St. Louis' police chief is calling the city's judges too lenient with defendants in alleged gun crimes, insisting those on the bench "are accountable to virtually no one."
Chief Sam Dotson offered that criticism in his official blog in a posting Monday titled "A Sane Rant for a Crazy System: Part I."
Dotson writes that "when you combine a runaway gun culture with a lack of judicial accountability, it seems like anything is possible." He adds that judges "make the decisions and we get stuck living with the consequences. And no matter how bad those decisions turn out to be, they hold on to their jobs and their power."
And he says another societal truth is that "guns are ridiculously easy to get."
