St. Cloud police focus on outreach to immigrant and refugee populations

St. Cloud Crime Prevention Specialist John Justin meets regularly with St. Cloud Area Somali Salvation Organization founder and director Mohamoud Mohamed. On Tuesday, they talked in Mohamed's office.
(Photo: Kimm Anderson, [email protected])

By Ben Katzner
Sunday, April 20, 2014

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For almost a decade, the St. Cloud Police Department has quietly worked with immigrant and refugee populations within the city.

Those years of building relationships have paid dividends — dividends that are being noticed within the city limits and outside St. Cloud.

"Wherever I go, if I speak about the St. Cloud police, (people) think that I am dreaming or they (say they) are in the wrong place," Mohamoud Mohamed of the St. Cloud Area Somali Salvation Organization said.

Mohamed, an elder in St. Cloud's Somali community, was among the first Somalis to come to the area in the early 2000s.

"What we are experiencing now is something with a great value that we've earned in this area of the state," he said. "We want to keep that standard, maintain it and we want to enjoy the harmony of that."

"St. Cloud police have a relationship with the youth, St. Cloud police have a relationship with the pockets of Somali and east African communities. They can walk in and people are feeling comfortable to talk with police," he said.

It wasn't always that way.

Without key contributions and a consistent effort from members of the St. Cloud Police Department and the community, the relationships the groups have now could have fallen apart before they had a chance to get started.

Rocky start

About 32 percent of the foreign-born population of Benton, Stearns and Sherburne counties comes from eastern Africa, according to the most recent American Community Survey. Many arrived here by way of refugee camps and areas rife with conflict.

"I was familiar with what was happening in Somalia," said John Justin, the St. Cloud Police Department's crime prevention specialist. "When I met the elders here, in the course of discussion, they explained to me the terrible things that happened to them in Somalia and especially in their refugee camps in Kenya. … Almost every horrible thing you can think of, the police did over there. When they arrived here they had a very, very deep rooted fear of the police."

That fear was palpable, he said.

"The first time I held a meeting here at the police department the first two people that I met, when I invited them to come to the police department for a tour, they stood outside the front door and they were literally shaking when they came in ... That is how scared people who come out of refugee status are of the police."

For refugees and immigrants, finding a new home was just one challenge.

"When I came here, I used to sit with people and tell them that this is a new country … we are not in Africa. Because there's a lot of difference. Culturally, economically and educationally," said Ismail Ali, an elder in St. Cloud's Somali community. "They are from refugee camps and most don't understand the issues."

Among those challenges was figuring out who to trust. Allegations of profiling and unfair treatment by police were plenty, and not just from new residents. St. Cloud officials had enacted the Communities of Color Agreement, a city policy that outlined non-biased police enforcement and called for stronger efforts to deter racial profiling.

Justin was at the forefront of outreach to the new populations, according to retired St. Cloud Police Chief Dennis Ballantine.

"When I first came to St. Cloud I started working with communities with color … addressing issues with the police department," he said. "But the credit goes to John Justin. I just kind of turned him loose and said, 'Make it better.' "

"Without him and his efforts, we wouldn't be where we're at."

Making the rounds

Justin figured the best way to understand the communities he was hoping to serve was to get out and meet them. His first attempt came about nine years ago at the Whitney Center in St. Cloud. It was then he realized there was a learning curve for both sides.

"A group of about 20 people walked in and they were the recent arrivals that were the Somali elders," Justin said. "There was a language barrier so my hour presentation on identity theft turned into about two and a half hours of translation."

Justin decided to re-group.

He asked Ballantine for permission to start an outreach program open to any questions or concerns within the Somali and east African communities.

Using the Communities of Color Agreement and with input from the communities themselves, Justin came up with presentations detailing everything from what police in Minnesota are allowed to do to how to make an emergency call to 911.

But it didn't just stop with law enforcement issues. Eventually the police department began to act as a liaison between communities and the agencies they needed to be in contact with.

"We listened to what their problems are and most of these are not police issues," said Assistant Police Chief Rich Wilson, whom Justin calls an integral part of the outreach process. "We call to different city departments and we bring them together. We connect the dots and bring them the answers that they're seeking. … They take that knowledge and bring it back to the rest."

Justin still makes weekly visits to Somali elders and hosts informational presentations. Each step in the right direction seemed to move the relationship between the police and immigrant community ahead by leaps and bounds.

"(This outreach) was mostly to reassure them that our system is not like it was in Somalia. They weren't going to be raped in jail. They weren't going to be held for ransom. They weren't going to be beaten or tortured or anything like that," Justin said.

Communication was key in making progress, Justin said. As the police department made more headway within communities, they learned that asking the right questions was more important than anything else.

Justin pointed to Sgt. Lori Ellering and her work with Enabling Language Service Anywhere devices and organizations such as St. Cloud's Hands Across the World — which provides learning opportunities to newly arrived immigrants and refugees — as key components to advancing the conversation.

Building trust

As proud as they are with the work they've done with the Somali and east African communities in St. Cloud, Justin, Wilson and Ballantine agree that the last thing they care about is whether the public knows about it.

"We kept it off the radar. We didn't publicize it, we didn't wave flags about it because what happens is, when you do something like that, you lose focus of actually benefiting people," Justin said. "The primary thing that Chief Ballantine wanted and what I wanted first and foremost was a relationship with the police."

Ballantine said that with such a fragile relationship early on, there was no reason to risk ruining it.

"If they thought it was a publicity thing, they wouldn't trust us from the beginning," he said.

Now, trust is not a top-of-mind concern.

"People are feeling comfortable sitting down and speaking with the police officers," Mohamed said. "In the last six to seven years there are zero complaints about police profiling. … If there is an issue between the police and the community, we have access to sit down with the police chief, pinpoint the problem and we trust them to take the action of correcting whatever went wrong. They are doing their job."

"If we continue like this, maybe the other cities will understand what we are doing here," Ali said. "Sauk Rapids has a lot of Somalis, so does Waite Park, but still the relationship between the police and our community is totally different than here."

Wilson hopes the work the police department has put in pays dividends when it comes to the community's perceptions of immigrant and refugee groups in the area.

"They don't have to worship together, but they can eat together. They can play together, they can work together. That's really all this is about," Wilson said. "When we work together, we accomplish together and it's for the greater good of the entire community. Our nation was founded on this stuff."

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