As recruits in St. Paul’s police academy trained recently, Deputy Chief Mary Nash stopped by to pass along words of wisdom she still remembers hearing when she was a rookie.
“The days are long, but the years fly by,” she said. “I look back and I can’t believe how fast 30 years has gone. … Now you get to go out and make a difference in the world.”
Nash, one of the two highest-ranking women in the St. Paul Police Department, marks her last day on the job Wednesday. She spent 20 years as a crisis negotiator, led the way in starting a unit that pairs officers with social workers for mental-health calls, and worked to recruit more female officers.
Police Chief Todd Axtell and Nash were in the same St. Paul police academy in 1989 and he remembers her as “tough as nails.” Through the years, he said he also saw her “incredible and compassionate interpersonal skills that served her well, specifically as a hostage and crisis negotiator.”
The Pioneer Press sat down with Nash recently to discuss her 30-year career as a St. Paul police officer, including overseeing the major crimes division at a time of increased gun violence in the city. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What led you to police work?
Back in the day when I went to Hazel Park Junior High in St. Paul, the police department had officers that would come into our social studies classes and talk about crime prevention, juvenile crime and how to stay out of trouble. The whole idea of being able to make an impact on people in your community intrigued me.
When I was a senior at Harding High School, a counselor said, “Here’s your application to vo-tech” and I said, “I’m going to Lakewood Community College (now Century College) for law enforcement.”
I knew I learned differently, and had to study differently and study more, but I’d never had anybody tell me basically that I wasn’t smart enough to do something and it was a real sucker punch when the counselor said that. I can tell you that I cried all the way home. I had never been so deflated.
It was a pivotal moment because I remember at dinner that night my parents saying, “You know what? You can do whatever you want, as long as you give it your best.”
When you started the St. Paul police academy at 22, you were the only female in your class. How have you handled working in a male-dominated profession?
When I was growing up by Beaver Lake on St. Paul’s East Side and I’d see those police cars drive through the neighborhood, it never struck me that none of the officers were females. When I came on the job there were only about 35 women officers in St. Paul.
Since I became deputy chief, I started a women’s leadership group for officers and support staff within the police department.
We brought in retired female St. Paul officers who were trailblazers. It was important that they share their history because if they didn’t pave that path, I don’t get to sit here with a gold plate on the door that says, “Mary Nash, deputy chief.”
You became the supervisor of the family and sexual violence unit in 2013 and soon after you stood in front of cameras at a press conference, appealing to victims of sexual abuse by priests to come forward. What was that like?
The Archdiocese case had been simmering before I got into the unit and blew up soon after. When we made our call for victims, that did not earn me many friends. I got a lot of hate mail because people felt we were going after the Catholic church, but we had information provided by a whistle-blower that we had to investigate.
I think what was hard for me was I grew up very Catholic. If the church was covering up stuff, it’s so hypocritical and it brushes up against your value system. But we were working for the victims in these cases and not the politics.
After spending 20 years as a hostage and crisis negotiator, the last six of which you were the team’s commander, what did you learn about staying cool under pressure?
I went up in a fire truck to talk to a man on a roof one time and I said, “We know this isn’t about the domestic today. What else is going on?” He agreed to come down off the roof. You have to be a problem solver, have empathy, be a listener.
I think calm breeds calm. Telling somebody to calm down is never going to work. You have to allow people to have their feelings and work with that and tell people, “It’s alright to have that day where you feel that there’s nothing worth living for, but tomorrow is that other day where you can feel better about things.”
We started focusing in 2015 on how do we respond better to calls about people in crisis? Those calls for help were increasing. We built a co-responder model with Sgt. Jamie Sipes, who now runs the Community Outreach and Stabilization Unit.
When you were tapped to be deputy chief of support services in 2016, recruiting more women was an area you focused on. Ten of the 43 recruits going through the police academy now are women. What has recruitment involved?
We created recruitment events where women of the department can come up to tell their own stories to young women about the obstacles they overcame. I remember one of the ladies who attended wrote in the evaluation, “Listening to the women’s stories made me believe in myself.”
We have young women out there that want to be a police officer, but may not have or find that confidence. If you’re in a community that has been marginalized by police and you want to be an officer, do you think you get much encouragement around the table at home? Maybe not, but you come to our events and you’re going to get the encouragement because we need to generate that interest for women to come into law enforcement and to be the next generation of change makers.
Your career has been book-ended by St. Paul experiencing increased violence. The city recorded the most homicides, 34, in 1992, when you were a relatively new officer. This year has seen 29 homicides. What has it been like for you since the spring?
It’s very stressful for everyone. I was on call the night there were three homicides in an 8-hour span in September. In the early ’90s we had a lot of gunfire with the crack epidemic and gang activity, but this is definitely a resurgence and a resurgence in a big way.
How did we get to a point where young people think that violence and gunfire is the answer to their disputes? There are some root causes and if that’s lack of family structure, how do we change that? If there is hopelessness if you’re growing up in poverty, then early on we have to put very young people on a path for success.
People don’t want to hear shots fired all night long. They don’t want to see their young people injured or killed by gunfire. They want to feel safe in their neighborhoods and we do that together, but there still has to be some accountability for the people doing these things.
What’s next for you?
My mom died of a massive heart attack when she was young and I’m in a job that’s stressful, so I want to enjoy some life on the other side of what I’ve considered a great 30 years as an officer.
I want to move into chapter two of my life while I’m still young enough. That may be teaching women’s leadership for law enforcement, but I think whatever my next step is, it will find me.
