The St. Paul Police Department needs 103 more employees, mostly officers, a staffing study released Monday concludes.
The City Council requested the study and St. Paul Police Cmdr. Jack Serier, who was previously the Ramsey County sheriff, spent last year analyzing the way the department operates.
The study finds challenges in:
- Responding to 911 calls quickly. There were 17,000 more 911 calls (up nearly 32 percent) between 2013 and 2018, while the department’s authorized strength increased by 16 officers (less than 3 percent) during that time.
- Keeping up with increasingly complex investigations due to changes in technology, specifically the availability of video footage. The technology can aid investigations, but also makes them more complicated because of the amount of time needed to comb through hours of videos.
- An organizational structure that hasn’t evolved fast enough to meet increasing caseloads, especially in the homicide, sex crimes and family violence units.
The idea of adding new officers to the police department is not a new one, but it hasn’t received support at City Hall.
Overall, Serier recommends adding 33 investigative sergeants “to meet the challenging workloads” and 33 officers to reduce response time for in-progress crimes. The other staffing increases would be for supervisors and civilians, who would take on some administrative work being done by officers.
Mayor Melvin Carter said Monday that the police department’s “budget leads all other city departments and authorizes the largest number of officers St. Paul has ever employed.” The 2020 general fund budget for the police department is just over $105 million.
“These recommendations will inform future investments as we balance competing needs across the city,” Carter said in a statement.
ADDING INVESTIGATORS
The study outlines suggestions for reorganizing investigative units. For example, the department’s Homicide and Robbery unit not only investigates those crimes, but also serious assaults, shootings, kidnapping and other major crimes.
“Right now we are asking our homicide investigators to investigate hundreds of cases a year,” said Serier, who has been a law enforcement officer for 29 years and holds a doctorate in leadership, policy and administration.
Serier recommends refocusing the homicide unit so investigators only handle death investigations. He suggests a separate unit for cold case homicides, another to investigate robberies and other kinds of crimes, and also one to investigate assaults and shootings.
There were 30 homicides in St. Paul last year, the most in more than 25 years, though violent crime overall is at its lowest level in more than two decades. The city previously averaged 17 homicides annually.
In most years, St. Paul police make arrests in more than 90 percent of homicides with the average time to close a homicide case taking one year, Serier found. Investigators work long hours and usually exceed the unit’s overtime budget by at least 50 percent — an amount that could fund two or more additional investigative sergeants.
QUICKER RESPONSE TO 911 CALLS
To respond to 911 calls more quickly, the study suggests adding three patrol officers to each shift in the city’s three districts and also continuing with changes to dispatching.
For the most urgent 911 calls — a serious crime in progress or other emergency — officers are supposed to be dispatched within 30 seconds, according to department policy.
There has been an increasing number of calls taking longer because officers were busy on other incidents — it happened 60 percent more in 2018 than in 2013, Serier found. There were 5,000 instances in a one-year period ending in June, which equates to about 7 percent of calls. Officers still responded, but not as quickly as called for in department policy.
The police department has been working with the 911 center and changed the shifts of some officers to speed up responses, the study noted.
DISCUSSION OF STUDY PLANNED
The study was completed on Dec. 8, days before the council approved the 2020 budget on Dec. 11.
City Council President Amy Brendmoen said that “was too late to be part of the 2020 budget,” which Carter proposed in August and was being discussed before then. Brendmoen said Monday she’s planning to hear more about the study and have the council discuss its suggestions.
Police Chief Todd Axtell said the department will use it as a guide.
“I look forward to further analyzing the findings and working with Mayor Carter, the City Council and our community to make an already great police department even better, and this study is a great tool,” Axtell said in a statement Monday.
In 2018, Axtell told the City Council he wanted to hire about 50 more officers over the course of two years.
That year, the council approved adding nine officers for 2019. Last month, the council reduced the department’s authorized strength by five to 630 for this year without laying off officers.
