St. Louis Police Headquarters Opened Two Years Ago Today
On Saturday July 19, 2014 — two years ago today — the St. Louis Metropolitan Police showed off their new headquarters on Olive between 19th (which they had closed) and 20th
![Saturday morning before the ribbon cutting](http://www.urbanreviewstl.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/1915olive01.jpg)
![The open house began while the festivities were still going on outside. We started at the top, 7th floor, and worked our way down floor by floor.](http://www.urbanreviewstl.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/1915olive02.jpg)
The building isn’t new construction, it was previously an office building. On the day of the police headquarters open house they had some vehicles out front.
![A vintage police vehicle](http://www.urbanreviewstl.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/slmpd.vintage.jpg)
![And what appears to be a former military vehicle](http://www.urbanreviewstl.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/slmpd.military.jpg)
Nobody questioned the military vehicle out front, but three weeks later Michael Brown was shot & killed in Ferguson. Many others have been shot by police in the last two years.
- CBS News, January 2014: Not your typical police car: Military vehicles put to new use back in U.S.
- Post-Dispatch, August 2014: Ferguson highlights police use of military gear and tactics
- CBS News, August 2014: Why Ferguson, Mo., looked like a war zone this week
- USA Today, May 2015: Obama bans some military equipment sales to police
- Mother Jones, August 2015: Documents Reveal the Fearmongering Local Cops Use to Score Military Gear From the Pentagon
- Fox News, November 2015: Outrage as military vehicles, equipment taken from officers in wake of Obama order
Recent shootings of black men in Baton Rouge & St. Paul, followed by the shooting of police officers in Dallas, Ballwin, and Baton Rouge, demonstrate we still have considerable work to do.
— Steve Patterson
Any interest in or action on the old police station on Clark Street?
Not that I’m aware of.