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When you call 911 about gunfire in St. Paul, these are the officers who respond

Saint Paul Pioneer Press - 10/23/2017

Oct. 23--It's 8:30 p.m. on a Tuesday and two St. Paul police gang officers are about to pull into an alley to talk with a group of young men after reports of gunshots in the neighborhood.

Suddenly, the officers hear "Boom, boom, boom, boom!" It is the sound of more shots reverberating -- about 30 in all.

"It was close enough to be uncomfortable," says Officer Isaac Palmer. The gunfire leads to chaos: People are running, while Palmer and his partner scramble to check whether anyone was hurt and search for suspects.

No one was injured, but the shots left damage and fear in their wake.

Bullets pierced four windows of the nearby West Minnehaha Recreation Center, which was closed for the night. A few kids were playing on the rec center's basketball court, on the other side of the building from the gunfire.

What happened that June night this summer -- reports of shots being fired, and bystanders shaken and angry, but not hurt -- was not just a warm-weather phenomenon. The numbers skyrocketed in the first four months of this year: Reports of firearm discharges were up 75 percent in the city, compared with the same period in 2016.

St. Paul police say their intensive focus on gun violence has yielded results, even through busy summer months.

While shots-fired reports are still up significantly from last year, Police Chief Todd Axtell said the "silver lining" is a declining rate. But, he adds, "it's not good enough." As of mid-October, reports of shots fired were up 37 percent, compared with the same period in 2016.

In 2013 and 2014, St. Paul saw an average of about two reports of gunshots each day, according to a Pioneer Press analysis. That rose to three reports a day last year and was more than four reports per day, on average, through mid-September of this year.

"This has got to stop; it has just got to stop," said Dee Walsh, a longtime North End resident whose 10-year-old grandson had to take cover on her home's floor when people in two vehicles shot at each other at 10:15 a.m. on a Monday in August. "It's sad to me that I own my home and I am being forced out of here for safety reasons. I'm not allowed to enjoy my yard or my garden. We can't sit outside and have barbecue with the neighbors anymore."

Many police officers, community members and local leaders say law enforcement cannot arrest their way out of the problem. They believe root causes need to be addressed: It's too easy for people to get guns. They also see many people, especially the young, as too willing to use guns to settle slights or because they think it will earn them respect on the streets.

Various groups work with young people to try to divert them from violence. But it's still officers who are called upon to respond when shots are fired. In the beginning of this year, after seeing an uptick in gun crime last year, Axtell moved staff around to be able to add five officers and a sergeant to the gang and gun unit.

This is a behind-the-scenes look at some of their work.

OUT ON THE STREETS

On a late afternoon in June, St. Paul gang officers Isaac Palmer and Rob Lokhorst hit the streets in an unmarked sport-utility vehicle, but they're not undercover -- they're wearing shirts that say "Police" and many people recognize the SUV as a police vehicle.

Palmer and Lokhorst say they don't mind being noticed because they believe their presence can be a deterrent. The officers fully expect that people will take cellphone pictures of them and post them to social media.

Unlike patrol officers, St. Paul's gang officers are not dispatched from call-to-call. They are out on the streets on most days, working from the late afternoon until the early morning. They're looking for signs of trouble and people who have outstanding arrest warrants, along with listening to six police-radio channels.

Palmer calls it "extreme multitasking."

The officers' cellphones also beep and buzz relentlessly with calls and text alerts. It's other officers, along with contacts from the streets and neighborhoods, providing information or asking questions. The gang officers have a knack for remembering vehicles, names and faces.

Any time the gang officers hear dispatches about gang activity or guns -- whether it's an armed robbery, a report of shots fired, or a shooting that injures someone -- they head that way.

They assist patrol officers with canvassing neighborhoods for evidence and witnesses, and they can often spend more time on the scene than a patrol officer because they're not rushing off to the next emergency call.

Before the additional gang officers were added, most of the investigative legwork for overnight shots-fired cases -- with no one injured -- would have begun the next day when gang and gun unit investigators started their workday.

With the officers added to the unit, that work can begin immediately, said St. Paul Police Cmdr. John Bandemer, who oversees the gang and gun unit.

"Many of the people who are shot can be identified by the gang investigators and the street cops who are out there," Bandemer said. "They're very good at knowing who these people are, so they can see a victim and they know this is a gang-related shooting or it has some kind of gang ties to it or, based on the suspect description, have an idea about who they're looking for."

INFORMATION SHARING

Since the spring, the gang and gun unit has led meetings several times a week with representatives from St. Paul's three patrol districts, plus every investigative unit and Metro Transit police. The goal is to improve information sharing about gun crimes, Bandemer said.

They talk about suspects they are looking for and cases they're building. The officers also review maps of crime statistics, focusing on which areas were busiest for robberies, aggravated assaults and shots-fired and which were improving.

Crime overall was up nearly 12 percent in St. Paul through mid-October compared with the same period in 2016. There were 17 homicides vs. 16 at this time last year. An additional two homicides occurred over the weekend.

Aggravated assaults, which include shootings that injure people, were up almost 4 percent year-over-year. As of Oct. 3, 129 people had been injured by gunfire in St. Paul.

VIOLENT CRIME DOWN FROM 20 YEARS AGO, BUT SHOTS FIRED UP

The statistics about shots-fired include only reports about firearm discharges with no one injured. St. Paul police are able to substantiate about 25 to 30 percent of shots-fired calls, while there isn't evidence in the other cases to prove or disprove whether shots were fired.

Bandemer encourages people to call 911 it if they think they hear shots fired, even if they're not sure whether what they heard were gunshots. The reports help officers determine whether they were authentic shots and to narrow down where they might have occurred, he said.

Reports of shots fired are significantly higher than they were in the late 1990s. Between 1997 and 1999, police received an average of 387 reports of shots fired in St. Paul per year, according to department statistics. In the first ten-and-a half months of this year, there were 1,142 reports of shots fired, compared with 832 during the same time period last year.

Dee Walsh, the North End resident whose grandson is afraid to spend time at her home after hearing gunshots outside, said some people have stopped reporting every instance of shots fired "because it's become the normal for us."

Walsh said she regularly goes to police-community meetings, and she met with the mayor and police chief last month about her concerns. She's long thought that the North End needs to once again have a police station, so the area would be saturated with officers.

Looking back two decades, the rate of violent crime in St. Paul last year was down 29 percent. For every 1,000 residents, there were 6.5 violent crimes last year and 9.1 in 1996, according to the FBI.

But officers say they're encountering people with guns more than ever.

When Dave Titus started as a patrol officer in St. Paul in 1994, he worked an overnight shift that included Frogtown and Cathedral Hill. Titus, president of the St. Paul Police Federation, recalls that he rarely heard gunshots while on patrol.

"Now, cops working the street hear them all the time as they're patrolling," Titus said. "The increase is astronomical. ... How are these kids getting the guns? Why are they out in the middle of the night firing weapons? We can't police our way out of this. We can hire more cops and protect our city to a greater degree, which is something we need to do, but we need to find out what is causing this."

VIOLENCE OFTEN FOLLOWS 'DISRESPECT'

The "why" behind shots-fired is difficult to pinpoint.

"We know it's a small percentage of the population committing a majority of the gun crimes," Bandemer said.

Friction between gang members or young people often comes down to perceived slights, and retaliation for past shootings or homicides, Bandemer said. St. Paul gang members make music videos that taunt members of other gangs and they also antagonize each other over social media, according to police.

"When disrespect is shown, it tends to quickly go to the violence," Bandemer said. "And it's not a fight on the football field after school. It's gunshots."

The subject of gun violence comes up regularly during small-group discussions at GRIP, a program at the Neighborhood House in St. Paul that works with young people in the juvenile justice system or at risk of becoming involved, said Joanna Lowry, GRIP coordinator.

Many of the teens in the program have been victims of violence or witnessed it, Lowry said. During a group discussion, a teen recently confided that someone shot at her the day before. She was scared, and they talked through ways to cope through the traumatic experience, Lowry said.

As GRIP strives to help individuals, Lowry said youth violence is indicative of larger structural problems in a community.

"It is no coincidence that the same urban communities, largely communities of color, that suffer from a lack of resources in regards to housing, jobs, education and youth programs and are most affected by over-policing and mass incarceration, are also struggling with community violence," she said.

Sasha Cotton, who is Minneapolis' youth violence prevention coordinator, said she sees programs like GRIP and others doing good work with youth in St. Paul, but she notes there is not a dedicated youth violence prevention coordinator in St. Paul or a strategic plan such as Minneapolis has.

Cotton is employed by the Minneapolis Health Department and takes a public health, problem-solving approach to preventing youth violence. She said she would like St. Paul to also have a "place for all that work to be connected and coalesce."

St. Paul-Ramsey County Public Health has staff that works on healthy youth development -- violence prevention in general is part of the work they do, though they don't have programming specific to gun violence, according to a Ramsey County spokesman.

25 'VIOLENT OFFENDERS' ARRESTED

St. Paul police often encounter victims, witnesses and suspects who don't want to talk to officers, which they say makes solving gun cases difficult. But the officers don't readily give up, said Officer Palmer. Someone who doesn't talk to police at the time of a shooting, may decide to later, especially to an officer he previously met and has rapport with.

"Sometimes it takes a little perspective," Palmer said. "When I talk to them, I say, 'How old is your kid? Two? What if your baby was in the backseat when that shooting happened?'"

St. Paul police also launched a new program this summer with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to make it easier for people to provide confidential tips about gun crimes. They've been publicizing that people can report information by calling 888-ATF-GUNS or 651-266-5755, through a smartphone app called Report It or online at ReportIt.com.

Between April and September, police arrested about 25 of the "most violent offenders who use guns" in St. Paul, according to Bandemer and Axtell.

Cotton, who is also a St. Paul resident and vice president of the African-American Leadership Council, said community members are looking for the right balance -- they want to be safe in their neighborhoods, though they do not want that to happen only through a heavy law enforcement presence.

"No one in the community wants the violence, right?" Cotton said. "On the other hand, no one wants to be profiled and no one wants to be over-policed just simply because of where they live or because of the ethnic community that they come from. We look for ... an approach of police not just arbitrarily going after every young black man because he could be a suspected gang member, but seeing that the time has been taken to investigate who the active players are."

Bandemer said officers work on identifying which gang members are the "shooters" and which are the "shot callers," and focus their investigations on them.

The gang and gun unit's work is not all about arrests, Bandemer said. They also try to steer people, especially younger juveniles, away from gangs. Gang officers meet with parents and school staff, and go on outings with at-risk youth.

WHERE THE GUNSHOTS ARE REPORTED

The Frogtown neighborhood where Officers Palmer and Ryan Anderson heard the gunshots while patrolling last June has had more than its share of shots fired reports.

On the Tuesday night in question, St. Paul police received reports regarding eight incidents of shots fired between 8:25 p.m. and 11:50 p.m., with half of them occurring in the area bounded by University and Minnehaha Avenues, and Victoria Street and Western Avenue.

Between 2013 and mid-September 2017, the blocks closer to Western Avenue had 148 reports of shots fired and the area closer to Victoria Street had 135 reports, making them the biggest and third-biggest hot spots for such reports. The area with the second-most reports of shots fired during that time -- 143 -- is between Case and Maryland avenues, and Edgerton and Arcade streets.

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman said recently that shots-fired also were a persistent problem when he lived in Frogtown in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

"There's nothing more frightening than having your child in your arms and hearing gunshots go off and I've lived that, so I know exactly the kind of fear that folks live in when they hear that," the mayor said.

Coleman now lives on St. Paul'sWest Side and said he still hears gunshots, but not as frequently. He believes the increase in shots fired is not a problem unique to St. Paul.

"It's a reflection that there's too many people who have easy access to illegal guns and they're too willing to use them," said Coleman, who added that St. Paul police have been "working very, very hard to deal with this." But he said Congress needs to "put basic restrictions on who has access to these weapons."

St. Paul police have recovered about 450 guns this year, though not all were associated with crimes, Bandemer said.

When guns are found, the police department has been able to reduce the amount of time it takes to analyze whether incidents are connected, Bandemer said.

St. Paul police previously had the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension test-fire their recovered guns, but the department brought the work in-house over the summer. The test fires produce shell casings, and police use a federal database to determine whether the casings' unique markings are a match to any casings found at crime scenes.

IN THE CROSSFIRE

Most shots-fired reports in St. Paul come between 8 p.m. and 2 a.m. and are at their lowest around 9 a.m., the Pioneer Press analysis found. Eighty-eight percent of all the reports are during the 12 hours between 4 p.m. and 4 a.m.

Just after 10:30 p.m. one Tuesday night in July, Anderson and Palmer head to a report of shots fired in the North End.

At Albemarle and Wayzata streets, officers confirm that bullets struck a parked car and a house. And a family was in the crossfire.

George Jackson, who was holding his 1-year-old daughter as he and his family hung out on their front porch, is infuriated at two strangers who were apparently shooting at each other. Jackson's 10-year-old son was in the kitchen when a bullet came through a window in that room.

Jackson describes 30 gunshots to the officers, his words spilling out and punctuated by cursing, but the officers understand. They're fathers, too.

"I ran in the (expletive) house," Jackson said. "My son was in the kitchen. The bullet went there, ricocheted and hit the (expletive) floor."

While officers continue talking with Jackson and others look for shell casings, Palmer strides down the block. There have been no reports of anyone injured in the shooting, but he shines a flashlight on the sidewalk and street to check for any sign of blood.

LaShonda Hester, Jackson's partner, asks officers whether St. Paul has ShotSpotter technology to detect gunshots. They tell her the city does not.

The police department researched the ShotSpotter system previously, but does not have immediate plans to do so again, Bandemer said. He said it's an expensive investment and the department has already committed to other technology.

Before the officers leave, they spend more time with Jackson.

"Those shots could have hit my son; it could have hit any one of us, man," Jackson said. "That could have hit my daughter!"

Palmer nods his head and tells Jackson, "Unacceptable, unacceptable. I totally understand."

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