When Jack Serier graduated from Stillwater Area High School and headed to Hamline University in 1986, he thought about becoming a history professor or maybe getting into business.
Law enforcement wasn’t on Serier’s radar until he happened into a university security job and had a chance to ride along with St. Paul police officers.
“It captured my imagination — it was a combination of the excitement of it but also helping people,” Serier said. “I always had service in my heart from being a young kid, from being a Boy Scout. I saw a pathway for me to do that.”
Now, after 26 years of working in law enforcement, Serier is Ramsey County’s new sheriff. The Ramsey County Board of Commissioners unanimously voted Tuesday to appoint Serier, 48, as the county’s 22nd sheriff.
Serier, most recently the sheriff’s office chief deputy, will serve out the remaining two years of Sheriff Matt Bostrom’s term. Bostrom retired last week and the next election for sheriff will be in 2018.
The Ramsey county sheriff’s office has 400 employees and a $54 million budget. Deputies provides policing services to seven cities — Arden Hills, Gem Lake, Little Canada, North Oaks, Shoreview, Vadnais Heights and White Bear Township. The office’s other duties include running the jail, maintaining courthouse security, apprehending people with warrants, serving legal documents on people and patrolling the county’s waterways.
After graduating from Hamline University in 1990, Serier worked as an officer at the Stillwater, Eagan and then St. Paul police departments. He earned his master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of St. Thomas and reached the rank of commander at St. Paul police. He began working at the Ramsey County sheriff’s office in 2011.
Serier recently sat down with the Pioneer Press to talk about his path to becoming sheriff and his plans for the sheriff’s office. The interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
How did you get into law enforcement?
I was a freshman at Hamline and realized I needed a job for some extra spending money. It was quite a walk to get to stuff, but I thought, “OK, I’ll walk down to Rainbow or somewhere over in the Midway area to look for a place to work” and then all of a sudden there’s a job posting on campus for a security officer.
There was a retired police chief who had just taken over the previous summer as the security director and he put us through a mini academy. He also arranged for us to have ride alongs with St. Paul police officers. I thought, “Well, nobody in my family’s ever been in law enforcement, I couldn’t be, but boy that was sure cool.” The next year I did another ride along and that got me even more interested.
What will be your biggest priorities over the next two years, as you complete Sheriff Bostrom’s term?
One of the top ones is to work with the county board and our staff to deal with our detention center staffing issues. We’re on a path to do that. Out of respect for the county board, I need to present to them a number of different things in the next couple of months and they will need to give us feedback. … Our people have performed admirably under a lot of stress. The thing that actually has kept me up at night over the last year has been staffing at the jail.
No. 2 is to continue our work on the Blueprint for Safety (a comprehensive approach to handling domestic-violence cases).
Another thing that’s very important to me is mental health in law enforcement services. That’s changed dramatically from when I became an officer — we didn’t have that many mental health calls early on. We also see it in our detention center. There are people that end up there because of their lack of ability to cope, lack of support and they end up committing crimes. This is not the best place for them. The best place for them is in the care of mental health professionals and so trying to expedite getting folks out of detention and into a more appropriate setting for their mental health issues to be addressed is really a top priority for me.
What are the solutions you’re looking at for under-staffing at the jail?
There’s a number of different things. One of the intermediate to long-term solutions is trying to reduce the population of the jail and part of that will be getting people who don’t belong here — people who have mental health issues — moving them to other places where everybody will be able to help them better. So when you start to decrease that, that helps the number of staffing people that you need on shift.
Another big piece we’ll be looking at are the optimal number of staff we need to meet the number of people we have in custody. We’ve typically relied on overtime to fill staff vacancies that normally occur, but with our current jail populations, that does not work long term.
You also worked with Bostrom on character-based hiring and said you plan to continue it. How do you square that stated priority with some cases in recent years of current or former deputies who have wound up on the wrong side of the law, including the deputy convicted of beating his K-9 partner?
Well, I don’t see them at odds. When you look at our character model, that’s also an accountability model. I don’t think you’ll find anybody here that doesn’t believe that I hold people accountable when they do something that is in violation of our character model or of our guiding principles or our policy.
We also want people to hold themselves accountable and we try to equip them with the understanding. I told the academy (which started last week for deputies and correctional officers) that if you take four things — respect, responsibility, honor and truth — and you etch them in your heart and every time you take a step, you think, “Did what I just do or what I’m about to do, did that line up with those four principles?” And if the answer is “Yes,” you’re going to do pretty well.
How do you spend your time when you’re not working?
One of my hobbies is being an ethics professor. I teach for St. Mary’s University as an undergraduate ethics professor and I also do one class a year over at the University of St. Thomas in the graduate program and for me that’s like a mental vacation.
Beyond that, I love traveling to Colorado and Utah. My wife and I get out there every year. We used to a lot more with our kids too, but now that they’re both adults (18 and 20 years old), those opportunities aren’t going to be as frequent.
I’m not built as a runner, but I do like it. Every summer I train and then every fall my wife and I participate — and I say “participate,” we don’t try to race to win — in the American Birkebeiner half-marathon trail run. It’s a great way for my wife and I to spend time together. She’s always been my training buddy.
I was a Scout Master for many years, but I put a sunset on it this last year. My son became an Eagle Scout and it was just kind of time. I had about 22 kids that I started with that were Tiger Cubs and I saw about five of them become Eagle Scouts and that was an incredible experience.
Is there anything else you’d want people to know about you?
I’m really honored that the county board gave me an opportunity to serve in Matt Bostrom’s stead. My goal is to do right by the folks that work here and also by all the communities. People are counting on us each and every day and I want to assure folks that they can continue to count on the sheriff’s office to serve them.