UNIVERSITY CITY, Mo. --Khalid Mullen and his friends strolled the Delmar Loop oblivious to the fact that an eye in the sky might well have been observing their every move.
"Where?" asked Mullen, 17, of Ferguson on a recent Friday evening, searching for the police security cameras University City installed last year to monitor activity on the popular commercial strip.
"Oh," Mullen said, his attention directed to a camera above a nearby Starbucks and another positioned on a utility pole across Delmar Boulevard.
"They don't even know the cameras are up there," University City Police Capt. Michael Ransom said last week.
But the young people frequenting the restaurants and shops along Delmar are aware of the increased Loop police presence, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights.
Loop business owners credit high police visibility for defusing what they contend was the unfairly earned perception that young people roaming Delmar between Skinker Boulevard and Kingsland Avenue posed a threat to customers.
"It wasn't as bad as it was painted to be," said Sarah Stallmann, the manager of Ziezo Boutique, a Loop clothing store.
Occurring over a four-year period, the sporadic incidents began with an outbreak of assaults in 2008 in the vicinity of the MetroLink station serving the Loop and carried through a shooting and mob violence last year near the intersection of Skinker and Delmar.
University City responded by imposing a 9 p.m. curfew for teens under the age of 17, beefing up police patrols and placing the security cameras last year.
Police and city officials say they don't have statistics available on the number of infractions in the Loop. They decline to say how many officers are assigned to weekend duty along Delmar or whether personnel monitor real-time activity captured by the security cameras.
City Manager Lehman Walker did say the measures adopted by the city had "led to a calming presence in the Loop."
Jason Stubblefield, a tattoo artist at Iron Age Studios, says serendipity -- in the guise of adverse weather that seemed to roll in every weekend this spring -- also contributed to relative tranquility to this point in 2013.
"The bad stuff usually surfaces when the weather turns warm," Stubblefield said.
Dominick Hines, 17, who runs a street dance group, hopes that's not the case.
Most Friday and Saturday nights will find Hines, of south St. Louis, and his dance crew, the Beat, performing on a sidewalk along Delmar.
Hines says the rudeness of other teens, even if overblown, was bad for a business dependent on the generosity of passing pedestrians.
"All the kids fighting made it worse for us," he said.
The Beat, Hines added, still observes occasional episodes of rowdiness. "But it's not as bad as it used to be," he said.
The reason, in part, is a zero tolerance policy enacted after the incident last year in the parking lot of the since-closed Church's Chicken at Skinker and Delmar.
"If you sit in one place too long the cops tell you to move," said Ave Romano, 17, of University City. "If you're in a big group they'll come up to you. But if you're in a small group they'll leave you alone."
University City Mayor Shelley Welsch said she was not aware of nearby residents' complaining to city officials about Loop-related activities spilling into surrounding neighborhoods.
Kyle Markiewicz, also an Iron Age tattooist, said it wasn't unusual to see University City police edge groups of young adults toward Skinker where St. Louis police encourage them to return west on Delmar.
"They're just getting ping-ponged back and forth," said Markiewicz.
Ransom and a spokeswoman for the St. Louis Police Department said herding groups of young people from one jurisdiction to the next was not part of the Loop law enforcement strategy.
Of all the measures put in place, none is more effective than the formidable truck police park each weekend at the eastern edge of the business district, said Ben Trujillo, owner of Star Clipper, a comic book and pop culture emporium.
"The best thing that ever happened to the Loop is that 'Nuisance Abatement Vehicle,'?" Trujillo said. "People look at it and they think twice."
The abundance of police and cameras has not stripped the area of its character or appeal, Mullen said.
No matter how many officers he encounters on a given evening, the Loop, to Mullen, will forever be "a good place to express yourself."
Copyright 2013 - St. Louis Post-Dispatch
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
