Regionalization: Ramsey County November 2013 Voiceover: Beat Intro 00:00 This is the Beat—a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing topics facing our nation. Debra McCullough 00:08 Hello. I’m Debra McCullough from the COPS Office and with me today is Sheriff Matt Bostrom of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office. The Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office was established in 1849 as Minnesota’s first law enforcement agency. In 2010, Matt Bostrom was elected sheriff and since then has led an effort to regionalize many of the public safety services provided in Ramsey County. Sheriff Bostrom joins us now to talk about the organizational transformation of the Sheriff’s Office and the impact that regionalization of shared services has had on public safety and the citizens of Ramsey County. Good afternoon Sheriff Bostrom. Matt Bostrom 00:54 Good afternoon Debra. I’m glad to be with you. Debra 00:57 Could you give us an overview of the regional shared services approach Ramsey County has taken to providing services to its citizens? What were some of the driving factors that led to this new approach? Matt 01:12 Maybe I’ll answer that in somewhat reverse order. The kind of driving forces I have to, maybe, give a little bit of my background. Much of my law enforcement career was spent with the St. Paul Police Department, which is the largest police department in Ramsey County. After working in a variety of ranks and then ultimately working on some very large projects, including the Republican National Convention as well as helping to respond to the 35W bridge collapse over in our sister city, Minneapolis, and then a series of floods that came through on the Mississippi River and downtown St. Paul, it became clear to me that the future of good governance, particularly in terms of public safety, really was going to take a regional approach. Even though St. Paul was the largest police department, it didn’t take much even for a department of our size to be overrun, which brought me to thinking, “Alright, if I’m going to remain in public safety, where might I be able to contribute the most?” The opportunity to serve as sheriff presented itself. Now the concepts that I learned working for a capital city, I’ve been able to take those to a broader level as we look throughout, not just the other 16 cities in the country but also just work with our surrounding sheriffs. Think in terms of not competing, but what does it mean to collaborate first. I really do believe that leads to what I think is a key charge for an effective public servant, and that is to be able to provide effective and efficient services. Debra 02:52 Now during the 2013 National Sheriff’s Association conference, I understand you spoke about how the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office guided the regionalization effort by three core functions. Could you talk about these core functions, what they are, and how they guided the regionalization effort? Matt 03:14 I think sometimes people have a good understanding of what it means to be a police chief. They have some understanding of what a sheriff’s responsibility is. What I’ve discovered is that any time that you have an opportunity to lead an organization, you need to focus on your core mission. In a sheriff’s case, yes we do law enforcement duty, just like a police department. We serve seven communities in our county that we are the 911 response; we are the police department. That’s one of our core responsibilities, to be a police department. The second case has to do with what we do to support the court’s environment and the two lanes within the courts department, our courts division I call it. That has to do with the traditional bailiff and court security and so on. The other side of that is all of the tens of thousands of civil process papers and other types of document s—legal documents—that need to be delivered on behalf of the courts and the legal system. So we have patrol, we have courts, and finally we have our detention services where we do all the pre-sentence detention for any of the arrestees from our county. In a nutshell, those are our statutory mandates. It’s not about coming up with a strategic plan to understand why we exist; those are the reasons we exist. Whatever decision making we make, first and foremost, we never deviate from our core responsibilities. What that does is it informs the things we must do versus the things that, perhaps, we might like to do. So we’re able to prioritize how we allocate our staff, how we allocate our resources, our equipment, and our training in accordance with that. I’ll add another aspect to it. Clarity with your core functions is key, but also understanding what your core values are. We have a strong focus on what our core values as an agency are. What we do is our core function. How we do it is contained in our values. Debra 05:23 How has regionalization affected the capabilities of Ramsey County in providing policing and other public safety services? Matt 05:34 I think that we’ve been able to meet that good governance standard. At least that’s what we aspired to do. I wonder if it might be helpful to, perhaps, provide a few illustrations of what we’ve been working on and what we’ve been able to accomplish and also the trajectory of where we hope to be in the future. Debra 05:53 That would be great. Matt 05:54 So one of the areas that we were able to implement is the criminal justice coordinating council. There’s other metropolitan areas that have those organizations but in our case we really took the evidence- based decision-making model and used that to inform the development of our criminal justice coordinating council. I think one of the outcomes from that is that the council asked the sheriff’s office to actually be the chair of that committee. It’s interesting in the criminal justice environment. A sheriff and a police chief oftentimes have some aspects, but when you look at courts, corrections, prosecution, and others, they have even more invested in this. It was interesting that the collaboration model seemed to work, so much so that they were willing to allow us to even take a greater level of leadership. There’s an aspect of trust that seems to be affecting our capabilities. Second, we have been working with our area sheriffs, the ones that work around us. At any given time, what each sheriff’s department is they’re moving prisoners. It could be from one end of the state to the other to make their court appearances. What we’ve discovered is that some of our deputies, literally on our interstates and highways, are passing each other, going from one to the other. We got to thinking that maybe it makes a bit more sense—and I don’t want to oversimplify this or over-complicate it—but what we have now is a transportation consortium, an agreement, a joint powers agreement, between our sheriffs, that we work it just like air traffic control. If each one of us makes a determination as to where we need to be transporting prisoners and we start to look at—are some of them going to be coming from Ramsey County, and would they be willing to pick up our prisoner at the same time we might be picking up someone that’s in custody for another county, and thereby reducing a whole lot of fleet time, fleet management, and other types of things. We’ve just gotten a lot smarter about how we do this. Fewer miles on the road are good for everybody. So we’ve initiated that. We also went countywide with a blueprint for safety. It was an idea that had been implemented in the city of St. Paul. We were able to take now that countywide. All 17 cities in Ramsey County now, as we approach domestic violence, we are literally on the same sheet of music. We look at it from the time of initial call to investigation to whether it’s going to be prosecuted by a city attorney or going to a county prosecutor. We’ve been able to take that countywide. So there’s some unique things that have been benefitted us. Maybe another area would be a strategic approach to resources where we’re pursuing grant applications as opposed to doing it just as one agency, as a sheriff’s department, it’s been helpful to our other chiefs that have smaller communities in our county. They’ve asked us to take the lead and if they could partner. An example would be auto- theft reduction grants that our state has awarded to use license-plate recognition and other crime- prevention tools to reduce theft from autos as well as auto theft itself and then to proceed in the prosecution of those things. We became the facilitator for those grants and then, ultimately by doing that and showing that partnership, we were awarded those grants. Once again, collaborating instead of competing with the other chiefs in the county has provided a great deal of success. I can think of several other things that we’ve done but those are just a few that I’d like to highlight that were simple things—things that we were probably going to do on our own—but all we did was ask that next question: “If we went in this direction, would this support our chiefs and would this support our prosecutors in the courts if we did this?” When they said yes, that allowed us to move forward with a great deal of support. We were able to implement these things at a very quick pace. Debra 09:58 Those are some great examples. Were there any challenges that you experienced along the way? Matt 10:06 Well I think that for any sheriff there oftentimes are some challenges because my office is an elected position. I think that it’s important for me to show that whatever we’re doing isn’t because of politics, it’s because of public safety and it’s in the best interest of our community. Overcoming that challenge so that people have a greater degree of understanding and trust as to why I do what I do and why I believe the Sheriff’s Department exists in the statute. I think it’s important for me to function as a department director or as a chief if you want to call it that, that happens to get elected once every four years, as opposed to a politician who is working on election for four years until the next cycle. The more that we practice departmental discipline, the more that we function as a public safety agency as opposed to a political agency, the level of trust in our capacity to support our partners in what I believe is the best way, doing right as we’re allowed to see right on a daily basis. Other people have used that term of a rising tide. If we have a bay of boats floating, if that bay floats higher, if the tide comes in, then all the boats float higher. That’s really what I believe the office of the sheriff can do to overcome some of the challenges that we sometimes face. As soon as they see that we’re not competing or throwing the weight of the office around, they see us as a true collaborative partner, we’re able to really accelerate some of these positive changes. Debra 11:45 Before we close, what other recommendations do you have for agencies who might be considering following a similar path, regionalizing shared services? Matt 11:57 My recommendations would be to have clarity with what your agency’s core responsibilities are. Police departments have core responsibilities. Sheriff’s departments have core responsibilities. We owe it to our community to be able to fulfill those core responsibilities. They have a right to expect that. It’s really why we took our oath of office; we said we were going to do those things. Understanding those things and then making that part of your mission so that we deliver our mission with great clarity. One of the things that we’ve been trying to do here, and it would be a recommendation for other agencies, and that is (1) make sure you’re clear about your department mission and it points to the core values. But more than that, each one of your divisions needs to have a mission and each unit within that division has to have a mission. All of your employees, whether they see their boss or not, whether they’re in a car or at a post or investigating a crime, they know that if they completed their work, they completed their unit mission. As the unit mission is completed, they’re achieving the division mission. As the division mission is achieved, the department mission is achieved. Every day our department mission is achieved Ramsey County is a safer place to live and work. So, have focus. Then, the other side to achieving mission is to make sure that we do it with the best in community policing values. What I mean by that is the tenets that we follow are making sure that we practice the best in community policing. We don’t solve other people’s crimes for them, we don’t try to do that, we work with them so that we take care of things in the immediate term, the medium term, and the long term. That takes true community dialogue and working together. (2) We make sure that we collaborate with other law-enforcement agencies and never compete. (3) We make sure that we are responsible with the taxpayers’ dollar so that we’re accountable and that they know that their dollars are well spent, and that they’re being used to keep them safe at the highest professional means possible. (4) We want to be an agency that’s characterized by being diverse and that we are reflective of the community that we serve. When you walk through the door, you see someone that looks like you at the entry level, the mid-level, and at the top of the organization. (5) Make sure that we work smart and we produce quality products by use of technology. Not just going after the next shiny object, whatever that fancy technology is. We want to make sure that we’re doing it intentionally and that by design it helps the community, it helps our department, and therefore it makes this a better place. Finally, one of our values is to make sure that we do community building. One of the ways that we seek to do that is by coming alongside kids and catching them doing things right and knowing that, because we have positions of authority, any time we catch kids not doing things wrong, which, that’s our responsibility to do, we take it the other way, the positive side to that, is find ways to make sure that we’re reinforcing positive things in the lives of youth. By doing those things, it’s amazing what happens. People start to see us as a professional agency. Figuratively maybe we’re the cavalry. We become the public safety cavalry and support so many different community aspects, whether it’s with other police departments, other public safety or criminal justice agencies. That is what we desire to be. That has been the focus of our department and that’s where we’re trying to continue to build our momentum and capacity to do even more. Debra 15:33 Sheriff Bostrom, we really appreciate you sharing your experience with our audience. Thank you so much for your time. Matt 15:41 It’s my pleasure. Glad to be able to spend some time with you today. Voiceover: Beat Exit 15:45 The Beat was brought to you by the United States Department of Justice, COPS Office. The COPS Office helps to keep our nation’s communities safe by giving grants to law enforcement agencies, developing community policing publications, developing partnerships, and solving problems. Voiceover: Disclaimer 16:01 The opinions contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or polices of the U.S. Department of Justice. References to specific agencies, companies, products, or services should not be considered an endorsement by the authors or the U.S. Department of Justice. Rather, the references are illustrations to supplement discussion of the issues.