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ST. LOUIS — Write something nice.

The advice came from Comptroller Darlene Green. We ran into each other in the hallway of the Carnahan Courthouse recently. We were both there for a story that is 1,000 miles from nice: a public hearing that was embarrassing, if not outright shameful, on the mayor’s attempt to fire her personnel director.

But that’s not what she wanted to talk about. Green, who has been in office for 30 years, is a cheerleader for the city. Outside of the nitty-gritty of local politics (generally not nice) and credit ratings (), Green loves her city and wants to see it succeed. I understand her encouragement to write something nice. It’s the sort of thing I’ve heard from readers dozens of times in my 37-year career as a journalist.

News tends to follow conflict, and conflict can be messy and not nice. Sometimes people just want good news.

An answer to Green’s request came a few days after we met.

Crime is down in St. Louis.

That’s a sentence I’ve written multiple times in the past few years. During every year of Mayor Tishaura O. Jones’ tenure, the number of homicides has dropped or remained stable. In 2024, there were 150 homicides in St. Louis, 10 fewer than the year before. Violent crime also dropped. Property crime dropped.

The number of homicides last year dropped to the lowest number in the city since 2013, and to the lowest rate since 2014.

This is good news.

“While we’ve seen remarkable progress, 150 homicides in one year is still far too many,” Jones said at a news conference Tuesday, appearing alongside Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore and Police Chief Robert Tracy. “And we’re committed to using every tool available to us to bring that number down even further.”

Talking about crime is never an entirely nice story. St. Louis remains a violent city. While the number of homicides dropped last year, the number of shootings grew slightly. And nationally, violent crimes dropped at a greater rate than in St. Louis. Every victim, from the person who got their car broken into to the mother who lost a child in a drive-by shooting, has a painful story to tell about the damage crime does in St. Louis neighborhoods.

The numbers, though, are what they are. Every mayor I have covered offers some version of the statement that “stopping crime is job one,” even though mayors get blamed too much when crime goes up and take too much credit when it goes down.

But crime is down in St. Louis.

That simple declaration drives critics of the mayor crazy. But it doesn’t make it untrue. Progress, especially amid unprecedented regional cooperation in the “Save Lives Now!” project aiming to cut homicides by 20 percent over three years, is a good news story.

It’s the sort of story the region should take note of as we work to add another year to the trend of decreasing homicide numbers. To get there, Jason Hall had a suggestion recently that rings true to me. Hall, the former CEO of Greater St. Louis, the city’s primary voice for the business community, is leaving St. Louis to take a similar job in Columbus (homicides dropped there last year, too). In an interview with my colleague Jacob Barker last week, Hall talked about how improving downtown, where crimes get outsized attention, isn’t just a responsibility of business leaders and elected officials.

“Everybody’s got a stake in it, and everybody can be a part of its success,” Hall said. “Not all of these have to be grand strategic actions.”

That means me. It means you. It means heading downtown for a concert, or a Cardinals, Blues or City SC game. It means spending time at downtown restaurants and heading to the office occasionally rather than working from home. It means adding to the vitality that improves safety and, as Hall suggests, not losing sight of “how far we’ve come in a very short period of time.”

It means writing something nice when the time calls for it.

Crime is down in St. Louis.