Axel Henry becomes St. Paul police chief at challenging time: ‘No place I’d rather be than here right now.’

Mara H. Gottfried, Pioneer Press
Updated ·10 min read
Axel Henry becomes St. Paul police chief at challenging time: ‘No place I’d rather be than here right now.’

Behind Axel Henry’s new desk at St. Paul police headquarters is a large photo of Martin Luther King Jr. at his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Nearby is a framed picture of Henry as a toddler with his father — then a Macalester College English professor — holding him in a hammock in their St. Paul backyard.

Among the books on a shelf is one written by a former U.S. Navy Seal called “Extreme Ownership.”

When the St. Paul City Council unanimously approved Henry as the police department’s new leader Wednesday, the chief’s office officially became his. Henry, a St. Paul officer since 1998 who rose through the department’s ranks, recently explained some of the personal mementos around the office — all of which provide glimpses into what’s important to him and who he is.

The book is one Henry values because he said it fits into his leadership philosophy of “owning everything you do, taking ownership for all problems” and not casting blame for failures.

The photo is his favorite picture of his dad, Harley Henry. “If I was going to get put on a desert island and they said, ‘You can have one picture,’ it would probably be that picture,” he said. When his parents split up when Henry was about 11, his father took on the responsibility of raising him and his two sisters. His mother struggled with alcohol use and mental illness, Henry said. She’s now deceased.

As for the large photo of MLK? When Henry’s parents were together, his dad was Episcopalian and his mom was atheist, “so in our house, Martin Luther King Jr. was the closest thing to a religious figure we had,” Henry said. “… That’s always been the backdrop of everything we did when we were kids, the ideals of Dr. Martin Luther King.”

Priorities: Addressing gun violence, recruiting officers

Mayor Melvin Carter announced his selection of Henry as the department’s new police chief earlier this month, after a community-based examining committee forwarded five finalists to him. The previous chief, Todd Axtell, retired in June when his six-year term ended.

Henry was sworn in Wednesday and officially starts his new role Saturday.

Henry becomes police chief at a time — both locally and nationally — of high gun violence and a shortage of officers. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, officers have been retiring or leaving the profession.

During the police chief application process, Henry said people kept asking him, “Why would you even want to be a chief right now?”

“I told them, ‘There’s no place I’d rather be than here right now,” he said, adding that he wants to face the challenges head on.

He said his priorities are addressing gun violence, recruiting and retaining officers, and “expanding from community engagement to real community connections.”

Henry wants to continue using data to direct the department’s resources to where gun crimes are happening and who is involved.

“What we’ve historically done is flood neighborhoods with police, and that impacts neighborhoods in ways we don’t want,” Henry said. “We want to be really, really intentional about how we approach the gun violence problem.”

In his most recent job as commander of the department’s narcotics and human trafficking unit, he also had a role in overseeing a police department team that’s part of a wide-ranging $10 million effort to reduce violence in St. Paul, which was announced over the summer and is called Project Peace.

Thinking of the police department and city’s work in terms of medals, Henry said gold is preventing crime, silver is intervening in the lives of people going down dangerous paths and providing them resources and a different direction, and bronze is enforcement.

Path to law enforcement

Henry will oversee a proposed department budget of nearly $131 million next year. He’s had budgeting experience from his administrative roles in the police department. And he majored in business administration and accounting at the University of St. Thomas.

He grew up in St. Paul’s Macalester-Groveland neighborhood for most of his life and graduated from the city’s Central Senior High School in 1987.

When he was 16, Henry started working for St. Paul Parks and Recreation at Municipal Stadium (which was later called Midway Stadium and was the old home of the St. Paul Saints).

“He stood out even then — he was always motivated and outgoing,” said Dan Long, who was Henry’s supervisor at Parks and Rec.

Henry continued working for Parks and Rec in college and the experiences made him realize, “I wanted to do something where I had to use my body and my brain. I wasn’t going to be happy sitting behind a desk my whole career,” he said.

Long, who is a few years older than Henry, became a Burnsville police officer. When Henry rode along with him in his squad car for a night, it helped him make his decision to go into law enforcement.

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Henry became a Roseville police officer in 1995 and then was hired in his hometown. He said his favorite job at the St. Paul police department so far was as a patrol officer — “you’re out in the public, you actually get to do the real work.”

As Henry moved into leadership roles, officers have wanted to work for him because “he’s fair and he treats the officers like they’re the backbone of the department,” said Sgt. Bob Jerue, Henry’s long-time patrol partner. He also views Henry as a person with compassion.

One Christmas Eve, when they patrolled together, they rushed to a report of a baby not breathing. Henry, who knew that Jerue had been a dad of a 4-month-old who died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, stopped Jerue at the door. He told his fellow officer not to go inside and that he’d handle it. “He saved me from that trauma,” Jerue said.

Leadership style

When Henry was a sergeant and the department was rolling out the Blueprint for Safety — a coordinated response to domestic violence — he told administrators he thought there were better ways to present the information to patrol officers.

“They were talking about basically saying, ‘Here’s the new set of rules and there’s going to be consequences to you if you don’t follow them,'” Henry said. “I thought, ‘You’d be way better off if you got them to understand how important this was and they all believed in it.'” Ultimately, the department asked Henry to take charge of training officers in the Blueprint and he took the approach of getting buy-in from officers.

Then, when the department was preparing for officers to begin wearing body cameras, Henry was again asked to be the person to roll them out in the police department. Henry knew that some officers regarded the cameras as a message of, “We don’t trust you.”

Henry, 54, convened community meetings to hear what the public wanted to see included in body camera policy. He gathered officers throughout the police department to work on drafting the policy, and he said they ended up proposing strict measures.

Officers began to see that the cameras not only benefited the public, but also them, and those who’d been resistant to the cameras started asking Henry how soon they could get them.

Implementing the Blueprint and body cameras are examples of how Henry said he prefers to lead.

“When we explain the mission to people and we create believers, they will do the greatest work they can do,” he said.

It’s not about convincing people to go along with his ideas, but “he backs up what he says,” Jerue said. “If he tells you something, you know he’s going to work as hard as he can to make sure it happens.”

Jerue and Henry were in the same police department academy class, and his classmates selected Henry to be their president.

“Since I’ve known him, he’s been a leader,” Jerue said. Officers have asked Jerue through the years when Henry would apply to be chief.

Community leaders were also asking Henry to pursue the chief job, including Pastor Joseph Webb IV of The Way Church in the West Seventh neighborhood. Webb told Henry why he wanted him to apply: “You understand all walks of lives and that’s valuable.”

Henry regularly attends The Way’s weekly men’s group — a place “where there’s no conversation off limits with the right vocabulary,” Webb said.

Many of the people who go to men’s group are Black and a large number have spent time in prison. Conversations with Henry have left them “with a completely different outlook of the police,” Webb said.

How his ideas mesh with the mayor’s

Henry says if he approached any group of officers and asked, “Why did you want to go into law enforcement?,” they’d respond, “I want to help people.”

“What’s going to help us have the strongest workforce is getting our workers back to that, reminding them or reinforcing that basic principle,” Henry said.

Those ideas fit into Mayor Carter’s focus on “community first public safety.”

“Our community members have entrusted us with a really big and expansive vision on what public safety means in St. Paul — they’ve told us loud and clear” that public safety goes beyond officers “chasing 911 calls around,” Carter said after the City Council approved Henry. He said Henry has exemplified in his career that public safety needs to be proactive and “in partnership with community members.”

Having officers available to respond to emergencies means using “more appropriate responders for each situation who can best assist those in need,” a community commission that Carter convened wrote in a report, and such work is underway or getting off the ground.

Among various response teams is a group coordinated by the St. Paul fire department — which has emergency medical responders — that has been responding to some emergency calls for people who are dealing with mental health crisis, addiction, or homelessness.

Carter’s new Office of Neighborhood Safety is coordinating the work of various departments and agencies, and is focusing on violence prevention.

His tattoos tell stories

Henry has lived in the Little Bohemia neighborhood off St. Paul’s West Seventh Street for about nine years. He had dreamt of buying an old firehouse and converting it into his home, but when that didn’t work out he decided to buy an empty lot and design his own home. He read books on modern architecture and thought, “I could design a big rectangle,” which is what he says he did.

“At the end of the day, I wanted to invest in this city that’s invested so much in me,” Henry said. “I realized that the Parks and Rec experience had turned into a contact that led me into a career that I love.”

He and his life partner, Mikeya Griffin, live in the home. They have two adult children.

When Pastor Webb first saw Henry out of his uniform — his arms covered in tattoos and wearing Nike Air Jordans — he noted he didn’t look like any officer he’d ever met.

Henry said his tattoos have been “a huge connecting piece for people” who’ve approached to ask about his individual tattoos and whether they could work for the police department because they have tattoos.

The St. Paul department previously didn’t allow “sleeves” or full arm tattoos, but he was able to get more tattoos when the policy changed in more recent years.

He describes most of his tattoos as traditional, classic Japanese work, saying he’s been drawn to the Samurai culture.

His right arm features Kintaro, who Henry says was a character in Japanese folklore who fought for justice. His weapon was an axe, befitting Henry’s nickname of “Axe.”

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