“It offends me, and it makes me want to do something,” said resident Gea Johnson, also the president of the Castle Point Community Alliance.

For a while, residents felt helpless. No one really knew how to tackle the problem, Johnson said.

Then, in October 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice awarded St. Louis County police a $1 million crime reduction grant. The county has since been planning, talking with residents and accumulating crime data. Now it has an approved budget, a steering committee and a plan of action.

Police tapped Southern Illinois University Carbondale criminal justice and criminology students as research partners. Led by professor Tammy Kochel, they’ve spent months surveying residents and looking at the number of gunshots recorded by the ShotSpotter system — a gunshot detection sensor — and analyzing the number of calls to police. The researchers will measure crime again next spring and again in the spring of 2021.

“My hope would be that we would see illegal dumping go down, see residents take action to address smaller problems, see a reduction in social disorder and a reduced number of shots fired,” Kochel said.