Am I reading this right?
I’ve seen this before. Adding regional bus service is what ultimately destroyed Parmatown Mall in Parma, Ohio. The deadbeats ride the taxpayer-funded bus to the mall, rob it, and ride the bus back home.