Bob McCullough

In May 2018, McCulloch's office filed charges on a dismissed restraining order that was filed against a woman protesting a city police officer who she claimed had raped her. In the Democratic primary on August 7, McCulloch in an upset lost handily to Wesley Bell who ran on a criminal justice reform platform. During that campaign, McCulloch claimed that his office does not file bail bonds for misdemeanors; however, an ACLU of Missouri report showed this to be false. On August 16, McCulloch as an invited speaker at an Oregon prosecutors conference made several remarks considered so unprofessional and characterized by some as "racially insensitive" that several walked out and subsequently boycotted a later keynote speech, including the entire staff of one district attorney office.

As of July 2017, McCulloch still refuses to enforce fare evasion tickets issued for non-paying riders on MetroLink (St. Louis), despite growing concerns over safety and security on MetroLink and MetroBus facilities. According to McCulloch, “Only peace officers are capable of writing a summons or making an arrest for a misdemeanor violation, and the MetroLink employees, no matter what they call them, are not and cannot be peace officers.” Ironically, this comes at a time when St. Louis County officers, whose tickets McCulloch would presumably enforce, have been caught neglecting assigned MetroLink patrols.

After the August 9, 2014 shooting of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson, McCulloch announced that rather than making a decision about whether to arrest Wilson, he would bring the case before a grand jury, leaving to jurors the decision of what charges might be brought, if any. His spokesman acknowledged that it was unusual that the prosecutor was not asking the grand jury to endorse a specific charge. It was also unusual to present a case to a grand jury before the police investigation was over.

In 2013, McCulloch publicly switched his longtime allegiance from fellow Democrat and St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley to support Dooley's challenger in the Democratic primary for county executive, Steve Stenger, stating that Dooley oversaw too much corruption in the county. Stenger won over Dooley in the Aug. 5, 2014 primary by a landslide.

In 2000, in the so-called "Jack in the Box" case, two undercover officers, a police officer and a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officer, shot and killed two unarmed black men in the parking lot of a Jack in the Box fast-food restaurant in Berkeley, Missouri. In 2001, the officers told a grand jury convened by McCulloch that the suspects tried to escape arrest and then drove toward them; the jury declined to indict. McCulloch told the public that every witness had testified to confirm this version, but St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist Michael Sorkin reviewed the previously secret grand jury tapes, released to him by McCulloch, and found that McCulloch's statement was untrue: only three of 13 officers testified that the car was moving forward. A subsequent federal investigation found that the men were unarmed and that their car had not moved forward when the officers fired 21 shots; nevertheless, federal investigators decided that the shooting was justified because the officers feared for their safety. McCulloch also drew controversy when he said of the victims: "These guys were bums." The two men killed, Earl Murray and Ronald Beasley, had prior felony convictions on drug and assault charges.

Just after he first took office in the early 1990s, McCulloch prosecuted Axl Rose of the band Guns N’ Roses on charges related to the Riverport Riot in which 40 concert attendees and 25 police officers were injured. McCulloch charged Rose with misdemeanor assault and property damage for allegedly hitting a security guard, hurting three concertgoers and damaging a dressing room at Riverport Amphitheatre. McCulloch made headlines when he pursued Rose across the country to serve an arrest warrant in the case before Rose finally turned himself in and agreed to a plea deal.

After attending law school at Saint Louis University, McCulloch served as a clerk for Missouri Appeals Court judge Joseph G. Stewart. McCulloch was an Assistant Prosecuting Attorney from 1978 to 1985. He worked in private practice until 1991, when he was elected to the post of Prosecuting Attorney. McCulloch was president of the Missouri Association of Prosecuting Attorneys and a board member of the National District Attorneys Association.

Robert P. McCulloch (born July 27, 1951) is an American former prosecutor who was the American Prosecuting Attorney for St. Louis County, Missouri, a post he held from 1991 until 2019. A Democrat, he historically had bipartisan support as a prosecutor and won re-election in 1994, 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014, often unopposed, but by wide margins when he had an opponent. McCulloch held the highest paid position within St. Louis County government with an annual salary of $160,000. In 2018, he lost his bid for re-election in the Democratic primary to reformist challenger Wesley Bell by a 13.24% margin.

Bob McCullough was a real firefighter for the Los Angeles Fire Department. He received his Paramedic certificate as the 38th man in the state of Los Angeles.