Police Chief Robert Tracy’s Blog Will Put You to Sleep

By Andrea Arnold On Mar 4, 2024

Perez Hilton, Emily Gould, Ray Hartmann, St. Louis Police Chief Robert Tracy — what do they have in common? They’re all bloggers, of course.

You would be forgiven if you didn’t know Tracy, who was appointed chief in January 2023, is a blogger. But two weeks ago, ProPublica’s Jeremy Kohler published a deep dive into Tracy’s compensation as police chief, which, in addition to $175,000 in salary from the city, includes an additional $100,000 from a nonprofit run by local business leaders.

As Kohler reported, that $100,000 comes with a few strings attached, one of which is that Tracy provides regular updates to the community “by a blog or other means.”

So we got to wondering, where is this blog? What sort of tea is he spilling on it?

To take the second question first (as Tracy himself might in a press conference), the answer is not much tea at all.

After reviewing several of the chief’s posts, we’re sad to say the writing is exactly as exciting as you’d expect of a blog written to fulfill a contractual obligation between the head of a major metropolitan police department and a group of businessmen footing a chunk of his salary.

In his initial post last August, Tracy wrote that the purpose of the blog is to let us know what’s going on at the SLMPD, analyze crime trends and “share a brief story, or stories.”

But we can find nary a story in the seven blog posts thus far – not a yarn, spiel or rigmarole. There is definitely no tea, no gossip and certainly no innuendo. Not even any low-level dish.

Obviously, Tracy isn’t going to write about his officers running over a church sign and then trying to cover it up, or crashing into a gay bar and then arresting its owner. But last week SLMPD officers uncovered an (alleged) cult, rescued a kidnapped woman, and collared a car thief who stole a Dodge Charger in Jefferson City and ran amok in Illinois before getting busted by the SLMPD in front of Busch Stadium – all of that happened in just one day.

Surely Tracy can spin up a few good yarns every month.

The blog is part of an unusual pay arrangement the chief has with the city, one that presents all sorts of questions about who the chief is ultimately answerable to.

The ProPublica story quoted Ward 12 Alderwoman Sharon Tyus raising concerns about the situation. “Who else can pay the chief?” she was quoted as saying. “Can the criminals get together and pay the chief?”

If you ask us, that’s the exact sort of combative, quippy energy Tracy should be putting into his online writing.

As for where to find the blog, that’s the most interesting thing about it.

The department’s social media accounts do make exactly one perfunctory post promoting each edition of the blog, but if you miss those, it is otherwise incredibly hard to find. While it’s technically hosted on the SLMPD’s website, it’s not available in any menu we could find, much less linked on the homepage. Regular Googling is of little help. Poking around those search results, we stumbled on former Police Chief Dan Isom’s blog from 2012 before we found Tracy’s.

If you’re trying to Google your way to Tracy’s monthly missives, you need to search “Commissioners Correspondence,” which is the name of the blog. Though of course you would only know to Google that if you had already discovered the blog. Maybe there is an easier way. But if there is, we haven’t found it.

We reached out to someone who builds websites for a living and asked him if there is a technical term for a page of a website that isn’t linked to anywhere on the website and is only available via the direct link or a very specific Google search.

The reply we got: “I think the industry term is ‘fucked’ — no lol I’ve never heard of that.”

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or follow on Twitter at @RyanWKrull.

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