Public Safety Committee Meeting - May 27, 2026: Gun Violence Intervention and Extreme Risk Protection Orders
Public Safety Committee Meeting - May 27, 2026: Gun Violence Intervention and Extreme Risk Protection Orders
The ninth public safety committee meeting focused on gun violence intervention, featuring presentations from the St. Paul Police Department's Non-Fatal Shooting Unit and Moms Demand Action St. Paul. The committee reviewed violence prevention strategies, community-first public safety approaches, and discussed the impact of Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs).
Public Comments & Testimony
- No public comments were made during the meeting.
Discussion Items
- St. Paul Police Department Non-Fatal Shooting Unit Review: Commander Nicole Peterson presented on the unit, created in January 2024 with $3 million in state public safety funding over three years (ending December 2026). The unit uses an on-call, real-time response model modeled after Denver PD, with investigators responding within one hour to shootings where a person is struck by a bullet. Staffing includes six sergeants and two officers pulled from other units without backfill; overtime and technology (e.g., cell tower data, software databases) account for the majority of spending. Key statistics: gunshot wound victims decreased 40% since unit inception (from 122 in 2023 to 73 in 2024); clearance rates rose from 20–30% to over 70% (estimated 75% for 2025); gun-related homicides dropped 62% (from 30 in 2022 to 8 in 2024). Council members inquired about data disaggregation by age and location, correlation versus causation in declining violent crime (noting national trends), and future funding sustainability. Commander Peterson highlighted partnerships with Ramsey County Attorney’s Office, Sheriff’s Office, and the Office of Neighborhood Safety.
- Moms Demand Action St. Paul – ERPO Overview and Legislative Update: Kathleen Anderson, lead volunteer and director at Protect Minnesota, presented on firearm suicide prevention and Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs). She noted that 90% of suicide attempts with a firearm are fatal, compared to 3–8% for other methods, and that 77% of Minnesota gun deaths in 2025 were suicides. ERPOs, enacted in Minnesota in 2023, allow law enforcement, county attorneys, or immediate family members to petition for temporary removal of firearms from individuals in crisis. Emergency orders are issued within two days, final orders require a hearing within 14 days, last 6–12 months, and can be renewed. Since 2023, over 400 ERPO petitions have been filed statewide, with an approval rate of approximately 80–90% for emergency orders. Council members discussed the petition process, burden of proof (civil court, preponderance of evidence), due process, and challenges such as inconsistent implementation across counties and lack of dedicated state funding for awareness campaigns. Anderson emphasized voluntary secure storage as a first step and noted that awareness of ERPOs remains a key priority.
Key Outcomes
- The committee expressed strong support for sustaining the Non-Fatal Shooting Unit and committed to exploring budget options to avoid reliance on overtime and to prevent burnout. Council members requested follow-up data on: breakdown of grant spending across units (gang, forensic, technology), age and location of shooting victims, and a day-in-the-life overview of a unit sergeant.
- No formal votes were taken, but the committee endorsed continued collaboration with Moms Demand Action and committed to amplifying ERPO and secure storage resources through council newsletters and social media. Chair Bowie noted five remaining public safety committee meetings for 2026 and invited council members to propose future topics with at least one month’s notice.
Meeting Transcript
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.
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