ONS Director Blakey Reflects on Three Years of Neighborhood Safety

When I interviewed ONS Director Brooke Blakey for the ONS Podcast earlier this month, just a few days before she stepped down from her role on October 17, I made a "Johnson & Johnson rule"-no tears! But the conversation quickly got emotional for both of us. (Fortunately, our producer Anton was ready with a box of tissues.)

While Director Blakey is leaving the work of ONS in the capable hands of our team, we will deeply miss her leadership.

Listen to the Podcast ↗️

A Stunning Success

The approach to community safety Director Blakey pioneered at ONS is working. So far in 2025, there has been a 33% drop in Saint Paul homicides over the previous year. Even more remarkably, the SPPD has cleared 73% of non-fatal shootings, an almost unheard-of success rate in policing. "A lot of people attribute that to the police department, which I do too, because they're doing their work," she told me. "But we're working with them."

Before ONS, when violence happened in Saint Paul, police sometimes struggled to persuade members of the community to cooperate with their investigations. By partnering with community organizations and hiring people who live in Saint Paul communities, ONS changed what the City's response to violence looks and feels like.

One key link in that partnership is our Project PEACE group violence intervention work, under the leadership of Faith Lofton. Her team sends life coaches into the community to build relationships with young people who are likely to get drawn into violence.

"Those life coaches out there are why our gun violence is down," Director Blakey said. "We are working with young people … in ways that no one has ever worked with them before. And they are coming to the table because we deliver. Those are the things that have kept community safe."

Combating Violence Far Upstream

Mayor Carter and the City Council established ONS to lead the City's implementation of recommendations from the Citizens League and the Community-First Public Safety Commission.

"In the beginning," Director Blakey told me, "we had our marching orders from the Mayor and from community about reducing gun violence-that tangible crime that they're seeing every day. We just jumped in headfirst into that. We talked to national leaders, we looked at our data, and we put our heads down and got started."

Combating gun violence turned out to be about much more than just guns. "We started to look at what was causing gun violence, and we saw these underlying social determinants. Quality housing. Opioid and drug addiction. Mental health. Reentry from juvenile correction." Community partners who worked on those issues existed, but weren't getting supported by the City. So ONS became what Director Blakey calls the "fix-it department."

A Whole-City Approach

The first order of business was to build relationships with the people and agencies who had the power to help fix things, from Planning and Economic Development to Parks and Recreation to the Public Library. "Having to explain our existence and why we were there was one of the first barriers," Director Blakey recalled. "But eventually our work started to speak for itself, and people started calling us. It was ONS this and ONS that."

Leading the charge to reimagine public safety across a city the size of Saint Paul was a massive responsibility, and Director Blakey was the public face of the effort. "People were like, 'okay, now you did it, now go!'" she told me. "I had to prove myself, but we also want to do it right so that it stays. One of the biggest things that I learned was just asking for grace-and sometimes demanding it."

When people in the City government and the community came to her for help, she had to tell them, "'I know what you want and I hear you loud and clear, but it takes time.' I reminded people, the police department and the fire department have had over a hundred years, and they still get things wrong! I wanted to make sure that ONS was given that same grace, to get a foothold in and do the work. It's a marathon, it's not a sprint."

Grace was given, and ONS kept running-to extraordinary effect.

Winning, in the Background

This year's dramatic increase in safety throughout Saint Paul is just the most visible result of the work ONS does behind the scenes to build community trust and safety. "Because we've been successful in bringing down gun violence," said Director Blakey, "now we do more things with schools, a lot more of that upstream preventative work."

Three local schools have already joined our Goals Not Guns initiative, with more schools to come. Through our partnership with the local youth-led nonprofit World Youth Connect, Saint Paul youth leaders teamed up with scholars from Harvard's Government Performance Lab to develop new metrics for public safety, work they won a $100,000 grant to continue.

"We have hired young people who have signed pledges to stay gun-free, some that have been gun-involved before. In our unsheltered work, we have housed 35 hard-to-house people"-an accomplishment our colleague Chris Michels accomplished with a team of only three people.

There's more. "The work the Neighborhood Safety Community Council did with Parks and Rec and Libraries is another thing I'm super-proud of," Director Blakey added. " We've been doing victim services for a lot of things, not just gun violence, which is where we started-helping families that were affected by fire, folks that were displaced by closing buildings. We have had our hands in everything. And when that lens opens, you start to see such a bigger picture of things outside of gun violence reduction."

A consistent challenge for ONS is to communicate the successes of our work without harming the people at the heart of it. Director Blakey emphasized the importance of "being very conscious about how we celebrate those wins, because it can sometimes get exploitative. But you should feel a little safer."

That feeling of safety, for every person in every neighborhood, is the true measure of ONS's success.

The Future of Neighborhood Safety in Saint Paul

As the first employee Director Blakey hired at ONS, I can tell you from experience that she deserves a break. Fighting the good fight to keep our neighborhoods safe can be draining, mentally and physically. Loving people, caring about community, and trying to find all the answers can be exhausting. That's why I think of Director Blakey as more than a superhero. Spiderman gets to be Peter Parker, Superman gets to be Clark Kent, but Brooke Blakey had to be herself 24/7-fielding calls from traumatized residents in the middle of the night, showing up to scenes of violence and heartbreak.

"I am looking forward to a full night of sleep," she said. "I don't think I've had one in 20 years."

At the end of our interview, I asked Director Blakey to imagine a future Saint Paul, where the work she began at the Office of Neighborhood Safety has continued successfully.

"First things first," she said, "neighborhood safety would definitely be a standalone office. It would hold its own, like a police department. It would be dispatched just like 911. It wouldn't be talked about as a 'program,' it would just naturally be the norm."

A generation from now, she envisions a future where a stand-alone Neighborhood Safety department is just expected part of City government, "treated just like we treat the Fire Department, Public Works, Parks and Rec. It's part of that whole package, worthy of being funded the same way." Not just here, she says, but in every city. "For the City of Saint Paul, it will be the legacy I left that ONS is still there. It wasn't me-dependent; it is just engrained into the everyday fabric of what the City is."

In conclusion, I want to express my own gratitude to Director Blakey. She has challenged us to believe that public safety belongs to all of Saint Paul government-not just police, fire, and EMT-and to the communities we serve. She inspires me to remember, every day, that we all have a job to do to build safer neighborhoods. That's why we're out here doing the work.

Lynnaia Jacobsen
Manager, Neighborhood Safety Community Council

Last Edited: October 24, 2025