Slay to call for tougher Metro security after wave of attacks
Mayor Francis Slay will join the city’s new acting police chief at City Hall today to call for tougher security at MetroLink stations. 
The push comes after a wave of assaults near the Delmar Loop, detailed in a story by Post-Dispatch transit scribe Ken Leiser, including one where a gang of at least 20 youths attacked a family at the Forest Park MetroLink station.
Alderman Lyda Krewson, whose ward includes the area around the park, has called the attacks “pretty unusual”; Blueberry Hill proprietor Joe Edwards has called them an “aberration.”
Slay, in a statement on his website, took a slightly different take, suggesting the perpetrators migrated in from the county.
“One of the many disturbing elements in the recent incidents is a report that throngs of badly intentioned youths from other municipalities have been walking across the city line from University City,” Slay writes, “and threatening customers and employees of stores and restaurants in the Loop’s eastern portion,” which is in St. Louis.
The city recently passed the century mark for the year in homicides; the last thing it needs now is seemingly random attacks at a major tourist destination.
Today’s 2 p.m. press conference will be the first joint public appearance between Slay and the department’s interim leader, Lt. Colonel Stephen Pollihan, who replaced the recently-retired Joe Mokwa.
Great.
Trying to get people to take the Metrolink is hard enough, and when you throw ‘dangerous’ into the equation, that will really keep people away.