ST. LOUIS – The elected leaders of St. Louis City and St. Charles County had a heated exchange Wednesday over a new regional crime reduction plan.

St. Charles County Executive Steve Ehlmann introduced amendments to the plan before the vote on Wednesday.

“We’ve got to improve the work of the police departments,” he said. “We’ve got to get our police departments working together, we’ve got to get them fully staffed, and I think only if you do that are you going to be able to fix the crime problem.”

St. Louis Mayor Tishuara Jones disagreed with the notion of focusing only on hiring more officers.

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“You can’t use a 50-50 split if you have three methodologies that you’re using. We’re using the methodologies of prevention, intervention, and enforcement, and to tilt it heavily towards law enforcement, it unfairly unbalances the prevention and intervention side,” Jones said.

Another topic discussed during the meeting was about officers moving to different departments.

“I think that is only fair to consider us agreeing that we should not actively recruit officers to jump ship from police departments to other police departments,” Jones said. “But as (Ferguson) Mayor Ella Jones pointed out, the pay scales are different depending on which municipality or city you go to.”

Ehlmann said Wednesday’s vote to adopt the current regional plan is disappointing.

“St. Louis is still a great place. The whole region is still a great place. We have crime in one part of one city and we’re getting a reputation that people don’t understand is very localized and it is the result of the fact that the city can’t expand, so our numbers look worse,” he said.

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