By Mara H. Gottfried
Pioneer Press
ST. PAUL, Minn. — After St. Paul’s Non-Fatal Shooting Unit was started, the solve rate nearly doubled and the number of such shootings dropped 40 percent. Now, there’s a push to fund a statewide grant program.
The Minnesota House of Representatives passed a bill Monday that includes $1 million in funding to solve nonfatal shootings. A companion version has advanced in the Senate , but awaits a final vote.
“Safer communities start with solving crimes, and solving nonfatal shootings will help remove illegal guns and dangerous individuals off our streets,” Ramsey County Attorney John Choi said Thursday. “Our success in St. Paul and Ramsey County shows this focus pays dividends in less violence, fewer homicides and safer neighborhoods. It’s a model that can and should be replicated statewide and across the nation.”
Started in St. Paul in January 2024, the Non-Fatal Shooting Unit treats those shootings as “failed homicides” with the kind of intensive investigations that usually are reserved for homicides. The solve rate in St. Paul went from 39 percent in 2023 to 71 percent last year.
Nonfatal shootings in St. Paul decreased from 122 in 2023 to 73 last year, according to police department data.
Downtown shooting shows need, officials say
With the legislature adjourning May 18 , Choi, St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her and Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher were among those speaking at a press conference Thursday at the Capitol in support of legislation for statewide funding.
“Earlier this week we saw a devastating event (in) downtown St. Paul,” Her said of a shooting Monday that injured two young men after a Metropolitan State University commencement ceremony at the St. Paul RiverCentre. The university said after the shooting they had no information indicating it involved students or employees.
Officers and the St. Paul Non-Fatal Shooting Unit “responded quickly and we are working on getting to the bottom of how we” interrupt the cycle of violence, Her said. “How we respond and show up means that we learn and build from these incidents to prevent them from happening again.”
Most non-fatal shootings “have some gang component to them,” Fletcher said. “Let’s just cut to the chase: There’s a gang or a rival group or some dissing that’s going on.” He said that was the case in Monday’s shooting and he said it involved the Somali community.
There have been 94 nonfatal shootings in the Somali community, plus 10 fatal shootings, over the past two years in St. Paul , Minneapolis and 20 suburbs in the metro, Fletcher said.
“You can imagine how difficult it is for some of these small cities to actually have a robust investigation of a nonfatal shooting,” he said. “These cases can be solved if you have the resources to go interview witnesses, develop relationships with witnesses, run all the evidence up the chain. … Had we solved some of the earlier cases, had we been able to identify some of the suspects from the earlier cases, we would then be able to prevent cases like what happened at the RiverCentre the other day.”
Police continue to investigate Monday’s shooting.
St. Paul shifted investigators
St. Paul police did not hire additional personnel to start the Non-Fatal Shooting Unit, they pulled investigators from other units, said Assistant Chief Paul Ford . They partnered with the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office, who now has a prosecutor designated to work on charging nonfatal shootings.
“There’s a huge prevention piece in this as well,” Ford said. The police department started a unit “in cooperation with the (city) Office of Neighborhood Safety where we did a lot of intervention work with young people involved in group and gang and gun violence. … Engagement, intervention, prevention and enforcement … they’re all pieces of one big puzzle to help reduce gun violence in our community.”
But without funding from the legislature in 2023 to help pay for the program, “we would not be here today,” Ford said. “The money paid for overtime for our investigators to come in after hours like a homicide investigator would. We didn’t do that before. It pays for our Forensic Services Unit to come in and they process the crime scene in real time.”
Previously, a nonfatal shooting case would have been assigned to an investigator the following morning.
With $1 million proposed for law enforcement in the state for nonfatal shooting investigations, how far would that funding go?
“There are needs throughout the state and next session will be a budget session, so I think if we could get … this funding started, get a process started, get people thinking about this and then we can come back to the legislature and build on that,” Choi said.
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