Excerpts from an oral hisory of

Captain
Wilfred O. Jyrkas

Part III - Early Community Policing

There were some other places that were hard. We had an island on the west side, The Flats. They used to call them, The Flats or State Street, Filmore and some of the streets south of downtown. There was an island that went out in the Mississippi that isn’t there anymore. There was no law on that island, literally.

I don’t think anybody had a phone, it was all squatters, lots of dogs, and there was one guy who called himself Scotty and he tried to kind of be the cop, he’d call us every once in awhile and we’d go down. And, when you got out of the car, you got out of the car with a nightstick in your hand, because you usually had to whack a stray dog or two to get to find out what was going on.

There was a lot of weird things happen. One day they caught Scotty and tied him to a fencepost with barbed wire. We got the call and went down there and freed him up. But it was his pals. They were all alcoholics and kind of that day’s homeless people, except they had these shacks and hovels and they would exist by taking this spoiled and damaged fruit and vegetables out of the rail cars and that kind of thing.

Squad 318 was assigned to The Flats. It was kind of an interesting neighborhood in a lot of ways. Those people were very poor, most of them. These old houses looked pretty tacky, some had literally sunk right into the mother earth and the doors didn’t open good half the time and I don’t think you could lock them very good, it was pretty bad. But it was pretty well crime free during the week, we didn’t have much activity then. But payday night, Friday night, Saturday night, we had a tavern called the Buck of the Blood, we had some pretty good fights in there and it was pretty wild sometimes.

The neighborhood itself had a mix of people in it, later on it became predominantly Mexican and then after that Latinos of different kinds. At the time that I was down there, we had Lebanese people and we had quite a few Jewish people mixed in, really that’s not a nationality, I think most of them were from Russia, a few Blacks, a few Indians.

To police The Flats you started out with one or two people that seemed to trust you. We’d go by and, for instance, if the day was nice the Lebanese people were probably out with a grill, which nobody else grilled in those days, but they were out making this flat bread that they make and barbequing a little piece of lamb. We’d stop and they’d invite us up, we’d come up and have a little lamb with them and bread. We had more time then. You’ve got to have more time to get with the people, you can’t establish anything driving by holding a steering wheel and looking straight ahead, or even just stopping and asking somebody how is everything, everybody says fine or don’t say anything to you. You have to have time to develop a little friendship between them.

And when you get to know one or two, then you start to know their children. Then you don’t have to run to the station with everything, you can say, “Hey Joe, I saw your boy, Dave, down here, I don’t know, he’s hanging with some pretty rough characters, you maybe better keep a closer eye on him.” And, all of a sudden you were one less person on that street gang. I don’t know what went on and we didn’t want to ask. But I think that’s the core to it, you’ve got to establish some kind of friendship.

Now, some of the things were harder to make any in-roads in, the merchants, of course, we tried to go into almost every merchant once during your tour. Not to pester, the trick was don’t stay in there and be something that spoils his business, but stop in and let the neighborhood know you’re friends with him. You can stop in several merchants every day even if you’re a patrol car, walk in and say, “How is things going? You got any problems? Anybody pestering you?” And, first they won’t say much of anything, pretty soon, about the second or third time you stop and do that, they’ve got something to say -- better watch this guy, that so and so, he’s been hanging around, I don’t like the way he acts at all. “Oh,” so you got a little tip there, so you know a little bit about him before he committed crimes, many times, you knew where he lived, you knew things, so that helped considerably. And, I’ve always been proud, it seems to me in Saint Paul, when a crime happens, not every time, but if this person is a local, we got him picked up within forty-eight hours. Other cities, don’t all do that.

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