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ONGOING COVERAGE: POLICE CHIEF SEARCH

Ethics are priority for chief candidate

Rochester's top cop is Spokane finalist

Roger Peterson is one of four finalists for the position of Spokane chief of police. (Elizabeth Nida Rochester Post-Bulletin ) Related information Read more

Thomas Clouse
Staff writer
July 6, 2006

This is the second story in a four-part series.

ROCHESTER, Minn. – When one of his officers pulled what he thought was his Taser but instead shot an unarmed man in the back, Rochester Police Chief Roger Peterson did what he always does when his department makes a mistake.

Apologize.

"Regardless of what led up to it, if you hurt somebody you didn't mean to hurt, you say you are sorry," said Peterson, 47, who believes his apology did not influence the city's decision to settle the case with the Sudanese refugee for nearly $1 million. "I think there is a moral obligation to admit the mistake."

A straight-talking Midwesterner who spends most of his off nights playing hockey, Peterson is widely credited with bringing a greater sense of ethics, professionalism and community trust to the Rochester police force during his eight years at the department's helm.

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Now, he's one of four finalists for the job of Spokane police chief.

Encouraged to apply for the position by the corporate recruiter hired by Spokane City Hall to help find retired Chief Roger Bragdon's replacement, Peterson is the only out-of-state candidate to make it this far. The job pays up to $140,000 annually.

Rochester, home of the internationally recognized Mayo Clinic, is an affluent community of about 94,950 located 80 miles south of Minneapolis. Nearly 40 percent of the adult population has at least a four-year college degree. There are more jobs than residents to fill them, meaning thousands of workers commute into Rochester each day.

The crime rate is substantially lower than Spokane's. It had no homicides last year, for example, and most burglaries get investigated.

It's a city filled with well-kept homes on tree-lined streets. Hospitals and hotels are the only structures tall enough to break up the Midwest skyline, which sports a water tower painted to resemble a gigantic ear of corn.

Peterson, who is the city's third police chief in 53 years, has spent his entire 25-year law enforcement career in Rochester.

Why would he consider leaving? Those who know him say Peterson's successes have made him a highly sought-after law enforcement executive, and they recognize his time in Rochester could be limited.

"He's an extremely smart man," said Capt. Brian Winters, who has worked his entire career with Peterson. "But he has an uncanny ability to educate himself on issues and put them in a street-smart context."

Peterson even gets high marks from the criminal defense lawyers who represent the suspects arrested by his officers.

"I think he's a good leader," said Assistant Public Defender Bill Wright. "Your community would be gaining a real asset."

It's not exactly a lock that he would take the job in Spokane if it is offered to him. And the answer is an unequivocal "no" if the department doesn't have a hockey team, he joked.

But Peterson suggested the transition could be a smooth one, even to a department more accustomed to promoting internal candidates.

"I think there is a universal among police officers: Tell me what you expect of me, and I'll tell you what I expect of you and we'll get along just fine," Peterson said. "It's the unknown that causes the frustration and the apprehension. With me, there are no mysteries. I put everything on the table."

Peterson believes in holding his officers accountable to the same laws they enforce. He prefers that other jurisdictions make determinations about the actions of his officers. And anyone who makes a complaint will get an answer.

"That might or might not fit with what Spokane wants," he said. "If it doesn't fit, (it's) good to know that now."

The son of a military family, Peterson moved 17 times before his high school graduation. He earned his bachelor's degree in criminology, with a minor in psychology, from the University of Minnesota Duluth.

He started as a patrol officer in Rochester after earning his degree in 1981.

Peterson remarried two years ago after a divorce. He has a 17-year-old daughter and twin 22-year-old sons in the Army's 101st Airborne in Iraq. One of his sons is stationed in Kirkuk and the other in Tikrit.

Peterson's passion for police work has been investigations. He has spent the bulk of his career either as an investigator or supervising the detectives who investigate violent crimes.

During that time, Peterson said, he learned a valuable lesson in community involvement.

During a particularly bad stretch one summer, Peterson said he was paged at home for nine straight weekends to deal with violent crimes in the same neighborhood. As a result, Peterson asked his captain for another investigator.

Instead, the captain said he was going to assign an officer to the troubled area, with orders to get to know the residents, landlords and even gang members. "I said, 'You've got to be crazy. I'm up to my eyeballs here in violent crimes. I need an investigator,' " Peterson said.

After the department put the beat cop into that neighborhood, crimes dropped 70 percent and Peterson began to enjoy his weekends.

"It doesn't make me look like a genius, because I was the guy saying that's a stupid idea," Peterson said. "But I do have the quality of learning from experience. That's what ultimately led to my deploying that strategy throughout the city."

In 1998, Peterson was promoted to deputy chief. That job lasted six months before the chief announced his retirement after 12 years.

City leaders eventually chose Peterson over two other candidates: a local FBI agent and Alan Chertok, from Newport News, Va., who had two master's degrees and a Fulbright fellowship.

Spokane later hired Chertok to replace Terry Mangan as police chief. But in 1999, he quit under pressure just nine months later and received a $65,000 severance package from Spokane taxpayers.

Peterson had two peaceful weeks as chief before controversy struck.

One of his officers pursued a suspect who parked in a dark alley. The suspect jumped into the back seat of his SUV, which had tinted windows, and reached for something. The officer used his gun to smash the window. The gun discharged, striking the man – who turned out to be a Mayo Clinic doctor – in the face.

That officer and the other officer, who in 2002 accidentally shot the Sudanese man, continue to work for the department even after the city agreed to pay the Sudanese man $900,000.

"There are two things that get you fired on our department," Peterson said. "One is malicious conduct … which is intentionally hurting someone without just cause. And the other is dishonesty."

The officer who mistook his gun for the Taser "made an absolutely egregious error. But it wasn't malicious. It wasn't dishonest," Peterson said. "If you make a mistake in good faith, we will work diligently to find out what went wrong, and we will fix what went wrong."

Peterson imposed a policy to cite his officers for traffic violations while they are on duty.

"It generated a whole bunch of rhetoric about how officers, with all the other stuff they have to do … should not be held to that standard," he said. "My response was, if you can explain … why they should be exempted from that with any explanation that does not include 'because they are cops,' I'll be happy to listen.

"But failing that, there is no other word for that but corruption."

Peterson has not dodged controversy in this town, where almost every pedestrian wears a name tag from a hospital or hotel.

Peterson agreed to be part of a 2003 racial profiling study by the University of Minnesota Law School that found black drivers were three times more likely to be pulled over than whites in Rochester.

Peterson called the study flawed because it relied on the 2000 Census as a baseline for racial makeup for the city, which has recently seen an influx of refugees and immigrants from Somalia and Sudan to work in the city's burgeoning hotel industry. Many members of that minority population do not report themselves as black, but they are listed that way on traffic stops, Peterson said, skewing the baseline.

Secondly, Peterson argued with the premise of the study: to show that people who have little education or income have fewer opportunities because they have more contact with police.

"It's not a question whether it's a huge social justice problem," Peterson said of racial profiling. "But it's a difference of viewpoint. When you have a high-crime area, it's synonymous with a low-income area. Unfortunately, it's also disproportionately people of color who live in those areas."

Peterson sends his officers toareas that have the most crime. "Huge economic disparities in education and income are not caused by police conduct. Police conduct is a result of that condition," he said. "It's really important to distinguish that."

Peterson pointed out that he could have avoided all controversy by simply refusing to participate in the study, which is what the vast majority of Minnesota law enforcement agencies did.

"I firmly believe that police departments cannot be effective unless they are first fair," he said. "That's where you put your emphasis."