On Tuesday, October 6, Normandy Police Department held a ceremony to receive its state accreditation. “The accreditation is a way to effectively measure our policing services,” said Normandy Police Chief Frank Mininni.
The department began working on its state certification through the Missouri Police Chiefs Charitable Foundation (MPCCF) in 2010 – years before municipal police departments in St. Louis County were nationally criticized by the Department of Justice and the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF).
According to the City of Normandy, the Normandy Police Department was the 14th in the state to accomplish certification, and there are currently 30 other Missouri police departments working toward this goal.
According to Better Together St. Louis, 75 percent of the police departments in St. Louis city and county are not accredited. There are 198 standards in the written MPCCF accreditation. Police departments have to rewrite their own stands to incorporate those of the MPCCF. Senate Bill 5 requires that all police departments in the county get accredited.
Normandy has 31 full-time officers who also patrol five nearby municipalities. As Huffington Post reported earlier this year, that area encompasses less than three square miles, according to a report PERF did for Better Together St. Louis. That means Normandy has more than 10 officers per square mile and more than four officers per 1,000 people – much higher than the national average.
Mininni, who has served as Normandy Police chief since 2009, said the department wanted to improve before the unrest in Ferguson. “We asked: How do we distance ourselves from under-performing departments?” Mininni told The American.
HuffPost also reported PERF data that the Normandy Police Department has an annual budget of $2 million and that its municipal court was reaping $1.6 million as of a few years ago.
Mininni admitted that many people complained about receiving excessive tickets, and that’s when the department looked into the state certification process.
In January, PERF and Better Together St. Louis organized a town hall on how to improve police-community relations. Mininni attended the meeting in University City. He told The American then that officers need to stop living in a “bubble of police culture.”
“It’s not about traffic tickets, it’s not about heavy-handed enforcement. It’s about a relationship,” said Mininni. “In the city of Normandy, we go to schools, we teach there. We go there to eat lunch with the kids, we play with them at recess.”
Mininni echoed those words in a recent phone interview with The American.
“If you can’t get outside that bubble and learn what people want and how people would like to be policed, you’re not doing a service to the community or the police department,” said Mininni. “And you’re really setting up a lose-lose situation.”
Since he started police work in 1997, Mininni said the region has lacked in professional policing. “That’s the main problem in this area, is that they under-perform,” said Mininni.
The process of state certification process has taken Normandy five years to complete.
“There wasn’t a crystal ball saying that in 2015 you had to do it,” said Mininni. “I think we were ahead of the curve there.”
Patrick Green, mayor of Normandy, said he hopes that Normandy will be an example to neighboring police departments.
“If you do it and do it right, it will drop crime,” Green said of state certification for police.
Mininni said the process reflects the public’s increased scrutiny of police work, especially in minority communities. About 70 percent of Normandy’s population of about 5,000 is black.
“People think it’s a certificate you put in the wall. This is about accountability. This is about making sure people are putting transparency in a police process,” Mininni told The American.
“State certification is important because it says you can’t recycle people anymore. People need to understand there are people looking in from the outside at your own people.”
This story is published as part of a partnership between The Huffington Post and The St. Louis American.
