St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones said she started thinking about reelection the day she was sworn into office in April 2021.
“I knew that the problems the city is facing are long term and cannot be fixed in just one term,” Jones said on the latest episode of the Politically Speaking podcast. “We have to make sure that we are enacting long-lasting, sustainable change, and oftentimes that takes more than four years.”
Jones points to a number of successes in her first term. Crime statistics, a key measure of success for many residents in the city, are objectively better than they were when she took over, homicides in 2024 followed a national decline, reaching their lowest level since 2013, and overall crime was down 15% year over year, though Jones acknowledged the difficulty in communicating that data to the public…