The meeting was brief and all business, but it was positive.

Just two months into her new position as community policing coordinator, Officer Emily Burt-McGregor is still feeling her way through the job. Her goal, however, is clear: to create positive interactions with Maplewood residents now, in order to hopefully prevent negative intervention from other officers later.

What does that look like?

Earlier this month it looked like an officer and a property manager sitting down for a chat about lease options regarding drug use in an apartment complex. The manager wishes the police would respond faster to calls. The officers show up, but can do nothing about the smell of weed in the hallway thats long-since dissipated.

The department would like the property manager to use her lease options to evict drug users when it becomes known to her. Roles and responsibilities are defined. Concerns noted and action steps discussed.

For Grace Fielder, property manager at Maple Ponds Homes, the personal visit is meaningful because it shows the department is taking her concerns seriously.

Its definitely nice to know that I have a specific person to go to when things do arise, she said.

Burt-McGregors position is just one piece of a multi-pronged approach the Maplewood Police Department has been using to change its culture from strictly law enforcement to more of a community-policing approach. Their efforts are getting noticed.

In September, the department was honored with the St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerces Leaders in Local Government award. Also, Ramsey County is poised to embed a social worker into the department in January, the first in the county outside of St. Paul, to help with mental health calls.

Maplewood was one of the first cities that approached us and wanted to begin the conversation, said Ann Barry, Ramsey County director of social services. We felt they were ready.

Following the race riots of the 1960s and the upheaval of the Vietnam War protests, police departments in the United States began to reassess their goals and philosophies.

Community policing became the buzzwords of the 1970s through the present, a style which focuses on controlling underlying causes of disorder in a neighborhood. Departments worked on increasing opportunities for positive contact with residents to improve trust and help officers become familiar with residents and their concerns.

In the Twin Cities and surrounding suburbs, police departments have also had to learn to work with an influx of non-English-speaking immigrants that began in the 1950s.

And with an increase of drug use, among other factors, mental health calls have increased substantially.

The Maplewood Police Department has confronted all of these challenges head-on, hoping to adapt to their changing community while remaining tough on crime.

What were trying to do is bring about a cultural change within the police department so that our staff understands whos in our community, understands who our residents are and the different cultures that are here, explained Scott Nadeau, Maplewoods public safety director. Its really a great two-way exchange where our community gets to know our officers and sees them as people, not just as a uniform that shows up when bad things happen.

The police shooting of Philando Castile in Falcon Heights in 2016 had a profound effect on Maplewood. It played into the hiring of Nadeau in 2017, who had built a reputation for himself in Columbia Heights as a chief who wanted to do more than just law enforcement.

I think that he is a visionary, said Maplewood Mayor Marylee Abrams. I think what he is doing is more transformative than what I would typically characterize as being, you know, police reform. Reforming sounds like you kind of take everything thats old and just remix it. And I dont think that thats what were doing at all.

So, what are they doing?

Nadeau has attacked the problem on three fronts: reshaping the departments staff to better reflect the citys population, increasing police-community outreach and reaching out for help from Ramsey County regarding mental health calls.

Since Nadeau started, there has been a 125 percent increase in hiring of non-traditional police officer candidates. Thirteen of the last 18 police hires have been women and/or people of color.

How did he do this? Four ways: intentional recruitment and marketing, changing the hiring process to allow non-traditional applicants, allowing community members to craft interview questions, and using entry-level and volunteer positions to support the department.

He created a recruiting committee that seeks out candidates who fit their police departments goals. These members go to job fairs, visit colleges and work on getting the word out about Maplewoods priorities.

We are looking for community-centric people that dont see their jobs necessarily as just law enforcement, Nadeau said. The majority of what we do is assisting people in crisis. Its disputes, its non-enforcement activities. We are trying to find the people that have that big-picture view of what policing is and the importance of going out and solving problems in the community in a way that doesnt always include enforcement.

He created an online application process that asks more open-ended questions in order to get a better sense of the candidates skill set, philosophy and mindset.

The city and department developed the multicultural advisory committee, which advises on hiring and allows community members to ask interview questions.

Nadeau also used alternative hiring methods to fill entry-level paid and volunteer positions. One of those is Pathways to Policing, a program that allows a candidate with a four-year degree to change careers to become a police officer. For recruits selected for the program, the city covers the cost of law enforcement in-class and tactical training and pays the recruit up to 70 percent of a starting officers salary.

Maplewood has brought on three candidates this way, one of them being Officer Burt-McGregor who used to work for the U.S. Postal Service.

It was a total game changer because it pays you not only for your education, but it pays you while youre in school, she said. I could go to school, I dont have to go deeper into debt and Im still getting an income.

The department also utilizes the community service officer position, which is a paid, part-time post, and the reserve program, which is on a volunteer basis, as another way to job shadow officers.

When Nadeau took over the department, officers were participating in a few dozen hours of community outreach per year. In 2019, that number increased to 2,000 hours. Every public safety employee, which includes police, fire and EMS, is required to participate in at least 15 hours of outreach per year, as part of their work.

Opportunities in 2019 included nearly a dozen events at apartments, shelter and mobile home communities, monthly programs with senior citizens to educate them on financial scams and other safety issues, and youth events.

Maplewood police hosts annual junior high police academies for students, mentors through Big Brothers Big Sisters programs, and participates in bicycle and helmet giveaways at community events.

Alesia Metry, a retired Maplewood officer who has been hired back on a part-time basis to help with community outreach events, says its not just the community that benefits, but the officers as well.

When I was a patrol officer, I loved community outreach, she said, telling a story about a student with behavioral problems she met with once a week and saw marked improvement. It helps us see these are real people these are moms, these are kids, these are great people.

In 2019, the Maplewood Police Department responded to 461 calls for a person in crisis, 86 calls for suicides in progress andhandled 698 calls where the primary cause for law enforcement presence was mental illness.

To try to get in front of this, the department has a mental health outreach team in which police, firefighters and paramedics work together to identify people in the community who are at risk and then try to work with them by making regular visits.

Added to that could be a full-time employee from the Ramsey County Health Department embedded in the police department to assist on mental health calls. The county board is expected to vote on it by the end of the year.

This will be someone trained in both mental health and social work who will work with law enforcement and the person, the family and everyone on the scene, explained Barry, the countys social services director. That could look like de-escalation. It could look like connecting someone to services. They will work side by side with law enforcement to help them understand mental health issues, what it looks like and how to help.

Nadeau hopes to use the hire as a single point of contact for officers struggling to navigate mental health resources.

No one has all of the resources youd ever want, Nadeau said. But we knew that working together, we could leverage resources and professions and talents in a way that we can be more productive. And now to have this problem-solving ability through the social worker, I think it will really help us to potentially get to that next level of being able to solve this.

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Maplewood PD says their efforts to reshape policing culture starts with who they hire - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press