When gunshots rang out on a residential St. Paul street at 9:45 a.m. on a Tuesday, wounding two teenagers, investigators working at police headquarters heard the information dispatched in real time over the police radio.

Members of the St. Paul Police Department’s new Non-Fatal Shooting Unit are accustomed to middle-of-the-night calls waking them up to head to a shooting scene, but they didn’t need to be told to go out to this daytime incident and start canvassing the area and collecting evidence.

Investigators quickly gathered information that led them to apply for a search warrant for a home in the area, and they carried it out later that September morning.

That fast-paced nature of investigations is common for homicides in St. Paul. Police Chief Axel Henry says their approach is what keeps the department’s homicide clearance rate so high: 89 percent last year, compared to the national average of about 50 percent.

But the same couldn’t be said in the past for nonfatal shootings in St. Paul. Investigating them used to fall to the homicide unit, which also had other serious assaults and robberies on its case load.

In January, St. Paul started the Non-Fatal Shooting Unit by reassigning investigators from other units to staff it.

“We’re conducting investigations in the same manner as if it were a homicide investigation, by putting in a lot of resources and time,” said Cmdr. Nikkole Peterson, who’s in charge of the new unit.

That means “preserve the crime scene, preserve evidence, collect video, talk to witnesses,” said Sgt. Nichole Sipes, who was previously a homicide investigator and now works in the new unit.

The result has been a big increase in the clearance rate for nonfatal shootings in St. Paul: 62 percent through the beginning of October, according to police department data. The average was 28 percent over the last three years during the same time period.

Prosecuting cases without cooperating victims

Since nonfatal shootings have a surviving victim to interview, shouldn’t they be easier to solve than homicides?

Investigators say that’s not necessarily the case, because many victims are reluctant to talk. That could be because of fear of retaliation, not wanting to get the criminal justice system involved, distrust of law enforcement or other reasons.

Ramsey County prosecutors and police are now taking an approach to nonfatal shootings that is similar to domestic violence cases, where victims can also be resistant to provide information to law enforcement: If they have enough other evidence, they move forward with prosecution that isn’t dependent on a victim’s participation.

A shooting in downtown St. Paul, which led to four people being charged, is an example of the work.

“There’s no way anyone would have been charged in that case previously,” because a woman who’d been shot in the toe “was completely uncooperative,” Peterson said.

But Sgt. Michael Dunaski of the nonfatal shooting unit analyzed hours of surveillance video from the area to identify people in the two groups who were shooting, Peterson said.

Just before 2 a.m. on a Saturday in February, 911 callers reported hearing multiple gunshots in the area of the Gray Duck Tavern on Wabasha Street.

Surveillance video showed a fight broke out between a man in a green track suit and three other men. The man in the track suit “took a shooting stance behind a vehicle” and a “gunfight erupted” between him and the other three men, who each appeared to be armed with handguns, according to criminal charges.

A 37-year-old woman with a gunshot wound to her foot showed up at a hospital nearly an hour later. She said she went outside to get an Uber home, heard gunshots and felt a pain in her foot, the charges said.

Shootings trending down in St. Paul

St. Paul police Sgt. Nichole Sipes, an investigator in the Non-Fatal Shooting Unit, pulls a search warrant kit to a home near the scene of a nonfatal shooting in September. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

The department’s gang and gun unit already had a practice of responding to nonfatal shootings to gather information. Before the nonfatal shooting unit existed, they’d forward information to homicide unit investigators, but the case wouldn’t be assigned to an investigator until the next day or a Monday if it happened over a weekend. Now, investigations are happening immediately.

When Sipes was a homicide investigator, her caseload usually didn’t allow enough time to visit nonfatal shooting victims in person. If she called a victim and they didn’t want to talk or didn’t get back to her, they generally couldn’t move forward with a prosecution.

Having the ability to follow up with victims in person is making a difference, Sipes said.

Officers try to speak to a victim immediately after they’ve been shot in an attempt to collect suspect information and determine if a suspect is still in the area. But at that point, the victim is likely “in pain and they’re mad,” Sipes said.

When she’s able to go to the hospital in the hours afterward, “a lot of times you’re at least getting a conversation flowing with them,” Sipes said. “Maybe they’re not being as forthcoming as they could be. … I think we’ve had some cases where we have gotten participation or cooperation from victims that we might not have in the past.”

There are shooting victims who may not want their case prosecuted, but Sipes said there are larger issues of public safety at work.

“Most of our shootings are happening outside or in a shared space with other people, and so whether or not you care that you got shot, there was a danger to public safety that occurred when that gun was fired, and that’s the big picture of what we’re trying to address,” Sipes said.

Overall, investigators believe that “by having a quick outcome for these cases, we will interrupt the cycle of violence,” Peterson said. It can also increase community trust by showing “we’re not just letting these things happen, that if a violent crime happens in the city, we are taking it seriously and we’re going to hold those offenders accountable.”

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There were 84 people injured in shootings in St. Paul this year as of Wednesday, compared with 95 during the same period last year and 167 year-to-date in 2022, according to police department data.

Homicides are also trending down, with 21 this year in St. Paul, compared with 27 as of this time last year.

It’s difficult to study whether there is a direct correlation between improving clearance rates and decreased gun violence, though it makes sense that there would be, said Ben Struhl, executive director of the Crime and Justice Policy Lab at the University of Pennsylvania.

Ramsey County Attorney John Choi said he sees a “preventive” benefit to catching suspects.

One reason could be because the same people are involved in multiple incidents, according to Ramsey County Sheriff’s Cmdr. Rich Alteri, who is on assignment at the county attorney’s office to work on the nonfatal shooting initiative.

Focused approach leads to charges

The main problem in the past was not putting enough resources into investigating nonfatal shootings, Alteri said.

“Homicides get immediate attention and lots of resources,” he said.

St. Paul and Ramsey County have looked to Denver’s success with solving nonfatal shootings and one concept they took from that city is “to treat every nonfatal shooting the same way as a homicide,” Alteri said. Denver went from a 39 percent clearance rate of nonfatal shootings in 2019 to 66 percent in 2020; it was 49 percent in 2021 and 55 percent in 2022, said Struhl, whose policy lab is researching Denver’s approach.

Giving investigators the time to follow up on cases is important. When the Crime and Justice Policy Lab studied the work of Boston police in 2012, they found the clearance rate for homicides and nonfatal shootings was about 11 percent for both types of incidents in the first day or two after the incident. Up to a year afterward, the clearance rate increased by 33 percent for homicides but only went up an additional 8 percent for nonfatal shootings.

“They found out this is probably a function of effort because, if they couldn’t clear the case in the first few days for the nonfatals, they were moving on because they had way too much work,” Struhl said.

The Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office also started a nonfatal shooting and gun unit, which works in suburban areas. As of August, there were four incidents of nonfatal shootings this year in Ramsey County suburbs. Investigators have “taken the stance of elevating the priority” of the cases, Alteri said, and arrests had been made in three of them.

Choi has assigned a prosecutor, Assistant Ramsey County Attorney Elizabeth Lamin, to work with investigators to bring charges in nonfatal shootings. She provides “real-time feedback” about what’s necessary to charge specific cases, rather than looking at information after investigators present it to her and having to potentially ask them to go back for more investigation, Choi said.

The county attorney’s office has charged 61 people this year in nonfatal shootings. The office only declined five cases, some of which may still be investigated, “which is a very high charge rate, meaning the dedicated investigative work and close partnership with our prosecutor has helped to get the evidence needed to move a case forward,” said Mark Haase, Choi’s executive officer.

Using one-time state public safety funding, Choi recommended and the Ramsey County Board allocated nearly $1.8 million to fund a nonfatal shooting initiative from 2024 through 2027. Included was a one-time $200,000 allocation to boost suburban agencies and the sheriff’s office in investigations, $200,000 per year to assist victims and witnesses and $115,000 annually for 2024 and 2025 to expedite forensic testing on guns and ammunition.

The funding for victims and witnesses includes helping with moving expenses if their safety is at risk.

The idea is “if we could support the safety and survival needs of witnesses and victims in the aftermath of a shooting … that they will hopefully participate and provide information to law enforcement so that they could help solve the crime,” Choi said.

Having a multi-pronged approach to try to get ahead of violence before it happens is important and that’s what’s been happening with St. Paul’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Ramsey County’s Healing Streets Project, Choi said.

September shooting remains under investigation

A St. Paul police officer and his K-9 partner search a house near the scene of a nonfatal shooting at East Maryland Avenue and Bradley Street in St. Paul, where a search warrant was executed Sept. 10, 2024. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

The nonfatal shooting unit has six investigators and two officers working on cases. The investigators are on call for 24 hours at a time on a rotating basis, and Peterson contacts them to respond to shooting scenes and the hospital.

Other personnel in the department regularly assist, including the gang and gun unit, the special enforcement group, the forensic services and video management units and the SWAT team for some arrests and search warrants.

When the nonfatal shooting unit is not responding to a shooting, they’re following up on past shootings, working to solve them and building cases against suspects.

They continue to investigate the September shooting, which injured a 16-year-old and 18-year-old in the Payne-Phalen area; no one has been arrested.

Surveillance video showed the two victims standing on a corner of East Maryland Avenue and Bradley Street when a vehicle stopped in the intersection. A muzzle flash could be seen coming from the driver’s side window, Sgt. Todd Ludvik of the nonfatal shooting unit wrote in a search warrant affidavit.

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Police were told that at least one of the victims shot back, the affidavit said.

Officers found about a dozen spent shell casings, but not a firearm at the scene. The victims circled back to a nearby address. Ludvik knew the same residence was struck by gunfire in June, he wrote in the affidavit. In that case, officers collected 22 spent shell casings, several of which were linked through testing to other shootings.

Ludvik obtained a search warrant for the home, looking for a firearm that may have been used in the shooting from that day in September, but no gun was found.

Investigators said they couldn’t discuss specific theories of the case, but Ludvik noted, “It appears there’s an ongoing beef going on between individuals.”