The pending state takeover of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department is facing another legal challenge.
The St. Louis-based legal advocacy nonprofit ArchCity Defenders filed suit Thursday on behalf of Jamala Rogers and Mike Milton, two long-time police reform advocates.
“In 1861, Missouri’s governor took control of the St. Louis police to stop the city from standing up against slavery,” said Inez Bordeaux, ArchCity’s deputy director of community collaborations. “In 2025, the state is doing it again – taking power away from residents who challenge institutions rooted in white supremacy.”
The measure once again placing a Board of Police Commissioners in charge of the department, was one of the first pieces of legislation sent to Gov. Mike Kehoe this year. By June 24, he must appoint five of the board’s six members – Mayor Cara Spencer is the sixth.
Supporters said it was needed to restore safety in St. Louis, even though crime in 2025 is at its lowest level in more than a decade.
The suit argues that because the legislation is written in a way that it will only ever apply to the city of St. Louis, it violates a provision of the Missouri constitution banning special laws except in certain circumstances. The suit also says language requiring the city to spend a set percentage of its budget on the police department every year is an unconstitutional, unfunded mandate.
In addition, because of laws requiring pay parity between the police and departments, any increases in police salaries approved by the board will also require raises for firefighters.
“There will be even less funds available to implement holistic, poverty-reducing programs that have a proven effect on increasing public safety in the City of St. Louis,” the suit reads.
Rogers, a co-founder of the Organization for Black Struggle and Milton, the executive director of the Freedom Community Center, have worked for years to push the city to focus its public safety plans less on enforcement and more on prevention. Their efforts have gotten results. The city now has an Office of Violence Prevention, which aldermen are required to fund. It has adopted a community violence intervention model that hires “trusted messengers” in higher-crime neighborhoods to intervene in conflicts before they result in violence.
The state takeover “is not a policy solution. It’s a political weapon,” Milton said. “It’s about punishing a Black city for daring to chart a new path forward, for believing that public safety is not the same as policing power.”
While crime has dropped in the city overall since the programs took effect, research has raised questions about the connection between that decrease and the implementation of violence intervention programs.
In her role with the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression, Rogers helped lead the ultimately successful fight to establish a Civilian Oversight Board for the police department. She said the state takeover would be “devastating” to years of progress toward more transparency, including a city law that gave the Board of Aldermen greater oversight of police surveillance.
The city, Rogers said, is already notoriously bad at fulfilling open records requests.
“Our expectation of getting documents to have a legitimate investigation is put on hold,” she said.
St. Louis Board of Aldermen President Megan Green filed a similar lawsuit earlier this month. Brendan Roediger, an attorney for Green, said he welcomed ArchCity’s efforts.
Both cases are pending in Cole County because the legislation was passed there. The court may consolidate them into a single case.
State officials do not comment on pending litigation.
