ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. — Mary Barton is becoming the St. Louis County Police Department’s top cop at a tumultuous time in her department, and the world.
Homicide totals have reached record highs.
Her predecessor, Chief Jon Belmar, has taken heavy criticism following a landmark $20 million jury verdict in a discrimination lawsuit involving a gay police officer.
And revenue streams are evaporating as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, decimating sales tax pools and other resources.
But, as the silver eagle pins reserved for the highest rank in policing shined on her collar Thursday, Barton didn’t do much looking back and focused on moving forward.
She’s had 41 years of service with the department, so she knows what her first mission is going to be:
Mentorship.
“Thirty years ago my boss told me, ‘You’re either going to die in this precinct or you're going to go to the detective bureau,’ so do it for me,” she recalled. “He saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself.
“So, that’s one of the things that I have always thought as I came up. There was a lack of people helping to keep people – for lack of a better phrase – from walking off a cliff or doing something really incredibly dumb. I would really like to engage in professional development of the people here."
Succession planning is also top of mind for Barton.
"When there’s only one person who knows how to do a job, and when that person walks out, gets hit by a bus or something happens, there's nobody that knows how to do that job. That's terrible.”
When it comes to crime-fighting, Barton said she believes the department needs to do a better job using technology and non-conventional ways to police. She said she favors the use of cameras, ShotSpotter – a program that detects locations of gunshots – and regional information sharing.
“I’m not a fan of wasting money or people's time,” she said. “So, if you can save time and money to me, then you've really won and you can move forward that way.
“I think that moving forward, regional information and criminal intelligence sharing is vital because crime crosses boundary lines and it would be good to know that you're having the same problem as three municipalities next to you.”
Barton also believes a regional approach to policing in general is the only way police departments, including hers, are going to survive the impending economic crisis headed their way.
One of the biggest boosts to the county police department’s bottom line was the passage of Prop P in 2017. It pumped close to $50 million into the department’s budget but has already been overspent and is based on sales tax revenues – which the pandemic has sent plummeting.
“If we can do the same job together, more efficiently and more effectively and faster or better? I don't see a problem with that,” she said. “I don't know how other people see that, but I don't see a problem with that."
She declined to get specific on her ideas for collaborating with other departments as well as her crime fighting philosophies because she said she wanted to share them first with her administration.
But, she said, she believes there is a lot of redundancy in policing locally, especially after serving 25 years with the Major Case Squad. The experience put her in touch with most of the area's more than 60 local departments, so she believes buying equipment and other resources all departments could use is one way to save money.
“I think that you're going to see more of it because people just can't survive by themselves when everybody's compromised," she said.
Survival in a male dominated profession is also something Barton is familiar with, but she's not one to dwell on it.
To her, it’s not so much survival.
It’s stubbornness.
“I realize it has been very hard for women coming up through the ranks and there aren't a lot of women in high positions because they get tired and they quit,” she said. “I get it.
"I think that a lot of the reason I'm still here is I refuse to leave. I wanted to be a policeman since I was 8 years old and nobody was going to tell me I couldn't do it. So, I just stuck it out, out of sheer stubbornness, I think.”
Barton has experience in almost every facet of the force of about 900 commissioned officers.
She became the department’s first female captain in 2009 and hasn’t been promoted since.
Until now.
She joins a growing minority of women in command positions nationally. In 2018, there were only 12 women at the helm of the country’s 100 largest cities, according to an NBC analysis.
“One of the interesting things that happened to me after I got promoted to chief was people who had retired many, many years ago, reached out to me that I hadn't seen or talked to in years to tell me, ‘That's just really great. I'm so glad you're chief and I'm glad you never gave up and I'm glad you stood in there and fought. And you know what? That's what I'm telling other women, stand in there and fight because it's worth it.”
And that boss she had 30 years ago who told her to aim higher than a precinct? He’s been in touch, too.
He told her: “I always knew you were smart. And I always knew you wouldn’t give up.”
