Rosario: The search is on for St. Paul and Minneapolis police chiefs. Will they come from inside or out?

Rubén Rosario, Pioneer Press
·7 min read
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Job postings coming soon: Wanted on both sides of the river — a police chief who is a visionary, transformative, a change agent who possesses media-savvy skills, institutes or maintains proactive crime-control preventive strategies and improves upon community and race relations while at the same time earns the respect and buy-in from the rank and file. Inquire within …

Good luck finding a person who checks all those boxes.

But that’s who Minneapolis and St. Paul are now simultaneously searching for as the state’s two largest cities seek to fill police chief vacancies in the midst of ongoing misconduct probes, a recent surge in violent crime as well as low officer morale that has seen hundreds retire early or walk away from the job.

“Mayors and city managers know this is the most important selection they can make,” said Chuck Wexler, the longtime executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. The Washington, D.C., think tank has helped cities from Los Angeles to Boston find and select police chief finalists. It is currently involved with the police chief searches in Boston and Chattanooga, Tenn., among other municipalities.

“There is no other appointment that will be more relevant than this appointment,” Wexler added, noting that the old and mostly insular ways of picking chiefs no longer apply.

There is now more transparency, community input and also political pressure in choosing the right person, partly because “every police chief in America is one bad cop stop from creating chaos in their community.”

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it and I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” Wexler said. “The old playbook does not work.”

Both of our Twin Cities are months away from making their final selections. Minneapolis hired the Public Sector Search & Consulting Inc. firm earlier this year to conduct a national search. It also held on April 18 the first in a series of community listening sessions to explain the search process and field questions.

St. Paul, whose current chief, Todd Axtell, will stay on until June 1, may also select a national search firm shortly. It is also weeding through more than 100 applications from citizens who want to serve on an examination committee that will ultimately select five finalists. It is at that point when finalists will take part in public forums. Like his counterpart across the river, Mayor Melvin Carter will make the final selection, pending approval by the St. Paul City Council.

“Few decisions are of greater consequence than selecting a Chief of Police,” Carter said in an email. “We will allow the time necessary to engage our community, to perform our due diligence, and to select the most fitting candidate to lead our department through the next six years.”

One intriguing question is which city this go-around will more seriously consider giving the job to an outsider rather than an insider. If I were a betting man, I would put money on an outsider getting the nod in the Mill City to succeed former Chief Medaria Arradondo, who left in January. Why? The city has looked elsewhere before and, according to police sources, a surprising number of Minneapolis police supervisors expressed support if not a desire for an outsider at a virtual meeting held weeks ago by search firm consultants.

St. Paul historically resembles a relay-race team, confident and content with reaching back and passing the baton of leadership to another member from the police brass ranks. The last five chiefs in the past 42 years, for example, have all been insiders. Not so in Minneapolis, which has had three of its seven chiefs in the same time period — Tony Bouza, Robert Olson and William McManus — come from the outside.

St. Paul City Council President Amy Brendmoen and fellow council member Jane Prince believe the next police chief will once again come from in-house because the SPPD culture, reputation and ways of doing things are different from those in Minneapolis.

“The chief” — Axtell — “has done a really good job of mentoring, training and supporting rising stars in the police department,” Brendmoen explained. “I think there’s a strong possibility that the candidate is internal here because we are a strong police department.

“I was asked before if we were competing with Minneapolis because we were both putting out the search at the same time, I said no,” she added. “I think Minneapolis needs a fixer.”

Added Prince: “While I can’t speak to pre-1990, I can say that Chief (William) Finney and his successors — John Harrington, Thomas Smith and Todd Axtell — have created a police culture in St. Paul that is the envy of every department in the country.

“There may be arguments to be made for why a city would want to bring in an outside chief,” she said. “I recall when (Minneapolis) Mayor Don Fraser hired Chief Tony Bouza from the Bronx, needing a strong hand to take control of a department that back then as now had serious problems. He was hired to fix what was broken.”

Sometimes, even insiders acknowledge that a new face and approach are what’s needed for a troubled department. Wexler said he was taken aback by what he heard at a meeting his firm organized with Los Angeles Police Department union officials and members during its search for a new chief in the early 2000s.

“They said anyone but someone from inside the department,” he recalled. “That shocked me because usually when you meet with the unions, they usually say they don’t want any outsiders.” The city of angels ended up selecting a high-profile outsider — William Bratton.

Bratton, who had served as NYPD commissioner in the mid-1990s, had a reputation as a cop’s cop but also a progressive thinker who implemented the “broken windows” theory of policing as well as CompStat.

The system of computer crime-mapping and holding police commanders at the borough, division and precinct level accountable for crime trends at weekly meetings is credited by Bratton and others with driving down felony crimes by 39 percent and homicides by half during the little more than two years that Bratton served as chief.

He was let go after a well-publicized tiff with “notoriously thin skinned” Mayor Rudy Giuliani, as Bratton describes him in his book, “The Profession: A Memoir of Community, Race and the Arc of Policing in America” (Penguin Press, 2021).

Bratton would be brought back in 2013 and served three years as New York’s top cop under the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio.

“Bratton came in and he was really transformative,” Wexler said. “Cops and people think it’s a zero-sum game — that if you work with the community, you turn off the cops and the reverse. But in L.A., he saw the advantage of working in both arenas.”

Wexler strongly believes that an internal candidate also can be transformative and successful.

Minneapolis, he said, presents more of a challenge because a new chief will not only have to contend with the residue of controversial incidents like the murder of George Floyd but also the likelihood of a federally mandated consent decree that would force the department under court order to make recommended changes. This week, the Minnesota Department of Human Rights concluded in a 72-page report that there is probable cause to believe that the city and its police department have engaged “in a pattern or practice of race discrimination” in at least the past 10 years.

“Generally, you ask: Are things going well?” Wexler said. “And if they are, the tendency is to stay within. And if you have a department where things are not necessarily going well or you fundamentally want to make change or you are dramatically trying to change the culture, then your search is more extensive.”

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