Metro is the massive transit agency operating trains and buses in the City of St. Louis, St. Louis County and St. Clair County, Illinois.

On Sunday, there was a stabbing on a downtown Metro platform. Those kind of attacks are extremely rare on Metro, but assaults and batteries (physical attacks) did increase 40% last year. In 2007, Metro reported 37 assaults and batteries. Last year, there were 52 reported incidents. Today, we found a strong presence of security at each of the five stations we visited in St. Louis and St. Clair County.

Clearly, with a ridership of more than 21 million in 2007, violent crime on Metro is rare.
Metro spokeswoman Diane Williams seemed to downplay the number of assaults on Metro by comparing them to violent crime in the city of St. Louis and St. Louis County. I am giving you virtually all of her response.

I'm not doing this to lay down for Metro. I'm doing it because I believe it demonstrates the remarkable degree of overkill used by Metro to make a simple point. It also gives you, a member of our audience, the chance to see how part of the news gathering process works, at least in this case.

Here are some excerpts from her e-mails:

I understand you are working on a story about an altercation between a man and a woman where the man was stuck in the forearm with a pen knife because the woman objected to his approaching her girlfriend.

Also on the subject of context, perhaps you have already viewed the St. Louis Police Department Crime Summary by Neighborhood in preparation for your story. I only did the math on a couple of neighborhoods through which MetroLink travels, but I'm sure your viewers will be impressed by the low percentages of crime on transit when compared with the communities the train passes through.

To emphasize her point Ms. Williams provided crime data for each neighborhood in the city. STLCrimebyNeighborhood2009[1].pdf

She also gave us a list of violent crimes that were more serious than the Metro stabbing.

Recent Violent Crime Stories
6/30 - Man shot to death in the 1600 block of Carr St.
6/27 - 16-year old shot in the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood; later died
6/27 - Tot, 2-years old, killed by mother's boyfriend; near Hyde Park
6/27 - 28-year old man, drinking with strangers, was thrown off the Poplar Street Bridge into the river
6/26 - Two teens arrested for carjacking that led to the discovery of a dead man wrapped in a mat; East St. Louis
6/25 - Jefferson County prosecutor attacked following court verdict
6/25 - Four charged with first-degree assault at South County Center
6/23 - Shamario Williams was shot to death near his home in East St. Louis
6/23 - 17-year old charged with murder in shooting death of 31-year old; Mascoutah
6/22 - 18-year old shot in neck on 4500 block of Adelaide Ave.; later died
6/22 - Police arrest 12 in street brawl on 3600 block of North Garrison; several fights broke out in a crowd of about 300; teenage boy taken into custody who was believed to have fired shots
6/20 - 16-year old held in fatal shooting of 27-year old man at the 3700 block of Kosciusko Street
6/19 - Edrow Perkins, 36, found fatally shot to death in his vehicle in Caseyville
6/18 - Two children wounded in two separate shootings in East St. Louis
6/18 - Two women charged with beating man to death in Forest Park
6/18 - Teen doused with gasoline and set on fire by other teen in Poplar Bluff
6/17 - Teenager fatally shot during the weekend while pumping gas in East St. Louis is identified
6/16 - 18-year old fatally shot by passing car at the 3800 block of Kennerly

In a second e-mail Ms. Williams compared crime on Metro trains to crime in the entire city of St. Louis.

Of 2623 aggravated assault/battery crimes in St. Clair County in 2008, seven (7) occurred on MetroLink property.

A total of forty 1st degree, 2nd degree, 3rd degree and five domestic assaults happened on MetroLink property in 2008 in Missouri. During that same period St. Louis City reported 4345 aggravated assaults.

I told Ms. Williams what I'm telling you, that's just not a fair comparison. Clearly, there's violent crime on Metro trains, and it increased last year at a significant rate. It's also rare.

Metro could have told that story easily, and without the overkill.

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I'm a little late to the Twitter fan club. It always seemed to me that the short message internet service was going to die after its owners failed to make money on it. I'm not saying anyone will get rich off it, but it clearly has value.

Twitter became the key source of information about the recent Iran election. The Tweets from folks inside Iran were critical to understanding what was happening there. In fact, according to Pew Research, 98% of all Tweets during that week were about Iran. That's stunning. It also confirmed the value of Twitter, at least to me.

Twitter is also a great source for breaking news. I recommend CNN or NPR for breaking news. NPR also provides "live" Tweets during live coverage under the username nprlive.
President Barrack Obama has nearly 1.6 million followers on Twitter making his page one of the most popular. The Obama Twitter page follows more than 770,000 different accounts, but the Obama page is rarely updated. Today, there's only one update. It promotes an online Town Hall about healthcare reform, which takes place on Wednesday. Within the last month, the Obama account has gone as many as five days without an update.

I follow quite a few sites for many different reasons. One of my favorites belongs to basketball Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul Jabbar. On Saturday, Jabbar tweeted 10 times during his visit to Hoopfest in Spokane, WA. His username is KAJ33. Stephen Colbert, host of the hilarious Colbert Report, makes me laugh every time I read one of his updates. His username is StephenTColbert.

There are quite a few Twitter users who offer tips on how to get the most out of your account. One of the best is Kevin Rose, a founder of Digg.com. His username is kevinrose.

I Tweet under the user name InsideNews4. I Tweet about major news developments, investigative updates and even a little bit about what's going on behind the scenes at News 4 and with me.

I look forward to your feedback.

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My head pounded, my eyes and throat burned. The dust in the air covered my hand like gray volcanic ash. I coughed repeatedly. There was so much poison in the air, you could taste it.

It was October 2002, I was in La Oroya, Peru, a small mining town nestled deep in the Central Andes. La Oroya was a company town, and the company happened to be based in St. Louis, which is why I was there.

The Doe Run Company, which also owns and operates a smelter in Herculaneum, bought the massive Peruvian smelter at auction from the government of Peru. When Doe Run purchased the plant in 1997, it was pumping nearly 2,000,000 pounds of pollution out of the main stack every day. Other buildings gushed smoke and dust (the pictures in this post are from 2002). Tests conducted over the years showed virtually all of the children living near the plant had lead poisoning.

Doe Run inherited an environmental and public health nightmare. Doe Run bought the smelter complex for $121 million, roughly 12 cents on the dollar for what it believed it would cost to build the same facility in 1997. The Peruvian government required Doe Run to spend another $125 million (a total of $246 million) on improvments to the plant designed to reduce pollution as soon as possible. Doe Run had ten years to finish all of the requirements of the environmental program.

Doe Run insisted that it significantly reduced pollution over the years, but Peruvian records dispute that. I saw less smoke and tasted less metal in the air during my visits in the summer of 2005, but the air seemed to burn more, and it was still extremely uncomfortable breathing there, especially during the late morning and early afternoon when sulfur dioxide levels were highest in the town.

Now, twelve years later, following a series of changes and a three year extension, Doe Run Peru isn't close to meeting the October deadline for all the conditions in the environmental agreement. The company, which says it suffers from critical financial and credit problems, is asking for another extension. Doe Run is owned by New York billionaire Ira Rennert. Rennert lives in a $200 million mansion with 29 bedrooms and 39 bathrooms.

I returned to La Oroya in February 2005 for a follow-up series of reports on KMOV. I traveled there in March, June and August of 2005 as a freelance journalist. One of my stories was published in the Sunday edition of the Dallas Morning News.

Here's a link to one of our stories in February 2005. Yesterday, the New York Times reported on the situation in La Oroya.

My visits to La Oroya had a dramatic impact on me. I returned from there seven years ago with a renewed enthusiasm for mission work and a much greater appreciation for the trust strangers place in journalists, and the impact our stories can have on society.

I tweeted about the Doe Run story. You can see my news and investigative updates on Twitter. My username is InsideNews4.

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Greg Shepard, the longtime General Operations Manager for S & H Towing, was indicted today by a federal grand jury. Shepard was the alleged mastermind of a criminal conspiracy that involved the towing services used by the St. Louis city police department. The eleven count indictment alleges that Shepard ripped off vehicle owners, paid bribes and accepted bribes related to towing business.

During the last year it has also been reported that S & H allowed police officers to "borrow" towed vehicles without the owner's knowledge. The scandal, which was first reported by the Post-Dispatch, revealed that Aimee Mokwa, the daughter of then-Police Chief Joe Mokwa, borrowed vehicles too. Mokwa "retired" as he faced increasing pressure to resign.

You can read the entire indictment here. indictments&h.pdf

Look for news and investigative updates on Twitter. My username is InsideNews4.

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