By Dana Rieck
Source St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS—Police Chief John Hayden will retire June 18, leaving Lt. Col. Michael Sack to take over leadership as interim chief of the region's largest police force, city leaders announced Wednesday morning.
Hayden, 59, will retire after a more than four-year term marked by a series of dramatic events that put a spotlight on the department, including police officers injured and killed and trials over officer conduct.
Interim St. Louis Public Safety Director Daniel Isom said Sack will serve as interim police chief while the administration continues a nationwide search for the department's next leader.
Sack has served as commander of the Bureau of Professional Standards and has been with the department for more than 27 years. He was one of two internal finalists for the chief job in the search that began last year — an effort St. Louis Mayor Tishaura O. Jones plans to reboot because she was dissatisfied with the narrow pool of candidates.
Isom and Jones thanked Hayden on Wednesday for his decades of service and expressed confidence in Sack.
"He has shown that he will stand for accountability for the St. Louis police department and help foster trust between police and the community," Isom said.
Sack made the news in 2018 when he was commander of the Bureau of Professional Standards after St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner claimed Sack thanked her for creating a list of 28 officers she would stop accepting cases from and prohibit from serving as witnesses because of "credibility" issues.
The St. Louis Police Officers Association was critical of Sack's involvement at the time.
The association's business manager, Jeff Roorda, published an article in the group's newsletter in August calling Sack a "sad sack" and criticizing his career.
But while the police union has been critical, the Ethical Society of Police on Wednesday called Sack's service commendable and said it expects to continue an open line of communication with Sack "to work to fill the gap between law enforcement and the community through this interim leadership."
The Ethical Society of Police is an association advocating for equality in the community and local police departments.
"We support Interim Chief Sack yet we will hold him accountable for our community and our officers during his time as Interim Chief as we've held Chief Hayden and previous chiefs accountable," ESOP wrote in a statement.
Isom said Wednesday that the city's Department of Personnel will hire executive search firm The Boulware Group to help with the national search for a chief. The Center for Policing Equity, an organization dedicated to police reform, will be an unpaid partner in the search, he said.
The Regional Business Council will pay the The Boulware Group $50,000 to $60,000 for the search, according to Nick Dunne, a Jones administration spokesman.
Sack said at Wednesday's news conference that he wanted to focus on curbing violence and maintaining integrity within the ranks.
"Our focus will continue to be as it has been on violent crime," he said. "Not just creating a wide swath through a community to effect arrests which can cause more harm than good, but identifying particular bad actors and developing cases ... ."
Hayden's retirement has been a long time coming. He said in September he would retire Feb. 23, the 35th anniversary of his employment with St. Louis police.
But conflict between the city's personnel department and the mayor's office delayed the national search for his replacement, and Hayden agreed to stay on longer than intended.
Hayden was appointed by former Mayor Lyda Krewson in December 2017 after a seven-month nationwide search.
A delayed search
Jones told the Post-Dispatch in January she was dissatisfied with having just two internal finalists for the job. The two, Sack and Lt. Col. Lawrence O'Toole, were selected in late 2021 by the city's personnel department, a uniquely independent bureau not directly answerable to the mayor's office.
O'Toole on Monday settled a discrimination lawsuit against the city, related to the previous appointment of a chief. The settlement states O'Toole will retire at the end of the week, thereby withdrawing his application to become chief. He will receive just under $162,000 from the city, which included back pay for what he would have made as chief and $25,000 in attorney's fees.
"I think we can all agree that the last search wasn't transparent and we would like to make sure that we cast a wider net," Jones said Wednesday. "I'm looking forward to working with Lt. Col. Sack in this interim role. I've had a chance to speak with him, and we share a lot of the same beliefs."
Jones said "it very well may be" that Sack is chosen as chief, but her administration has committed to conducting a transparent, national search that includes town halls and neighborhood meetings with a larger group of finalists for the job.
In the previous search, the personnel department was tasked with narrowing the pool of candidates to six finalists. The city's public safety director, a member of Jones' cabinet, was then supposed to pick from those six. Isom holds the role of interim director.
In late November, former personnel director Richard Frank sent rejection letters to most of about 30 applicants for the job and gave a written test to O'Toole and Sack, according to police and city sources.
Both are white men with long careers in leadership with the department. Jones had emphasized the need for a national search and diversity in the candidate pool.
Jones in February appointed a new interim personnel director, John Moten, after a change to city rules.
Under Moten's tenure, the department has been tight-lipped about the progress of the police chief search.
Hayden's tenure
Under Hayden's leadership, the department has weathered officer deaths, high-profile police misconduct investigations and a pandemic. He also led the department through 2020, a year with the city's highest homicide rate on record, followed by a significant reduction in criminal killings in 2021.
Major events included:
- The fatal shooting of St. Louis police Officer Katlyn Alix by fellow Officer Nathaniel Hendren in January 2019. Hendren pleaded guilty in March to involuntary manslaughter and admitted that he shot Alix in a Russian roulette-style game at his apartment while he was on duty.
- Local protests following a national call for police reform after the death in 2020 of George Floyd during an arrest in Minneapolis. The most violent night, June 1, 2020, culminated in looters shooting four St. Louis police officers and killing David Dorn, a retired police captain working security at a pawn shop.
- The death of St. Louis police Officer Tamarris L. Bohannon in the line of duty in August 2020. Bohannon, 29, was responding to a shooting call in the Tower Grove South neighborhood when he was shot by a man barricaded in a home.
- Three St. Louis police officers went on trial in 2021 after being accused of involvement in the beating and arrest of St. Louis Detective Luther Hall when he was undercover during a September 2017 protest before Hayden was chief. One officer, Dustin Boone, was found guilty in June of a federal civil rights charge. Hall settled a civil lawsuit against city police for $5 million.
When Hayden announced his departure in September, he said that his shake-up of the department command staff, including those leading the internal misconduct investigations, was his greatest accomplishment as chief.
His greatest challenge in the role, he said, was hiring new police officers.
Hayden for years lobbied the Missouri Legislature to remove the requirement that St. Louis police officers live in the city, which he argued was a barrier to recruitment and retention. In September 2020, Gov. Mike Parson signed a bill into law that lifted the requirement for St. Louis police and firefighters until at least 2023.
But that change didn't solve the department's recruiting problems. The total officer count fell by more than 165 officers during Hayden's tenure to 1,093 officers as of this month.
Hayden's initial, widely publicized crime-fighting strategy centered on an approach soon dubbed "Hayden's rectangles."
The strategy focused police attention on a broad area in north St. Louis, roughly in the shape of a rectangle, that Hayden said was responsible for the majority of the city's homicides, carjackings and other acts of violence. In 2018, he announced an expansion of the strategy, targeting downtown and a section around Cherokee Street.
The strategy came under scrutiny for a lack of data supporting the selection of the areas.
More recently, Hayden changed the "rectangles" approach to focus on what he called "mission zones," smaller areas of increased enforcement that can be shifted more quickly in response to upticks in crime.
During Hayden's four full years as chief, 2018 through 2021, the homicide rate increased by 19% compared with the four years prior.
The criminal homicide rate was the highest on record in 2020, amid a national surge at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, at 87 homicides per 100,000 people. It fell to a rate of 68 per 100,000 people last year.
In retirement, Hayden says he plans to spend more time with his family. He and his wife, Michelle, have been married for nearly 30 years and have three daughters.
"I don't have any immediate plans after retirement," Hayden told the Post-Dispatch in January. "I was hoping just to put the phone down for a while after having been on 24-hour-a-day call for probably better than 20 years or so."
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