National COPS Evaluation of St. Paul: 2000
Transition in The Saint Paul Police Department
Operations in Change: from the "Tour" Mode to Team Policing
The "Tour" Mode of Policing
During the early 1970s, the Patrol Division operated through a "tour" mode, as the Department identified it: "the command structure was organized by time of day, with all personnel assigned on a permanent basis to one tour or shift. Although the City was divided into four zones, the assignment of personnel and squad cars to zones was not rigid, and dispatching was not rigorously done by zones (i.e., cars assigned to one zone would often be dispatched into other zones)."10 In the downtown area, the skyways presented special policing problems. Begun by developers in Saint Paul early in the early 1970s, they continued to expand, eventually linking major businesses (banks, hotels, and commercial establishments) at several stories above the ground through interconnecting enclosed walkways. Yet 'beat cops' from the downtown beat unit were still assigned to patrol the streets below the skyway. The Business Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) began asking Chief Rowan, "why?'—the streets were mostly empty, since people had moved up into the skyway above. Finally they got a skyway patrol—the Downtown Patrol Beat—started, and federal dollars gradually added to the numbers of officers assigned.
By the early 1970s, the Saint Paul Police Department had already developed a number of innovative policing practices, including both call prioritization, and crime mapping and analysis. SPPD started very early to look at computers and attempt to determine how they might be used in law enforcement. The law enforcement computer system in Ramsey County began in the early 1970s, and SPPD began tracking incidents at that time. Later in the 1970s, a small (three to four person) crime analysis unit was formed to keep track of crime trends. An important use of the information, according to Lieutenant Joe Polski who heads the Records/Evidence Unit today, was in "being able to get feedback to the community about crime in Saint Paul, and being able to look at where we were succeeding and where we needed to put resources."
Recruitment and Training
Recruitment of officers for SPPD during the late 1960s was made especially difficult because of the hostility and anger toward police that followed the civil rights movement, and the Democratic National Convention. Recalling his own role during this time, Larry McDonald reports being asked to recruit for SPPD:11 he helped to start what later become the Internship Program, traveling throughout the state and into the Dakotas and Iowa, going to small towns, to farms, churches, schools, and barbershops, posting handwritten notices, and asking about young men who might be interested in becoming police officers. McDonald would take young men around with him for a day, talk with them about policing, and try to get a sense of whether they might be good recruits. When potential candidates were identified (and he was lucky to find twelve in a year), thorough background investigations were conducted, psychological profiles were done, and families (parents, girlfriends) were brought in, interviewed, and prepared for entering and working with the Department as well. The Department's attitude was that it was forming a relationship with an entire family when it hired an officer. New recruits attended Demonstration School, a two-week period of programs, before actual training started, to make certain that they knew what was involved in becoming an officer, and were prepared. McDonald contends that this proved a highly successful strategy in recruiting officers who would stay with the Department for decades—such as John Sturner, recently retired Commander of Central Patrol District, and Don Winger, Commander of Eastern Patrol and an officer who started many innovative programs over the course of his career.
Recruitment of women and minorities played virtually no role as either a priority in, or even part of, Departmental hiring efforts at this time. From 1972-75, however, Saint Paul's Police Department was under a consent decree, ordered by the courts to hire one African American for every four new employees. Officers were not hired under the decree until 1975: by this time, the Department had lost approximately 50 officers through attrition, and new hiring had to make up for this decline.12 The decree was modified in 1977 to include women.13 Later in the decade, the new Asian population presented challenges that SPPD tried to meet by recruiting Hmong, Vietnamese, and other officers who were fluent in the languages, knowledgeable about the culture, and familiar with the Asian community.
During the late 1960s, the first training unit began compiling its own curriculum, gradually adding a field training component as well. Larry McDonald was part of this effort. Working within the Research Unit, the officers assigned to this task wrote their own lesson plans and brought in experienced SPPD officers to teach classes for recruits.
Early Initiatives: The Help-P Unit (1970-73) and Team Policing Pilot Project (1974-77)
While formal team policing would begin later in the decade in Saint Paul, it was grounded in two early experiences. Beginning in 1970, the H.E.L.P.-P. project, funded by LEAA and the City of Saint Paul, placed officers in four low-income public housing projects—Roosevelt, Mt. Airy, Dunedin, and McDonough—in an effort to improve police/citizen cooperation. Newly promoted Lieutenant Larry McDonald was asked to command the project, with Sergeant Dick Ekwall assisting. McDonald wanted only officers who volunteered for the project to participate, and took the unusual step of involving residents in the housing projects in interviewing officers before they were finally selected. He was determined that citizens would "buy in" from the beginning. A Citizen Participation Committee (which met monthly) was formed for each target area, with citizen representatives elected by community organizations for one-year terms. In addition, a Target Area Advisory Council, consisting of SPPD officers, social workers, and others assisting in the project, also operated. Community Relations Officers also worked with the project, along with University of Minnesota student interns, who assisted police in solving disputes in the areas, placing abandoned children, and dealing with domestic disturbances and runaway children.
The latitude given to the HELP-P team to innovate created very real tensions with the rest of the Department. One of the first changes then-Lieutenant McDonald made involved shift schedules: HELP-P officers were placed on a ten-hour shift to accommodate their work with citizens. While HELP-P officers "loved it," this created something of a rift with the rest of SPPD, which did not change its shift structure until much later. HELP-P officers also spent much of their time meeting with local citizens and attending community events, which sometimes required heavy reliance on backup from the rest of the Patrol Division to cover calls that could not be answered by HELP-P officers. Yet when non-HELP-P officers came into the area on a call, citizens in the project did not like it—they wanted HELP-P officers only, and not "strangers." (McDonald recalls that citizens were never timid in pointing out what was going right or wrong.) McDonald tried to reciprocate by having HELP-P officers respond outside the housing projects around the periphery of their areas when patrol officers couldn't handle all the calls coming in. But he never solved the problem of citizen responses. The HELP-P staff did focus on problem solving: working together, police and citizens addressed problems such as vandalism and burglary in schools located within the projects, paint-sniffing by young people, traffic problems, damage to Housing Redevelopment Authority property by teenage boys, and disputes among tenants. And responses to the project by police and citizens alike were highly favorable:14 when federal funding ended for the project, the City took it on.
While HELP-P was operating, several drawbacks were perceived in the "tour" mode of the larger SPPD organization. First, it was believed that the supervisory span of control was too large: typically, one lieutenant would have responsibility for the entire city for his tour. Second, many crime and police-related problems had geographic rather than temporal patterns, and required service delivery that corresponded accordingly. Finally, in the tour mode responsibility and accountability remained concentrated at the top: since most police problems occurred across tours, and innovative strategies could only take place at the deputy chief level, it was difficult to assign responsibility at lower levels.15 In 1973, an external report requested by Mayor Cohen following the revision of the City Charter (which placed the Police Department under the administrative control of the mayor rather than the City Council) was harshly critical of this form of policing, concluding that there was a serious lack of accountability within SPPD's Patrol Division.16 An internal SPPD study of Patrol Division management concurred, and proposed geographical decentralization as a means for improvement. In 1975 a Departmental committee appointed to formulate specific recommendations issued a report citing neighborhood team policing "as the best means of solving both the accountability problem and the need to integrate a variety of community oriented programs within the Department."17
In the meantime, SPPD's positive experience with HELP-P, the need to improve relations with the Hispanic community in Saint Paul, and the desire to address accountability problems in "tour mode" policing led Deputy Chief McCutcheon to initiate a team policing experiment on the West Side early in 1974. The setting, a well-defined community across the Mississippi River from the downtown Saint Paul area, made it an ideal location for carrying out the pilot project and measuring outcomes. Although staff saw it as a somewhat isolated location (they would have preferred a residential or commercial area), the downtown airport provided a base for the project. It was commanded by (then) Lieutenant Ed Fitzgerald. Several officers got their first taste of team or community policing here—among them Commander (then sergeant) Don Winger. The team policing project built directly on the work of the HELP-P project in Dunedin housing project, located in the area, and generated many of the same positive responses from citizens and police alike.
With this track record of two experiments in "team policing," City officials decided to explore the possibility of developing a citywide team policing program for Saint Paul. (At the same time, the City itself, as part of a Citywide Citizen Participation Process, established seventeen districts, with a district council for each. The councils were set up to plan and advise the City on physical, economic, and social development within the districts, identify neighborhood needs, initiate community programs, recruit volunteers, and inform residents through local newsletters and community events.) Within SPPD, a Decentralization Committee was formed that met from February through June of 1976: it interviewed representatives of various SPPD units that would be affected by decentralization, visited other cities where team policing had already begun, and drafted a set of recommendations for implementing team policing in the City. The major recommendations proposed by the Committee centered on expanding the responsibilities of the Patrol Division by giving it some investigative capacity, and complete responsibility for community relations. Specific proposals included: breaking the Patrol Division into a north and south sector, each to be commanded by a deputy chief; and dividing each sector up into four teams. Every team was to be commanded by a lieutenant, who would be responsible for all patrol operations, and to have eight sergeants (five for street supervision and three to be involved in investigations).
Policing in the team mode was expected to correct the organizational shortcomings of "tour" mode policing: each lieutenant would be responsible for the delivery of police services on a twenty-four hour basis within his geographical area, as well as longer range program planning. Accountability and responsibility were also expected to increase at lower levels: sergeants and patrol officers would become more involved in planning and goal setting. Police service delivery was to be improved as well by increasing and improving police-citizen interaction, with police better informed about the needs of particular communities, and citizens more knowledgeable about their own responsibilities in deterring crime generally and in lessening their own chances of becoming crime victims.
While SPPD's Decentralization Committee was working on its report, a further boost to team policing prospects came with mayoral candidate Latimer's pledge that team policing would be implemented if he were elected. In addition, the director of the Governor's Commission on Crime Prevention and Control became interested in team policing in Saint Paul, which "opened the prospects for federal funding which would permit St. Paul to implement a more ambitious program than could be done with its own resources."18 With the Mayor, the Governor's Commission, and SPPD firmly and mutually committed, the preparations that would make citywide team policing a reality began during the summer of 1976.
10 "Team Policing in St. Paul, Minnesota, An Evaluation of Two Years Implementation," November 5, 1979, p.4. Draft, prepared by the Team Police Evaluation Unit, SPPD.
11 Civil Service was unable to come up with a pool of candidates at this time.
12 In 1975, 12 African Americans were hired: 11 male and 1 female; in 1977, 12 more were hired, again 11 male and 1 female. In 1978 and 1979, two minorities were hired each year; however, they were not African Americans.
13 During this same period POST standards were being raised in Minnesota: according to some in the Department, the raising of these standards also set back attempts to hire minorities.
14 LEAA, Department of Justice, Discretionary Grant Progress Report—Housing Environmental Liaison Police Program (HELP-P), Grant No. 72-DF-05-0023, Interim Report, October 1, 1973 (covering the period 3-15-72 to 3-14-73). A copy of this document is available in the SPPD Library.
15 Ibid., p. 6. All of these problems were later identified in the original Team Policing grant application, written in 1976. See "St. Paul Neighborhood Team Policing," Grant Application No. G-25-77, August 16, 1976, 00. 3-3b.
16 Public Administration Service, Chicago, Illinois, "Individual Technical Assistance Report," August 24, 1973. Cited in "Team Policing in St. Paul, Minnesota, An Evaluation of Two Years Implementation," November 5, 1979, p. 11. Draft, prepared by the Team Police Evaluation Unit, SPPD.
17 "Team Policing in St. Paul," p. 11-12, citing St. Paul Police Department, "Patrol Accountability Study," April 1, 1975, and St. Paul Police Department, "Reorganization Study," September 30, 1975.
18 "Team Policing in St. Paul, Minnesota, An Evaluation of Two Years Implementation," November 5, 1979. Draft, prepared by the Team Police Evaluation Unit, SPPD.
