Kinloch is Missouri’s oldest incorporated Black city. It was incorporated in 1890.
Olive Street Terrace Realty developed the land and then encouraged White people to buy parcels as an investment to later sell to Blacks. At one point the Olive Street Terrace Realty ran an ad in the paper stating, “The good colored people of South Kinloch Park have built themselves a little city of which they have a right to be proud. More than a hundred homes, three churches and a splendid public school have been built in a few years.”
Kinloch sits along the western border of Ferguson, another St. Louis suburb that has become notorious.
The population peaked in 1960 at 6,500. Then it started falling fast. It lost about a third of its population by 1980. Then city of St. Louis began buying up land for the airport, and the population decline accelerated. By 2020, there were only 450 people. It was down to 298 in 2010 and 263 in 2020.
However, one thing is not in short supply. MURDER!
The city of St. Louis may have the highest average mass shooting rate of any major city in America. Between 2014 and 2022, the per capita rate of mass shootings in St. Louis was nearly double that of Chicago, and far higher than Washington DC, Memphis, Detroit, Philadelphia, or Jackson.
However, even St. Louis can not compare to Kinloch. They had two mass shootings between 2014 and 2022. A total of 2 people died, and seven were injured. If we use 281 as the population, we get an average of 79.1 mass shooting per 100k. This is a mass shooting rate 31 times that of the city of St. Louis!
Between 2014 and 2022, at least twelve people were murdered. Another twelve were wounded by gunfire during the same time period.
Of the twelve murders, two were killed during arguments, three were killed during two different drive-by shootings, two were killed during a carjacking, one was executed after being transported to Kinloch, and one was shot at the park during some altercation. The other three were simply found shot to death by police, and there are no further details in the local media.
At any rate, this gives us an average homicide rate of 474.5 per 100k per year. In 2020, St. Louis set an all-time record homicide rate of 87.4 per 100k. That means the 2014-2022 average for Kinloch is 5.4 times highest than the highest rate in St. Louis history!
