19 October 2023
The St. Paul shootings of four female teens, one fatally, meant going through “the worst in our community,” but also seeing signs of hope, said Mayor Melvin Carter on Wednesday.
“I saw the way our police officers comforted the family who had lost their daughter,” he said. “I got a chance to be hopeful as I saw at midnight our staff members in our Office of Neighborhood Safety consoling the family” waiting for their injured daughter to come out of surgery.
“Those things aren’t just nice to have,” Carter continued. “Those things are ensuring that people can be stable, that people can be safe and that people can move on and continue to build forward.”
Carter spoke during a media briefing Wednesday with Gov. Tim Walz about $300 million in local public safety aid throughout the state, which was approved in the last legislative session and Walz signed into law. St. Paul received $13.6 million from the state that includes planned funding for the police and fire departments, city attorney’s office and Office of Neighborhood Safety.
The funding is being used in initiatives meant not just to better and more quickly respond to incidents of gun violence, the rise of which were a nationwide trend, but also preventative measures.
“We made a historic investment in public safety,” Walz said. The idea was to put funding into the hands of local officials “who know best, … who can tackle the individual and unique issues of each community,” the governor said.
Walz also said there have been “a horrific number of incidents directed at law enforcement,” including Pope County Deputy Josh Owens who was fatally shot in April and five law enforcement officers who were shot and wounded in Benton County last week.
Crime declining, but work not done
After a rise in crime in recent years, there’s been a downward trend.
In Minnesota through the end of September, incidents of crimes against people were down 5% and the decline in St. Paul was similar, both compared with the same nine-month period in 2022, according to Minnesota Bureau Criminal of Apprehension data from local law enforcement agencies. But Walz said they “aren’t resting on that” and aren’t going to “take a couple months of data and claim victory.”
In St. Paul, carjacking incidents are down 50 percent and non-fatal shootings declined 40 percent compared with the same time period last year. Reports of shots fired without injuries are also down 40 percent, which represents 774 less calls year-to-date, said Police Chief Axel Henry.
There have been 28 homicides in St. Paul this year; there were 29 at this time last year. Monica Joy Holley, an eighth-grader at Highland Park Middle School in St. Paul, was a bystander when she was killed in an Oct. 4 shooting on the Greater East Side, her family has said.
Injured in the shooting were 13- and 15-year-old girls and a 19-year-old woman. Police continue to investigate and have not made arrests.
The events of that night were “unacceptable,” Carter said. “We don’t stand by and watch that happen, but we also know that gunfire is like a pandemic — that violence creates more violence, that people who have … survived gun violence are more likely statistically speaking to be either a victim or a shooter in the future.”
That’s why it’s also important to have the city’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and community-based organizations at hospitals and in neighborhoods “to ensure families and our surrounding community are supported,” Carter said.
Brooke Blakey, Office of Neighborhood Safety director, said some of the state funding will be allocated for working with community organizations and social workers to focus on the roots of crime, such as homelessness and drug addiction.
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