Police chief finalist Gordon Ramsay: Relationship with community is key

When Gordon Ramsay was a rookie with the Duluth Police Department in Minnesota, he patrolled on bicycle in the Central Hillside neighborhood – a low-income, densely populated area perched over downtown and Lake Superior.

Central Hillside kids hung out at a little neighborhood store and often got disorderly there. As Ramsay rolled up to the market one day, he recognized half of the teens. One blurted, “Hey, there’s the cops,” and another interjected, “Oh, that’s Ramsay. He’s cool.”

It was something Ramsay would never forget – “because those kids trusted me,” he said.

He developed friendships in that neighborhood that have lasted 20 years, and it showed him the value of community policing where police get to know people in neighborhoods and work together with them on the problems that underlie crime. It’s not just old-school, chase-down-and-lock-up-the-bad-guys. Police say it is proactive, preventive and relies on true relationships.

“It shaped the police officer and police chief that I became,” said Ramsay, one of two finalists for Wichita police chief.

Around the nation, many police departments moved away from community policing after the 9/11 terrorist attacks as federal funding for community policing fell, Ramsay said.

If he becomes Wichita’s police chief, community policing will be the top priority, he said. In Duluth, he said, “community policing is engrained in everything this department does.”

At age 43, Ramsay is in his 10th year as police chief in Duluth, a city of about 86,000 in northeast Minnesota. His tenure will soon be tied for third-longest in the city’s history.

As for the Wichita job opening, Ramsay said a headhunter with the International Association of Chiefs of Police called him and encouraged him to consider the job. He said he hasn’t applied elsewhere. “I’m not looking for other jobs,” other than Wichita’s, he said.

Although Duluth is about a fourth of Wichita’s size, it has had many of the same challenges that Wichita has faced, Ramsay said. It is an urban center that has lost manufacturing jobs. It has homelessness. It has had to reinvent itself by focusing on tourism and the medical and aerospace industries.

Duluth’s innovations

A lot of innovation occurs in midsize police departments, and Duluth is one of the first midsize cities to fully implement use of body cameras so that every patrol officer has a camera, Ramsay said.

Duluth has a history of progressive policing, he said. It was the first city to mandate arrests for domestic violence. There’s the Duluth Model for how to respond to domestic violence.

Under his leadership, Ramsay said, Duluth police have been focusing on racial disparities and racial sensitivity. In 2012, Duluth established a civilian review board that helps police to devise policy, take and review complaints, and work with the department to build community relations.

Ramsay noted that a recent national study said that two-thirds of African-Americans feel they won’t be treated fairly by police.

He has developed a program to help reduce incarceration of minority children through collaboration with other criminal justice partners. Last year, he involved civil rights leaders in an audit of tickets issued and arrests made by school resource officers.

In outreach to Duluth’s Native American population, Duluth police use a Native American chaplain as a liaison with families, which “helps us navigate some of the cultural issues,” Ramsay said.

Ramsay oversaw an audit of sexual assault cases involving Native American women, which he says is one of the least prosecuted kinds of crimes. He said the audit resulted in a better way of responding to such cases.

Police shootings have been an issue in Chicago, Ferguson, Wichita, Duluth and elsewhere. Ramsay noted that 65 percent of officer shootings nationwide involve one officer, so “maybe slowing things down … not getting involved in situations that can escalate until you have back-up” should be part of the goal, he said. When a suspect has a knife, he said, it’s important for the officer to keep a distance. “We don’t want to create a crisis by using poor tactics.”

Police departments still don’t have a less-than-lethal weapon that can reliably incapacitate people. “That would change policing,” Ramsay said.

His perspective on adversity

Ramsay was born in St. Louis to parents who emigrated from Scotland. The family moved to Duluth when he was 8. His father was a mechanical engineer, his mother a court clerk. He grew up in a middle-class neighborhood and realized later how naive he was to the struggles others face in neighborhoods like Central Hillside.

As Duluth police chief, he prefers to hire people who have faced adversity, who have a variety of experiences, who maybe are coming to policing after another career.

He has been married 18 years and has an 8-year-old daughter and a 5-year-old son.

Growing up, his aspirations evolved into wanting to be a cop.

“I am passionate about the role police play in society,” he said. “It’s tough times right now. A lot of people’s opinions are being made by national events.”

‘Not set in any way’

Joan McNamara, 58, is a retired commander with the Los Angeles Police Department who moved back to Duluth. Before she became a member of the civilian review board, Ramsay impressed her. “He reached out to me, and he asked for my advice, and he asked for me to look with a critical eye at his department,” McNamara said. It told her that he wanted the best for the community. “I just found that so refreshing.”

Ramsay is well-read and familiar with what’s occurring across the nation, McNamara said.

“He’s always searching. He’s not set in any way,” she said. “That’s what we need with leaders today.”

This story was originally published December 11, 2015 at 4:56 PM with the headline "Police chief finalist Gordon Ramsay: Relationship with community is key."