I owe an apology to Mark Maxwell with KSDK news. He contacted me yesterday to confirm Kim Gardner’s timeline and account of actions taken by her office regarding Daniel Riley’s bond. I bit his head off because this whole affair has made me very angry with our City’s journalists and reporters.
Kim Gardner’s office has been a disaster for six years and it hasn’t been some secret. Anyone who is paying attention already knows it. I’ve blogged about many of her failures. Everyone involved in the criminal justice system in any way knows about her failures. And every time she has another significant failure, I hear the same refrain from everyone I know: “I didn’t think it could get any worse than it already was.”
It’s so bad and widely known legislators in Jefferson City even know it — and have tried to take steps to remedy it. Yet, somehow this has escaped the notice of our reporters and journalists. I got a call from Elliott Davis, the You-Paid-for-It guy, saying he was doing a story on the Circuit Attorney’s Office and asking if we could talk. Where have you been for six years, Elliott? Has your head been in the sand like Tony Messenger’s?
It doesn’t take great intelligence to realize that when the Circuit Attorney’s Office is a disaster, other disasters will inevitably follow. If these reporters think the Daniel Riley situation would have never happened had Kim Gardner been competently doing her job, then aren’t they complicit in her failure? She was able to perform so poorly – and for so long – because they performed so poorly.
I owe an apology to Mark Maxwell because he has only been in St. Louis for a year. He seems sincere. And I do recognize that some news outlets have intermittently reported Kim Gardner’s mismanagement, her inability to work with her law-enforcement partners (in case you don’t already know this: it’s really difficult to get people to work with you when you call anyone who disagrees with you a racist and misogynist), and her utter lack of professionalism.
But this story is really just the tip of the iceberg. There are huge problems in the CAO that have and will continue to result in tragedies. These are not new problems, only under-reported problems. I don’t know if Kim Gardner can or will be removed by the Attorney General or whether a special prosecutor will be appointed to take over her caseload. I’m not even sure either of those is a good idea. The City voters did elect Gardner. This might be my naivete speaking, but I would like the voters to remove her. But to do that, they need to be informed of what’s really going on in the CAO and how it impacts their lives. That can only come from the press. And so far, they’ve let the voters down.