National COPS Evaluation of St. Paul: 2000
Policing Saint Paul in 1997
The City Attorney's Office
Current City Attorney Peg Birk came to the job in February of 1997 from civil practice. Reports from attorneys in her Office and SPPD suggest that a positive and constructive working relationship has been maintained since Chief Finney took office. There are a number of areas of mutual interest, in which SPPD officers and assistant City Attorneys are collaborating closely: first, domestic violence unit attorneys are working with the domestic violence project in Eastern District, helping to train officers in videotaping and gathering evidence from domestic abuse victims. Second, the Office has sent attorneys to be housed and work with some special SPPD units—first with FORCE—and attorneys from screening/charging rotate at the Homicide Unit at SPPD headquarters. The goal is to make these attorneys available to many officers who might have legal questions, and to expand opportunities for communication between the attorneys and police officers. Assistant city attorneys who prosecute misdemeanor cases, including domestic violence, are required by their supervisor to ride with police regularly; they have also benefited from having SPPD's Field Referral Unit officers present in their office:
…we are very dependent on them, and having them close by is wonderful because they answer a lot of police questions that the attorneys have as well—how do we get this information, what does this record mean? They have access to all of the police records as well, we get criminal histories from them, if we need a victim picked up for a jury trial they call and get the squad. It has just been crucial having that link, and it has really opened up the communication between the police department and our office by working together...it has broken down a lot of the stereotypes we have of each other…we have become trusting of each other. It is also very effective to have someone in the Field Referral Unit go to [domestic violence] training…and talk about why it is so important for [officers]…to put certain information in the reports…it is not just some attorney sitting up in an ivory tower "who does not know what we do out on the street"—it makes a big difference.
The positive relationship between police and city attorneys seems to facilitate problem solving rather than casting blame: when a number of citations were dismissed by assistant city attorneys in 1997, and SPPD did not feel this was justified, one of the deputy chiefs met with an assistant city attorney. It soon became clear that one of the problems was an overload of work for that office. So the Chief offered a sergeant for three months to work with the city attorneys, helping to clear up some of the backlog. The deputy chief also asked that tags that were going to be dismissed be sent to him for review so that he could identify the problem, pass the documents along to the districts where the officers and sergeants involved could correct the problem, and improve the quality of police work.
The Ramsey County Attorney's Office
Current County Attorney, Susan Gaertner, a Democrat, is serving her first term, and is up for re-election in 1998. Gaertner is generally reputed to have broken from the more traditional reactive focus of her predecessors, and to be both innovative in her own right and sympathetic to SPPD's community policing efforts. In two areas of common interest the County Attorney's Office and SPPD have formed an active and ongoing alliance: first, assistant county attorney Patrick Hest works with the FORCE Unit to close down, or abate nuisances on, problem properties. Under the state nuisance abatement statute, two nuisance events in a year (two drug violations, two warrants where drugs are recovered) are sufficient grounds for commencing a suit to abate the nuisance through loss of use of the property for a year, even though the owner must continue to pay taxes. Another joint effort is the Gun Suppression Program, which began in 1995.
