'There to bridge that gap:' St. Cloud police hire Somali community liaison at COP House

ST. CLOUD ― Sitting at a table in the St. Cloud Community OutPost Thursday morning, Hakima Siyad was eager to talk about her new role with the St. Cloud Police Department. Siyad is the department's new community liaison, and it's her job to connect with families and bridge cultural, religious and language gaps to help police better serve Somali residents in south St. Cloud.

Siyad started two months ago and is in charge of day-to-day operations at the COP House, as well as community programming and partnerships with local organizations.

Her role comes as a big help to the department as it works to improve its community policing efforts, said Sgt. Ryan Sayre, a supervisor of the Community Response Team that works out of the COP House and specializes in community engagement as well as violent offender apprehension and drug cases.

St. Cloud's COP House, built in 2017, is the first of its kind in the state. At 600-13th St. S., the refurbished house serves as a community center and the home base to a handful of police officers, social service and health care workers. Since its inception, studies show the OutPost has positively impacted the safety and wellbeing of local residents.

In March Sen. Amy Klobuchar announced she had secured $475,000 in federal funding for another COP House in St. Cloud, and Waite Park has talked about building one too, to help youth and seniors.

More:Waite Park police discuss potential community outpost

Building community from the ground up

Since its inception, the COP House has had success reaching neighborhood kids through its plethora of sports and activity programming, as well as homework help, but Sayre said officers had struggled connecting with Somali parents in the neighborhood.

"[The kids would] come to the house every day. They'd go to all of our events, our soccer events, fishing events, you name it. But the parents would kind of stand alongside and wave and say 'hi,' and we couldn't communicate with them to really see, you know, what they first of all thought of us, and to offer them some of the services that the house has," he said. "So we had a great relationship with the kids, and not really a relationship at all with a lot of the adults. And it was primarily because we couldn't speak to them."

Last year when the COP House started a community garden with the intent to connect with parents and other Somali elders in the neighborhood, it was hard to talk with them in English and explain that they could use the garden and take home the produce, Sayre said.

"That's when I really noticed, all right, we need something to combat this, to figure this out, to really break down those barriers to really find out what the neighborhood is and what the needs are," he said.

More:St. Cloud COP House garden provides produce in food desert in its first year

Sayre said he did some research and couldn't find any other police departments, school districts or private businesses that had a similar community liaison position they could replicate, "so we kind of hand to build it from the ground level, kind of like we did the [COP] house."

After approval from his commander and the assistant chief of police, Sayre formed the position, interviewed 13 applicants and hired Siyad to be the department's connecting arm into the community.

'I'm there to bridge that gap'

Siyad moved to St. Cloud from Minneapolis to attend school at St. Cloud State University and switched her major to criminal justice and psychology after working as a receptionist at the police department, "because I really liked what they were doing."

"When they told me to help with the garden poster, I could see that struggle they had with community here. They don't have a lot of Somali people working at the PD," she said. "So when the position came out, I was like, 'I'm almost done with school. I love this. I love the community engagement part of the police department. I don't have plans to become an officer at this time. So I was like, this is the perfect thing for me.' I really ran with it."

Siyad spent her first month as a liaison knocking on doors in the neighborhood, introducing herself and getting to know the community and what issues residents are having. She said neighbors have been excited to see a Somali person speaking to them who was able to get their message across.

Last spring the police department spent two weeks implementing their Safe Streets Initiative, focusing heavily on crime prevention in the area. Officers and Siyad met with local landlords, tenants, property owners and residents to discuss issues like trespassing, drug use and safety concerns in order to work together to address those issues and stabilize the neighborhood.

More:Service with a smile: St. Cloud Optimist Club strengthens community

Since those meetings and more police presence, Sayre said there hasn't been a shooting or robbery in the area, and said business owners and residents have given positive feedback. Siyad said she worked to inform the community what was going on, because there was a lot of confusion initially.

Before coming to Minnesota, Siyad grew up in Botswana and lived in a refugee camp with her family for 14 years before emigrating to Oregon around 2014.

"I was the only one who kind of spoke English in my family. So it was always a lot when it comes to immigration papers, filling out forms and all that stuff," she said. "I'm the second oldest. I have nine other siblings … and my dad passed away in Botswana when we lived there. So I kind of had to slip into a parental role, help raise my siblings, since my mom had to go and work. It's been a lot, figuring out college on my own, figuring out basically everything on my own and moving out of home before I got married, which was a huge thing to my mom. It's been a lot, but I'm kind of glad I paved the way for my younger siblings … even though I didn't have someone to pave the way for me."

Siyad said many Somali families tend to avoid the police because there's a lot of fear and misinformation. Many don't know the police can be a resource for them, and some parents don't understand why their children would want to go away on week-long trips for sports tournaments or outdoor recreation trips offered by the COP House, she said.

"Just being there for them, I can [be a] link to the police department," Siyad said. "Even though they don't speak the language, I'm there to bridge that gap. And that's really important to me."

Already she's helped the police department understand cultural and religious differences too. Sayre said there was a kid who wasn't showing up to basketball practice so often that he was about to kick him off the team. Then Siyad explained to Sayre he was taking a Duksi class to learn Arabic and memorize the Quran.

Sayre said the COP House wants to offer more resources like transportation services to neighborhood kids, which is often a financial barrier, with the goal of organizing more programming in the future.

Some Muslim parents do not allow their kids to participate in co-ed sports, and Siyad said the COP House will be exploring ways for more girls to get involved in sports as well as single-gender swimming lessons. Last January Siyad helped take some of the kids sledding for the first time and Sayre took six boys fishing and camping in the Boundary Waters earlier this month.

"We love to pair experiences with police officers, right? Because if you can pair an experience with a police officer, you will always remember that positive interaction. And for a lot of the kids that we deal with, there's a lot of negative stuff with police just from their own family … or that they see on TV," Sayre said. "And that's important for a police officer too, because we do all these community engagement things but we also do all the crime, drug intervention [and] violent offender apprehensions, so it's a really nice mix for officer wellbeing. You're not always looking at the bad stuff that happened over and over and over and over again. Because I think that it for sure beats you down after a while when you get salty and every day [you're] dealing with the negatives, and the positives start to look bleaker and bleaker when you're thinking like that."

Becca Most is a cities reporter with the St. Cloud Times. Reach her at 320-241-8213 or bmost@stcloudtimes.com. Follow her on Twitter at @becca_most. 

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This article originally appeared on St. Cloud Times: New Somali community liaison bridges gaps at St. Cloud COP House