With the Lord.

Safety committees order, roll call, please.

Vice Chair Coleman.

Here.

Johnson.

Joel.

Here.

Kim.

Yang.

Chairboy.

Here.

Six present.

One on their way.

So good morning, everyone.

I just want to say that this is the ninth public safety committee meeting.

I just want to say I appreciate everyone's participation, involvement and engagement, not only in the topics, but just really just ways that St.

Paul and our partners and our county has really been championed public safety.

Let's re-explore what the goals are of this committee because when we think about when this body was created, it was really dedicated to reviewing and developing and recommending, you know, policy, good policy that's informed, not by not only by data, but also by um live experience and our experts.

So we're going to be covering this month, um, gun violence intervention, and we have two partners here.

Excuse me, one partner being from the St.

Paul Police Department, and our other partner, uh, our community organization that we've partnered with before, Mom's Demand Action, the St.

Paul location.

And we're going to be reviewing areas of violence prevention, community first public safety, and how our partnering organizations have been engaging around gun violence intervention.

And we've heard a little bit of that last month with Sasha Cotton and Office of Neighborhood Safety.

So I'm just going to, oh, actually, I'll I'll turn it to Pierre to read into the record our first agenda item.

Item number one, SPPD, non-fatal shooting unit review.

So welcome.

We have Commander Nicole Peterson here, and she's going to be reviewing our non-fatal shooting unit.

Good morning, Council President, Council members.

Thank you very much for having me here.

I really appreciate it.

As we said, my name is Nicole Peterson.

I am a commander with our police department.

And I've been with our department for it's almost 24 years now, which is just crazy to think about.

Currently, I'm assigned to our non-fatal shooting unit.

I oversee that unit.

And actually, I was tasked about two and a half years ago with creating the unit.

So I've been with it through the inception, figuring out what has worked best for our unit and just coming, overcoming any difficulties that we may have had along the way.

So I um because of that, I'm able to give you a little bit of historical information about what the department looked like, how we investigated these crimes prior to the creation of our nonfatal shooting unit.

We started the unit in January 2024, and prior to that, these cases, they're aggravated assault cases where someone is actually struck by a bullet.

These cases were investigated by our homicide robbery unit.

Our homicide robbery unit falls underneath our major crimes division, and all of our units within that major crimes unit our division is really cleverly named.

So homicide robbery, you can probably figure out what they investigate.

Our family violence unit, you can probably figure out non-fatal shooting, you can figure out what we investigate.

The slight difference with homicide robbery is yes, they're investigating homicide cases, they're investigating robberies, but there's a lot more that they're looking at.

They're looking at kidnappings, they're looking at carjackings, any assault case from someone slapping another person all the way up to previously these non-fatal shooting cases.

So they were really tasked with really high priority cases that demanded a lot of attention.

If it was a homicide, these investigators would respond within an hour to begin that investigation.

That wasn't the case with these non-fatal shooting cases.

They would get assigned the cases the next morning, or if it happened on, let's say a Friday, they wouldn't start looking at the case a lot of times until that following Monday.

So there was information that was being lost, witnesses that maybe no longer wanted to be cooperative, same as the actual uh victims, that they no longer wanted to participate in the investigation.

And because of that, uh these investigators had a very heavy workload because of all the cases that they were looking at.

Um, so now why was the non-fatal shooting unit created?

Um, a lot of the factors that I just mentioned, but I'm sure maybe you've heard Chief Henry talk about conversations that he had with our prior mayor Carter about the clearance rate for our homicide unit with regards to homicides, they're usually in the upper 80s 90% clearance rate, and uh just last year they actually cleared 100% of all homicides that happened within St.

Paul.

And um Mayor Carter at the time asked Chief Henry, well, why are you able to do such a great job on clearing, you know, solving these homicide cases, but you're not doing as good of a job on solving the non-fatal shooting cases.

And uh at the same time, um County Attorney Choi was looking at a model in Denver of Denver PD, how they investigated their non-fatal shooting cases because their clearance rate had dramatically approved and improved in recent years.

Um, so we began to investigate Denver's response to these cases and to see if we could apply it to St.

Paul PD.

We also wanted to increase public safety.