Tony Messenger | Post-Dispatch

Metro columnist

When Thomas Abt came to St. Louis two years ago to help regional leaders tackle crime issues, he shared data about what hasn’t worked in other cities with high homicide rates.

“There is no city that has had success by arresting its way out of the problem,” Abt said.

In other words, just adding cops and increasing the jail population wasn’t a long-term solution. The same was true for proposed solutions on the opposite end of the political spectrum. No city, he said, showed success in reducing homicides just by throwing social workers at the problem.

Abt, a criminologist and the founding director of the Violence Reduction Center at the University of Maryland, wasn’t pulling figures out of thin air. He was, in part, relying on the deep d

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