St. Paul's next police chief faces great expectations

St. Paul's new police chief, Thomas Smith, is fit and educated and mentors at-risk youth. Perhaps the biggest skeleton in his closet is that a nun once beat him in an arm-wrestling match.

Sure, Smith was in junior high at the time, but the nun? She was 40.

"I don't know if he challenged me, or I challenged him, but whatever, we had our arm-wrestle and I won," said Sister Anne Becker, now 77, who was Smith's music teacher at St. Matthew's School on the city's West Side. "It was easy."

Smith, a West Side native who married his high school sweetheart and lives in his childhood home, will take over as police chief this month. He'll face immense expectations but he'll have some challenges, most notably managing what's expected to be a lean budget and balancing the responsibilities of his new job with the accessibility citizens praise him for.

He has served as assistant chief for the past three years under Chief John Harrington, who is expected to step down about midmonth.

During a spike in youth crime one summer, Smith was instrumental in moving the West Side police substation from a remote location in a nursing home to the more accessible Neighborhood House, which attracts a lot of teens, said Martha Elena Varela, executive director of the West Side Safe Neighborhood Council.

"He's involved, he's there, he's listening," she said. "I'm sure it might be a challenge for him to balance it all, but I look at it as a good thing."

Born to an Irish-American mother and an African-American father who was possibly part American Indian, Smith was adopted as a baby by Jean and Walter Smith, a German, Norwegian and "all over the map" white couple from St. Paul.

His tight curls and darker complexion stood out against his sky blue eyes. His younger brother, Richard Smith, 50, also was adopted as a baby, and both knew they were adopted. There was some mild teasing, said Richard Smith, who is white.

"If you saw the two of us together, the first thing people said was, 'You're brothers?'" said Richard Smith.

Straightforward guy

Childhood friend James Brengman said Thomas Smith was a well-liked, honest kid.

"He didn't do it in an accusatory way," Brengman said with a laugh. "He just did it to let you know you were out of line."

Despite being surrounded in his neighborhood by police officers and firefighters, whom he respected, Smith said he didn't grow up wanting to be a cop. Some run-ins with police as a teen, mostly for violating curfew, didn't go well.

"I had a bad perception of police officers," Smith said. "They used fear."

That changed when he was 17 and was treated well by two officers who pulled him over for violating curfew.

Began as a prison guard

"I knew he was a great candidate," Finney said.

He joined the department in 1989, and with Finney's guidance, was assigned to increasingly more challenging jobs, including head of the SWAT team and senior commander of the Western District.

"It's easy to be liked, but Tom is the kind of guy who makes the right decision and then people understand why -- even if it's not best for the person," said retired Assistant Chief Thomas Reding, who supervised Smith.

As chief, Smith said, he wants to increase department diversity and create an "education-based" disciplinary system so officers get training to learn from their mistakes. He also wants to reach out to the city's growing Karen population, many of whom are from Burma.

He has been described as a workaholic, but Smith said it's key that he spend time with his family, exercise regularly and read, especially on the topic of military history. (His father was a World War II veteran.) In the Smith household, everyone sits down for dinner every Sunday. And yes, he often cooks.

It's unknown who'd win that arm-wrestling match, however.