Melvin Carter, the mayor of Saint Paul, Minnesota, swept into office in 2018, promising to improve equity. In his campaign, he had spoken from experience about what it felt like to be pulled over by police as a Black man. He wanted to create a new public safety framework that would be rooted in community.
But then the COVID-19 pandemic wiped out much of the city’s budget and the May 2020 killing of George Floyd by a police officer in neighboring Minneapolis sparked calls to defund the police. How would Mayor Carter make these changes happen?
Harvard Business School professor Mitch Weiss discusses the challenges and rewards of “possibility government” in his case, “Community-First Public Safety.”
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BRIAN KENNY: In August 2020, Human Rights Watch published a recording titled, “A Roadmap For Re-imagining Public Safety in the United States.” It contained 14 recommendations on policing, community investment, and accountability. Set against the backdrop of Black Lives Matter protests in cities from coast to coast, the notion of public safety had taken on a renewed sense of urgency. A Google search of the term yields hundreds of results of similar articles and reports published in the summer and fall of 2020. The topic took center stage in a contentious presidential election where polls showed that racial tensions were among the top five issues concerning voters, concerns that were further politicized by an incumbent president. If there was an eye of the storm, it would be Minneapolis, Minnesota, where George Floyd, an African-American, died at the hands of three police officers on May 25. Today’s case takes us just over the bridge to the twin city of Saint Paul, where Mayor Melvin Carter is facing some daunting decisions in trying to reinvent public safety. Today, we’ll discuss, “Community-First Public Safety” with case author Mitch Weiss. I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Presents Network.
Mitch Weiss studies digital transformation and innovation ecosystems. He created the School’s first course on public entrepreneurship and his new book, We The Possibility: Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve our Most Urgent Problems, is all about public entrepreneurship. Pardon me. And I think it’s available today. Is that right, Mitch?
MITCH WEISS: It’s available now and it’s probably launching as we’re being broadcast, Brian.
BRIAN KENNY: That’s pretty exciting. You must be excited about that.
MITCH WEISS: Well, I think it’s a right moment, I hope, for a book about possibility government. Our case protagonist, Melvin Carter, the mayor of St. Paul says, “Patience is for the privileged.” And I think he’s right. I think that we need to find a way of responding more urgently to the problems that face us all over, and the book I hope sheds some lessons on that. In the book, I harken back to Martin Luther King Jr., who had sat in many cities, including in St. Paul, the city you and I are talking about today. That time was one of the great myths in American society, and that the idea that we should just wait for things to get better is a terrible myth, and that the time is always right to do right, and it’s basically helping time. And I think we’re living in a helping time and I hope the book offers some lessons for that. I’m certain that Melvin Carter the protagonist’s case offers some lessons in that.
BRIAN KENNY: The other thing that’s happening, tomorrow actually, in this country is the transition from the Trump administration to the new Biden administration. Again, a remarkable thing that the United States can sort of withstand the kinds of tensions that have been around during this campaign and still have a peaceful transition of power, but also I would ask you, is this kind of a unique moment of opportunity for people who have an entrepreneurial spirit to run with new ideas?
MITCH WEISS: Well, I think the beginning of any year is a moment of renewal and refreshment anyways, at all levels of government. For certain, our federal government here in the United States it’s a time of renewal. It’s a time of reinvention. The new President Joe Biden said on victory night, “There’s one word that defines America: possibilities.” And in saying so, he’s talking about how do we usher in sort of an uncertain future? And he’s tapping into rhetoric that presidents and other national leaders have used since our beginning. This country has always been an experiment, it still is. The transition of power reminds us of that. The question for him, and his team, and all of us is going to be, do we just talk about possibility, and about renewal, and reinvention or are we able really to usher it in? And I hope that we can.
BRIAN KENNY: I know the case is going to help us to step into some of the ideas in your book and I definitely want to do that. And I think the case, obviously, because it’s sort of ripped from the headlines as I teased in the opening, it’s so current and so compelling, these conversations are playing out in real time all around the country. So I thank you for taking the time to be here with us today to talk about it and you’re a frequent visitor to the show, so we love having you on. Let me ask you to start by telling us when you step into the classroom, what would your cold call be to start this case?
MITCH WEISS: Well, you talk about this being a live case, I mean, the first time I taught it, Brian, Melvin Carter joined us via Zoom and he was after class, literally, going to announce this essentially community-first public safety advisory task force, which is going to help him look at public safety in St. Paul. In particular, look at how police are responding to calls, in particular how they’re responding to essentially low priority calls, the ones that are non-violent, appear to be non-criminal calls. He’s going to ask this public safety task force to look at those calls and help him think about, a year from now how should we as a city respond to these calls? So I ask the students right at the beginning of class, you have the data on low priority calls in St. Paul, you can see that some 70,000 out of 260,000 overall emergency calls are low priority calls. What else do you need to know about response in St. Paul? What other data would you want at hand in order to answer the mayor’s question: Who should respond to these low priority calls and how?
BRIAN KENNY: I didn’t mention in the introduction, but you worked for Mayor Tom Menino here in Boston, as Chief of Staff for many years, you’ve seen what it’s like to govern up close and personal. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to do the job of mayor in a time like this where we’ve got COVID, and Black Lives Matter, and all these other things that are roiling cities across the country. I wonder if that’s another piece that comes into play as you’re having this conversation in the classrooms?
MITCH WEISS: Certainly, it comes into play because the students are very aware and can feel it palpably because they’re living it themselves, but also can feel it in the case that the mayor is facing multiple challenges all at the same time. He comes into office in 2018, running on an equity agenda. St. Paul is a very diverse city, but it’s also in many cases a highly unequal city, and the mayor comes into office promising to change that. He’s the first Black mayor elected the mayor of St. Paul, and he’s avowed about an equity agenda in the city of St. Paul, and he starts moving forward in that agenda. And then of course, what happens is COVID happens, and of course, George Floyd is killed next door, and so much else is roiling the world and the community in St. Paul in the year 2020. And so he’s trying to navigate, yes, I want to reinvent public safety. It was part of his campaign pledge, part of his campaign platform. He wasn’t new to this topic and yet doing it now amidst all these dueling crises is quite hard.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Tell us a little bit about Melvin Carter. I can’t believe how young he is to be having a job like this, but what’s his background? What were his influences? How did he get into politics?
MITCH WEISS: Well, I’m glad to hear you say he’s young because I think he and I are the same age, so I appreciate that. He’s quite a remarkable person in my view. We try not to adore our case protagonists. We try to approach them neutrally, but I have come to know him over the years, and I find him to be quite an amazing mayor. So, I’ve been very keen to follow him. He grew up in St. Paul. His parents were both in public service, his mom was elected in St. Paul to public office. His father was one of the first Black police officers in St. Paul. So he grows up in this community, interested in public service, very respectful in some ways of the police. He saw his father and his colleagues as being superheroes in many ways, but he also was no stranger to being pulled over essentially for being Black, so both those aspects are part of his history and his upbringing. He studies both business and public administration. He comes back to St. Paul, he wasn’t intending really to run for office. He was trying to get other people to run for office and everyone kept pointing the finger back at him. So, he ends up running for city council in St. Paul, working for the state for some, and ultimately running for mayor of St. Paul. And he is young and he’s brave, and he comes to office pledging, as I said, to try to bring about an equity agenda in St. Paul, as well, an engagement agenda. He thinks these two things are tied hand in hand. Equity for him is about ownership and so he wants everybody in St. Paul to feel like they own part of the city and to work to make the city a better place.
BRIAN KENNY: Talk a little bit about the racial landscape there. People might be more familiar with Minneapolis than they are with St. Paul, they call them the twin cities, but I think Minneapolis is more sort of the big brother in that euphemism.
MITCH WEISS: Well, St. Paul is a very diverse city, hundreds of languages spoken there, many immigrant communities there, certainly a Black American community, and also many other communities. Its Rondo Neighborhood is legendary. Melvin Carter’s grandfather was a property owner, a jazz musician, many other things in St. Paul. And I think what happened in Rondo is emblematic of what happened in many other cities around the United States, which is Black Americans had been able to, in some instances, to build up wealth and then because of gentrification, or because of eminent domain, or other reasons property was taken from them. And so Melvin grew up in St. Paul, as many others grew up in St. Paul observing both the richness of the city, its great heritage, so much creativity, but also a sense that they weren’t always open to the Black community that live in St. Paul or other communities that live in St. Paul.
BRIAN KENNY: I want to relate this back to your book; can a mayor be an entrepreneur? Can an elected official play the role of entrepreneur? I think of entrepreneurs as private citizens who have big ideas, and they’re trying to implement them, and they’re using government as part of the lever, but I don’t think of it necessarily as somebody in a government role being an entrepreneur. Can you maybe explain that a little bit?
MITCH WEISS: The question is whether or not we can at a first instance solve public problems anymore, and whether or not we can do new things. And what entrepreneurs do, if you think about the widest sense of the word, is they pursue new opportunities. In particular, we have this definition at Harvard Business School from Howard Stevenson: Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity beyond resources controlled. What entrepreneurs do, whether they’re private sector or the public sector, is they look out at the world and they see what are the problems. And they really orient themselves on how am I going to solve those problems? It’s not really about what people, what buildings, what assets they have at hand at this moment. And in that sense, a public official can be every bit as much of an entrepreneur as can a private one. I think of Mayor Carter, I mean, some things he did wouldn’t strike you as being the same as starting up a company, but they absolutely require taking a new mindset, a novel approach to an old problem. I mean, one of the things he’s most fond of is the fact that he canceled library fines in St. Paul, and what’s very entrepreneurial about that, you could say. Well, the standard view, the conventional view is that we should have library fines so people, I guess, return books. And Mayor Carter flips it on its head to say, as a city, the challenge is how do we get people to read? How do we support literacy? How do we support engagement? If they’re checking out books, that’s what we want them to do so. So he says, “Look, I’m willing to take the risk, that somehow, what all our volumes are going to disappear? Or the books are going to fly off the shelves? Or what? I’m willing to the risk. Let’s cancel library fines, let’s reactivate people’s libraries cards.” And of course what happens? Circulation goes way up, it’s the equivalent of opening up a new library. It serves the challenge of closing inequities and raising achievement, and so he could be every bit an entrepreneur in the public sector as can others in the private sector, and I would suggest also work on more important problems in many cases.
BRIAN KENNY: What does he see as the problems then, as he’s looking out sort of assessing what’s happening in St. Paul, where are the problems according to Mayor Carter?
MITCH WEISS: Well, again, I think he sees the city in all its richness and all its opportunities, so I want to acknowledge that again, that he feels optimistic and confident about the city. He loves his community and sees so much commitment in the people there. At his inaugural, he sort of goes off script and says, everybody’s clapping for him, and it’s a very exciting day, he’d won by quite a lot, and it’s this fresh day in St. Paul and everyone’s excited. And he says, “Listen, don’t clap if you’re not going to help.” It’s not just an invitation to be part of what we’re doing. It’s an exhortation, right? We’re all going to do this together. So he’s very optimistic about the city. He’s very committed to enlisting the people in St. Paul, but to your question, enlisting them towards what? Well, first of all, towards closing the inequities broadly, including on economic opportunity. So he is coming into office committed to raising the minimum wage in his city. He ultimately rolls out the first city guaranteed universal basic income pilot. He’s committed to establishing savings accounts for newborns in St. Paul so they can have access to savings when it comes time for them to go to college. And then also around public safety gun involved homicides are on the way up, actually at record levels. So he wants to make his city safer. He also is very aware of the history of police violence, especially on Black Americans at disproportionate rates. So the mayor has a lot of respect for his police department, for his police officers. He also wants to make sure that everybody is treated with equal protection under the law, no matter what the color of their skin or their background. So he’s trying to address public safety from both, if you will, from all these various angles, which is how to make the city safe for everyone and equally so. So that’s kind of what’s on his plate and more when we meet him.
BRIAN KENNY: The case does a great job of going into some of the history of policing in the country. And I think it’s relevant just in terms of all the discussion that’s been unfolding over the summer about defunding police, and reforming police, and even the plan that I teased at the beginning of the podcast that came out from the Human Rights Watch, the first six of the 14 steps that they recommend had to do with police reformation. But Mayor Carter comes at this a little bit differently, which I want you to explain it a bit, but maybe you could just start by describing some of the origins of policing in the country because I think it’s relevant.
MITCH WEISS: One of the privileges of writing cases like this is to go back and understand history in a way I hadn’t even understood it. I confess that I didn’t, and obviously still don’t of its full depth, but when you go back and look at the history of policing in the United States, one thing that you’ll come to know is that policing in its earliest days is in many ways about perpetuating slavery. Some of the earliest forms of policing in the U.S. are actually slave patrols, these were essentially citizen member groups of people who were tasked with looking for escape slaves. Policing in its early days, yes, had community roots, but those community roots were also racist roots. Over time, the community roots are retrenched in some ways. Organized policing comes to the fore, built in some ways on models that were built up in the UK, professionalized police forces, they’re more well-trained, and more well-equipped, that doesn’t erase the racist elements of policing. In fact, there are reports about police brutality also from the earliest days of organized policing. So this problem exists even then. And then fast forward to the last couple of decades, there was an effort to put back in community policing into public safety or the orientation in cities, try to develop more proactive relationships between police and their communities, try to develop deeper partnerships between police and their communities, and to some extent those work. There are examples of cities where there are good bonds between police departments and the people, where in some cases the perception of police departments went up, trust in police departments went up, proactivity we tilt in that direction as opposed to reactivity. But the data on community policing writ large is not as strong as we might like it to be. It didn’t solve the problems we had in public safety or policing either. So the story of policing in the United States has been one, I think, where community has been mostly present, racism has also been mostly present, and we’re constantly trying to eradicate that, but of course we haven’t.
BRIAN KENNY: And the case also points out that there’s been legislation, attempts to legislate in ways that have probably made the problem worse, if you look at the drug enforcement policies in the 1970s and the Crime Act in 1994, those didn’t lend themselves to community policing, I think, as it was envisioned.
MITCH WEISS: Right, and so you end up at this moment today where Black and brown communities especially feel like police forces have been marginalizing them. And we see the most egregious ones in the form of the killing of George Floyd and others, are the ones that we pay the most attention to, but of course there’s the day-to-day version of it, which is also very pernicious. And so the question facing mayors around the country, facing all of us, is how do we keep our community safe? How do we recognize the bravery and the valor of so many police officers, but how do we also recognize that we have racism in the system and root that out?
BRIAN KENNY: So, I don’t think anybody would expect Mayor Carter to be able to solve all those problems, but what are some of the things that he sees, as an entrepreneur, as ways to approach this that might be different and more effective?
MITCH WEISS: The lens he’s taken to this is something he calls community-first public safety. So those first two words are essential. His version of how you remake cities is that you enlist the community much more than they’ve been enlisted before. When he comes into office, he appoints 100 people to help him pick his department heads, when he does his budgeting, he enlists them in participatory budgeting. He’s not the first man to do that, but at every turn he’s trying to figure out how do we enlist people actually in the provision of public service, in this case in public safety. So his creative vision for public safety, it’s not his own, and it’s not brand new, but is how do we basically build public safety that’s community oriented, that’s about their needs first, and enlists they, them themselves, in the service of public safety? He sees that as being a way to expand the way of thinking about public safety way beyond policing, right? Public safety is about all the upstream things too. What are the housing opportunities? What are the job opportunities? What are the education opportunities? So how do we reimagine all this so we can look way upstream and much broader than policing? How do we make it so, yes, it’s much more proactive rather than responsive? So that’s his big vision, and then you see him, trying to experiment with various ways of reinventing public safety along these domains. So they experiment with community ambassadors who are basically people who are of the community and can help deescalate some of the potential violence that arises in the community. You see new efforts at building restorative justice, so how to actually enlist the community when a misdemeanor crime has happened. How do we enlist the community to actually meet with the perpetrator and see whether or not amends can be made in ways that don’t involve this perpetrator actually going to prison? We see a program to provide basic guarantees for landlords, so that when formerly incarcerated people came out of incarceration, were trying to reenter society, they can have housing. Now some of these things have been tried in other places. I’m not trying to say he alone thought of these or for the first time, but this idea that let’s try, let’s experiment with some new ways around public safety, and let’s get some data, and then let’s figure out which ones those we can scale, and which ones don’t work, and that’s his effort in possibility government in the service of public safety in St. Paul.
BRIAN KENNY: And this is definitely sort of at the core of your book, this idea that people need to take responsibility for this. They need to act, they need to be part of the solution to the problem.
MITCH WEISS: It is, if we’re going to move towards possibility, we have to move together. We need public leaders like Melvin Carter, who are willing to take on novel approaches. He says, “Look, what we’re doing at public safety in St. Paul is not working. We have amazing people doing the work, but what we’re doing overall is obviously not working. We spent 30 more million dollars today than we did when I first got elected city councilor, do you feel $30 million safer? And if you don’t, let’s think of a new way to do this.” So he’s a possibility leader. He’s saying let’s find new ways of approaching the problems that face us, but if we’re going to move to possibility, we have to move together. He’s also saying, “I need you with me. I need your ideas. I need your encouragement. I need your co-participation. Do not just stand there and clap. You’re going to have to help.”
BRIAN KENNY: How has the community been responding to these ideas? I mean, are they engaged in the way that he needs them to be?
MITCH WEISS: Yeah, the community is engaged. He holds all these sessions in community around public safety. They weigh in, they don’t always agree with him. He benefits from hearing from their perspective one way or the other, but I’m not going to say it’s easy. I mean, to the issue of facing him in the case, is at what level should he fund the St. Paul police department? How many sworn officers should there be? And he’s got people in the community who are saying, “We have rising gun involved homicides, you need to have police officers.” And he’s got people in community saying, “We need to reinvent this, policing as we know it is not working, and you should be taking those monies and putting them towards housing, towards health, towards education.” So he enlisted the community, he’s hearing from the community, he’s getting help from the community, and it’s not always smooth or easy, but he believes it’s absolutely essential.
BRIAN KENNY: Like most HBS cases, there’s no answer that’s evidenced at the end of this. I mean, that’s the question that the students are left to sort of figure out. In your experience, having been in a position within city government, what are some of the pushes or the tensions, the push and pull that you get, because it’s a highly politicized environment? As well-intended as Mayor Carter might be, as good as his ideas might be, there’s always going to be that opposing force that’s pushing back in the interest of winning the next election away from him.
MITCH WEISS: His biggest competition is the status quo and that’s understandable because people are afraid in their neighborhoods and want to be safe, and one of the ways that we help them be safe is by having brave, and well-equipped, and well-trained police officers. And so any public safety strategy, which begins to bring in other elements immediately gets people anxious about, well, what’s going to happen with policing? And that’s the issue this country is facing right now. There’s obviously a roiling debate, you alluded to it, about how we want to talk about policing, the words we want to use. When you’re the mayor of a city, how that manifests is, honestly not to make it small, is in your budget. At the end of the day, you have to decide how big is your police department going to be, what are they going to do? If people in this country want alternative ways of keeping people safe, social workers to respond to non-emergency calls, new education programs for youth, new job training programs, new ways to support communities with their physical environments so everybody can be safer, one of the questions that has to be on the table is, where is that money going to come from? In a typical city budget, maybe 60% of the budget is a police budget, and so I don’t think the country’s quite wrestled with the fact that… Well, they are wrestling with the fact that. We’re wrestling with it all right now. We want this new way of providing public safety that’s better and more fair. We also need to find ways to fund it. How much of that, or how little that do you want to come from police departments? That’s the issue facing many states in the country right now.
BRIAN KENNY: How would you coach them in terms of taking an idea and getting it to the next level? What are some of the things they should be thinking about?
MITCH WEISS: If we’re going to get towards possibility government, I think it’s basically three steps. There are three giant steps, but one, we need new ideas. Two, if we have those new ideas, we need to find ways of trying them. And three, if we find ways of trying them, we ultimately need to find ways to scale them so they help the many. In the case, Mayor Carter spends a year basically experimenting with these ideas. He sort of puts them into action so we can see how well they’re doing. And he’s very careful to say, if the data shows they’re not working, we’re not going to fund them, and if the data shows they are working, we’re going to try to find ways to scale them. I think that’s an important second step. And then we’re going to take the ones that work, we’re not only going to basically scale them on money, but we’re going to try to find ways maybe to use government as a platform, so to speak, to support them so that other people can join up. That’s what I would say to people, if you want to get engaged around possibility government, about solving problems in new ways, start with new ideas, think about how you can try them together, and then ultimately figure out how to scale them so they help everybody.
BRIAN KENNY: Mitch, this has been a great conversation and Mayor Carter is a really fascinating individual. Let me ask you to conclude just by telling our listeners, if there’s one thing you’d want them to take away from Mayor Carter’s case, what would it be?
MITCH WEISS: Well, I’ve said it couple of times already, but I think when he says, “Don’t clap if you’re not going to help.” We cannot solve the problems of the country unless everybody gets involved, and as a government leader, as a public leader, your job is not just to provide public service, it’s to figure out how you reshape government, so that it enlists friends, neighbors, community, in the provisioning of those public services, all of us together. There’s this line he quotes from Senator Paul Wellstone in his inaugural address, which I’ll re-quote here. He says, “We all do better when we all do better.” And I think that’s true, and I hope we can get there.
BRIAN KENNY: Thanks so much for joining us, Mitch.
MITCH WEISS: Thank you, Brian.
BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like other podcasts on the HBR Presents Network. Whether you’re looking for advice on navigating your career, you want the latest thinking in business and management, or you just want to hear what’s on the minds of Harvard Business School professors, the HBR Presents Network has a podcast for you. Find them on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School on the HBR Presents Network.