St. Louis County has spent $1.5 million on overtime pay for its police force since September to deal with protests following the acquittal on murder charges of former St. Louis City police officer Jason Stockley, a spokesman for the county police department said Wednesday.
Combined, the city and county have spent $8.3 million on police overtime since Sept. 15, when a judge found Stockley not guilty of first-degree murder charges in the killing of Anthony Lamar Smith, a crime suspect who was black. The verdict touched off weeks of protests in locations including Downtown St. Louis, the Central West End, Clayton and Richmond Heights.
St. Louis County police spokesman Sgt. Shawn McGuire provided the latest figure for the county’s overtime costs in an e-mail to McPherson. Those costs are up by more than 60 percent since last fall, when the department said it spent $920,000 on overtime during the first 10 days of the protests. The $1.5 million figure is for overtime costs related specifically to the Stockley situation, McGuire said.
McPherson reported on Saturday that St. Louis City has spent $6.8 million on police overtime since the announcement of the verdict. However, the city’s figure covers all police overtime costs, not just those related to the Stockley protests, according to a spokesman for Mayor Lyda Krewson. The city has not provided breakdowns of its total overtime figure.
The extra costs for policing in the city and county are one of the few quantifiable ways to measure the direct economic impact of the protests. One of the protesters’ stated goals was to disrupt the St. Louis region’s economy — a rallying cry at the time was “No justice, no profits.”
The Stockley case has been in the headlines again this week after a lawyer for Smith’s daughter said a judge had agreed to reopen discovery related to DNA evidence in a civil case the city police department agreed to settle in 2013 for $900,000.
