National COPS Evaluation of St. Paul: 2000
A New Approach to the Community
With ACOP and FORCE in place, during the last half of 1992, after taking office, Chief Finney looked for other ways to immediately step up community policing efforts.31 One of his first acts was to assign desk officers to each of the City's four team houses, making them available seven days a week: residents could now go to an officer right in their own neighborhood if they needed to speak with someone from SPPD. Additionally, tele-serve (crime reports by phone) was decentralized to allow for team office staffing.
But Finney would also reach out to another part of the community: early in his administration, the Chief was strolling downtown, and stopped in and asked business owners what they thought of police service. Bill Buth (of BOMA) recalls meeting him casually one day: "all of a sudden I get a tap on the shoulder (in the skyway) and I turn around . . . and said 'Corky, how are you? What are you doing?' He said, 'I was in the neighborhood yesterday, and I'm going to be up here tomorrow—I need to get to know my people.' I said, 'Officers?' He said, 'No. My people—the people that I'm going to serve.'" Finney walked in and out of shops, sometimes in uniform, sometimes not. Businesspersons gave him suggestions—one area of downtown needed a beat officer (and he added one). No police administrator had asked for these opinions before, and the business community liked it. Finney then assigned two inspectors to survey business people in all areas of the city: in three weeks 600 businesses were contacted downtown to ask what the police could do for them. When BOMA started a security group, with security officers meeting once a month to discuss common problems and concerns, representatives of SPPD began meeting with them as part of this effort.
Chief Finney took another important step when, some time later, two youths shot at each other in Town Square Park, in the skyway. Trouble had started several days earlier; then when the two saw each other by accident in the skyway, "all hell broke loose." Bill Buth recalls: "I heard about it, and I don't have any qualms about calling the station—these are my officers...." By the next morning, a meeting was scheduled for Chief Finney and several of his top management staff to meet with BOMA. "The words that went out were wild, and we wanted...to make sure that we knew and understood exactly what the facts were." Chief Finney called and said "This is what we're going to do. Are you okay with that?" He filled Bill in, and "what he tried to say was, 'while we can't be everywhere, and you can't expect us to stop these random acts of violence, we will respond with all the force that we've got in order to assure you of the fact that we've done everything in our power. And in fact we have.'"
For Chief Finney, it was crucial that he hear the concerns of business owners and residents alike, so that police responses could be developed before the concerns became larger issues. Business was not the only recipient of his overtures. The chief therefore assigned Chris Nelson, in Inspections, to network with advocacy organizations in the community. Nelson recalls, "it was at that point that I got involved with gay and lesbian organizations…. They had some concerns. [Earlier]…we were involved for many years with what we call now the Ramsey County St. Paul Police Department Mental Health round table…. We deal with mental health issues that impact upon police and mental health professionals…. Really, our major focus…was to reach out and work with these groups and be a conduit back into the Police Department."
Local Government: A Change in Mayors (1994)
In 1994, Republican Mayor Norm Coleman took office after defeating former Mayor Scheibel. Originally from New York, Coleman had previously worked in the Minnesota Attorney General's Office, as Solicitor General, and a policy advisor to the Attorney General on criminal matters. He helped start the DARE program in the state, and wrote much of the early legislation dealing with the prosecution of child abuse and violence against women. Although Mayor Coleman and Chief Finney differed in their political affiliations and views, their power bases and sources of support within the community often overlapped—Finney calls himself a "conservative Democrat," and Coleman a "liberal Republican," but the Chief also says he is fiscally conservative and liberal when it comes to diversity issues. Both have support from the business community.
Since 1994, Mayor Coleman has continued to come through with more police for the Department—adding funding for ten officers in 1995, eleven in 1996, and another fourteen in 1997. He holds strong views on where policing priorities should lie, but describes his actions as setting out a direction, rather than micro-managing SPPD:
I want tough, rigorous enforcement on gang members…. I want to see more police-community interaction. I want the police out on the beat. I want them in the street. I want to see aggressive enforcement. I work with the County Attorney very closely to deal with issues such as truancy, graffiti, that kind of stuff. So, what I do is…I am involved by very clearly and publicly setting a tone…. When mayors start running police organizations, they get in big trouble. It becomes political decision-making rather than good policy. I can't tell you that I agree with every decision of my chief. I don't have to. But I have confidence in his leadership and I will support him. I let the chief manage.
31 Many of these are documented in SPPD's 1992 Annual Report. This and subsequent SPPD Annual Reports include basic data on organization (charts), demographics of employees, general fund budget allocation (by use, by division), medals of valor/merit/commendation honorees, letters of recommendation, promotions, retirements, in memory of…, chief's award, SPPD Honor Roll, arrest data (Part I and II by offense, age), incident data, calls for service total/per patrol officer, and Saint Paul demographics.
