It's time to start boycotting the St. Louis Police Board of Commissioners' businesses

Don Brown owns Don Brown Chevrolet at 2244 S Kingshighway Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63110.

Chris Saracino owns Chris’ at the Docket at 100 N Tucker Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63101. It’s right across from City Hall.

Edward McVey owns Maggie O’Brien’s, a popular sports bar located at 2000 Market St, St. Louis, MO 63103.

Bradley Arteaga owns Arteaga Photos, which is at 5212 Delor Street, St. Louis Mo. USA 63109.

Each of these individuals serves on the St. Louis Metropolitan Board of Police Commissioners, and are demanding the City of St. Louis defund and dismantle other public services the city provides in order to fund a whopping $250 million+ budget for the police department that they are tasked with overseeing.

They are bad faith actors, who do not see the City of St. Louis as a city that many of us call home, but a business opportunity to be exploited and extracted from.

They are extremely aware that the budget they are demanding for the police department would cause mass layoffs in city government (Mayor Cara Spencer’s words). They are extremely aware that $250 million or more is unreasonable, unsustainable, and unfeasible. They are extremely aware that they are wielding their ill-begotten power to harm the City of St. Louis in pursuit of hundreds of millions of dollars they believe they are “owed.”

This group of unelected bureaucrats are a cancer on St. Louis. They are taking their malicious directives from the gutless, spineless Republican cowards in Jefferson City, who have wanted to see the economic dissolution of St. Louis for decades. If they have their way, there will be an overflowing trash can, a pothole, and a cop on every corner of our city. We won’t be safer, and our quality of life will be at the bottom of one of the many sinkholes already plaguing St. Louis.

I don’t think we are reacting sufficiently to the nightmare future these people are ushering in.

If we allow this, we are allowing the complete destruction of the City of St. Louis.

We cannot do that. We have to make this decision as economically painful as possible for the individuals who are making it.

We have to boycott their businesses.

We may need to escalate to protesting in front of their business. But for now, we have to make sure they know that this is not a decision they are making in the dark.

They are people, with names and addresses, who rely on St. Louisans for their income.

We should deny it to them until they reverse course, lower their budget demands, and stop trying to destroy this city.

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This week’s theme song: HIT EM WHERE IT HURTS by PawPaw Rod