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ST. LOUIS — A series of fights between Mayor Tishaura O. Jones and progressive activists may be nearing a breaking point.

Almost three years after their alliance helped Jones capture the mayor’s office, activists have been disappointed by her support for police department budget increases. They have been outraged by her fights with civilian watchdogs at the city jail. And now, following the controversial breakup of a homeless camp at City Hall this month, some are uncertain they can back Jones again in 2025.

“If we stay on this path, I don’t necessarily see Mayor Jones winning re-election,” said Audra Youmans, an organizer with homeless advocates Tent Mission STL. “She has put herself in a really tough place. She has upset a lot of the people who supported her, but she isn’t what more conservative people want.”

If the frustration continues, the consequences could be significant. Activists have played key roles in successful left-wing progressive campaigns in recent years: They bundle campaign donations. They tell their friends to vote. They make phone calls, send texts and knock on doors to spread a candidate’s message in the dead of winter.

Few, however, are ready to break with the mayor publicly. Several activists and organizers who spoke with the Post-Dispatch in recent days requested anonymity, worrying that openly criticizing the mayor could cost them jobs, influence and city funding. Key figures like Kayla Reed, of the powerhouse organizing nonprofit Action St. Louis, and Blake Strode, of the marquee civil rights group ArchCity Defenders, did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Many also said that while they are frustrated about how Jones has handled key issues, they haven’t given up on her: They recognize that she has a difficult job where it’s not always possible to do everything they want. Some are also wary of how a split would stall momentum for left-wing politics in the city. And the next election is still more than a year away.

Still, they say their patience is not infinite. They thought they were voting for a genuine threat to the status quo on public safety and homelessness. And they want results.

“We will get behind a mayor who runs on the policies that we advocated for,” one activist said. “And if she’s not going to do it, then we’ve got to elect someone else who will.”

Jones, in response, said she has worked with activists on a number of progressive wins, including the closure of the City Workhouse jail in the north riverfront, the establishment of a program providing attorneys to residents facing eviction and the creation of the jail oversight board. She said her administration continues to seek input of community leaders and activists on issues they care about, even when they disagree.

She also said that, sometimes, she has to choose between a bad decision and a worse one. For instance, she had to vote to keep funding the hapless Loop Trolley — or risk losing federal funding for expanding Metrolink, one of her top priorities. And she had to make people leave their tents at City Hall — or watch what she called a public health hazard get even worse.

“As they say in the musical �Hamilton,’” she said in a statement, “�Winning is easy … Governing is harder.’ Sometimes as a Mayor, I’m faced with a bad decision and a worse decision, and I knew when I got elected that I would have to make those difficult choices and to hold difficult conversations.”

“Family members don’t even agree 100% of the time, and I don’t expect us to agree 100% of the time either, but I remain committed to working and finding compromise with anyone to find practical and forward thinking solutions to improve the lives of St. Louisans.”

There are other factors to consider in the upcoming election. The impact on Jones will depend on who challenges her and the promises they make, said Lana Stein, a longtime political scientist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. If someone’s running to Jones’ left, she might lose support from some activists. But she might gain support from more moderate voters.

And Ken Warren, a political scientist at St. Louis University, was dubious of any threat from activists, saying that the issues that animate them aren’t the issues that animate most voters. “Politicians survive these problems,” he said. “Incumbents survive these problems.”

Jones’ relationship with an array of left-wing activists who came to prominence amid the Ferguson protests is a story years in the making.

�This city deserves a lot more’

In 2016, a group called Decarcerate St. Louis was ramping up an audacious effort calling for the closure of the Workhouse, which was wracked with complaints of detainee abuse and unsanitary conditions. The Francis Slay administration and most of City Hall brushed them aside. But Jones, then the city treasurer, wrote an op-ed in the St. Louis American of the jail — and its closure.

“With the support of all of us, the residents of St. Louis and their elected officials, we can do this,” she wrote.

That same fall, she announced a run for mayor on a platform tailor-made for progressives in the city, calling for a citywide plan on racial equity, a push against development incentives for wealthy neighborhoods, and a crime strategy aimed at keeping nonviolent offenders out of jail with more mental health and substance abuse services.

She ultimately came up short, finishing a close second in a seven-candidate Democratic primary. But the movement behind Jones kept the pressure on the victor, Mayor Lyda Krewson, for much of the next four years: pushing her to close the Workhouse, showing up at her house to protest police brutality, and rallying to block an effort to privatize .

And when Krewson announced in late 2020 that she wouldn’t run again, activists mobilized to deliver Jones’ message.

Reed, the leader of Action St. Louis, her organization knocked on 25,000 doors, made more than 230,000 calls and sent 100,000 text messages in support of Jones’ victory.

Jones quickly set to work emptying the Workhouse and moving detainees to the newer City Justice Center downtown. She made some controversial cuts to the police budget. And she began a successful push to use federal pandemic aid to send $500 cash payments to thousands of struggling residents.

But a push to strengthen civilian oversight of police took a bit more work than expected. Plans to set up a city-run homeless encampment for people unready or uninterested in shelter withered despite efforts of progressive aldermen to find space in their wards. And then there was the matter of the new city counselor.

When Jones took office, advocates were optimistic that the city attorneys would quickly settle cases like those brought against city police officers accused of conducting illegal mass arrests of people who took to the streets in September 2017 after a judge acquitted a white police officer accused of murdering a Black motorist.

ÁńÁ«ĘÓƵ were even more optimistic when a panel of federal appellate judges said the immunity from liability officers usually enjoy would not apply in a case brought by a downtown resident named Brian Baude. Baude said he had come outside during protests to observe what was happening and then had police pepper-spray him, zip-tie his hands and jail him for 14 hours.

The three-judge panel said police might have been entitled to immunity if they had arrested people with probable cause, but they couldn’t cite troublemaking by a small group to justify mass arrests.

But the city, guided by newly appointed city counselor Sheena Hamilton, appealed to the full Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, alarming activists who feared giving police even more leeway to manhandle protestors.

At a press conference the following week, advocates led by then-state Rep. Rasheen Aldridge and the Rev. Darryl Gray, a leading police reform advocate, .

“This city deserves a lot more than it’s getting,” Gray said then.

Progressives who thought they would be collaborating with Jones’ office felt like they were slowly losing touch.

�Not my mayor’

Then, in April 2022, the administration began moving to clear a homeless encampment on the riverfront. Activists held a protest at City Hall, and officials said they would back off until they could find shelter for everyone there. But when the city returned nine months later saying they had found beds for everyone, people in the camp said otherwise, and activists accused Jones of betraying them to cater to downtown businesspeople, who had been complaining about homeless people wreaking havoc on Laclede’s Landing.

The agitations multiplied from there. In April of this year, the administration agreed to give police officers their largest raises in years, adding more than $10 million to the department budget in the first year alone.

This past May, members of an oversight board tasked with investigating complaints at the city’s remaining jail downtown accused the administration of stonewalling access to the facility, its staff, detainees and important records, like those documenting use of force. They demanded the ouster of jail commissioner Jennifer Clemons-Abdullah.

Their calls for change only grew louder in August when two detainees died in the jail within two weeks. Janis Mensah, the board’s vice chair, went to the jail to investigate but was instead arrested. Aldermanic President Megan Green, one of Jones’ most prominent allies, called for “an immediate change in leadership” at the jail. None was forthcoming.

Then, earlier this month, Jones gave the order to clear the City Hall homeless encampment at night, on just a few hours’ notice.

Activists for the unhoused came out in force to protest, with Aldridge, Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier, and top aides to Green in tow.

With city trucks pulling floodlights up on the sidewalk, and police ordering everyone to leave or face arrest, the assembled crowd locked arms and began defiant call-and-response chants. Jay Nelson, Green’s chief of staff, held a sign that read “Not my mayor.”

Aldridge, who became an alderman with Jones’ endorsement, could scarcely conceal his disgust. “This is sick,” he said. “The city has got to do better.”

Eventually, Aldridge negotiated a truce with a top Jones aide, and the campers were gradually moved out the following afternoon.

But activists are still smarting. After city workers fenced off the area outside the Market Street doors with signs reading “Park closed for restoration,” Reed, the Action St. Louis leader, wrote on X, “City Hall is in desperate need of restoration. This is gross.”

Jones defends herself

Jones and her aides defended each of the decisions along the way.

She cast the police budget increase as part of a broader effort to raise pay for city workers, respond to inflation and defend against state lawmakers’ efforts to put the city’s police department under state control.

She told the jail oversight board that it isn’t in charge of the justice center, and that members still needed to complete training before they could begin looking into complaints.

And she and her aides said the homeless encampments were cleared because they had become havens for violence, drug use and other lawlessness.

But for at least some supporters, those arguments ring hollow.

Mensah, the jail oversight board member, has almost lost faith. Mensah, who uses the pronoun they, said when they voted for Jones in 2021, they believed they were voting for the candidate who would do the least harm in office.

“I have been surprised by how much harm she has done to my unhoused and incarcerated neighbors as well as to me,” Mensah wrote in an email. “The only way I’m voting for Jones again is if there is no better option.”

Elad Gross, a civil rights attorney and candidate for Missouri attorney general who has fought the administration on jail and Sunshine Law issues, said he’s on the fence, too.

“This administration hasn’t done a lot of favors to people who have supported it in the past,” he said.

But for the majority of activists who spoke with the Post-Dispatch, there’s hope for reconciliation. Frustrating or not, Jones is a leader in the progressive project. A loss of support for her could open the door to backlash against the entire movement.

Still, they want more communication from Jones’ office about what’s happening, and input on the decisions Jones makes. They also want some acknowledgement of mistakes.

Some activists suggested she could start by getting behind a proposed Unhoused Bill of Rights, which would require the city to find beds for the homeless before clearing encampments, and create city-run camps with showers, toilets, security and social services.

Jones has been cool to the idea so far — much to the frustration of progressives, who point out Jones said .

Youmans, the Tent Mission STL organizer, said she doubts activists will get their satisfaction.

“I think it can improve,” she said. “But it would take a lot of things I don’t think will ever happen.”