Jason Sole says he saw way too much growing up on Chicago’s South Side.

Without warning, classmates would be permanently gone from school. In fifth grade, his friend killed her father to stop his attack on her mother. In sixth grade, a girl died of an asthma attack. In eighth grade, a boy on his basketball team who everyone looked up to was killed due to gang violence. And that was only the beginning.

“Trauma, upon trauma, upon trauma,” Sole said recently in St. Paul. “It was like we were dying and nobody seemed to care. But we had glimmers of hope.”

One glimmer for Sole was Chicago’s first black mayor Harold Washington. Now — decades later — Sole is working for St. Paul’s first black mayor, Melvin Carter. Carter hired Sole to be his director of Community-First Public Safety Initiatives.

Sole, 39, says he brings his experiences and academic expertise to the job he started in March.

As a teen, he joined a gang in Chicago, became a leader in it and sold drugs. He moved to Minnesota at age 18 and later wound up in prison. But he came out of it determined to find a different path.

He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and written his dissertation as he works toward his doctorate in criminal justice. He’s been an employee at non-profits in St. Paul and Minneapolis, and has been a criminal justice professor for nine years.

Sole also has been a vocal critic of police, including at protests after officer-involved shootings. He resigned as president of the Minneapolis NAACP to take his new job in St. Paul.

SEEKING FEEDBACK

Now, in his new job, Sole says he’s been taking a step back to hear what the community wants him to focus on.

He’s also told his own story at various St. Paul libraries and asks people for feedback about what his priorities should be. He has three more community sessions scheduled for this week.

At public safety break-out sessions at Carter’s State of Our City Summit on May 19, Sole said the topics raised most by participants were making it easier for people leaving prison to re-enter the community, police accountability and the role of school resource officers.

At one of his speeches last week, about 16 teens came from various St. Paul neighborhoods to tell him they wanted him to focus on gun violence because “they don’t feel safe,” Sole said.

Carter campaigned last year on a platform of “Community-First Police Reform” and hiring Sole is his first major move to bringing those ideas to life.

“It really is about … re-wiring how we think of public safety,” Carter said. “For a generation … we’ve thought of public safety as really just as simple as more police officers, bigger jails, more prosecutors. And our goal is to really think about public safety as a function of safe spaces, trusting relationships, promising community for people who re-enter our community from incarceration and (to) really the bridge the gap that exists between … our law enforcement community and people all in our neighborhoods.”

Sole said he will continue gathering community feedback, which will inform where he begins his efforts. Carter said his goal is to for Sole, Police Chief Todd Axtell and City Attorney Lyndsey Olson to work together.

Sole expects to launch initiatives in July and he’s looking at creating a taskforce of community members who want to be involved.

FROM TEEN PAPER BOY TO GANG MEMBER

Sole said he’s been holding community gatherings at the libraries so people better understand his perspective about criminal justice and his vision to “set a new standard for what safety looks like.”

Speaking to more than a dozen people at the George Latimer Central Library on Wednesday, Sole told them that growing up in a poor neighborhood in Chicago meant “there just wasn’t a lot of hope because … there’s not a lot of options. You stop dreaming.”

Sole’s mother had her first child when she was 16 years old, but she never stopped going to school and was valedictorian of her high school class. She worked for Chicago’s downtown post office for 28 years.

His father has battled a heroin addiction since Sole was a kid, he said.

“When he wasn’t on drugs, he was amazing,” Sole said. “He could draw. He put a basketball in my hands and taught me how to master that game. … He just didn’t take the time to work on himself to be a good father … and it hurt me because … there were certain years where I needed my father in the home, rather than me acting like the man of the house.”

Research shows boys who don’t have dads in their lives are more likely to join a gang, Sole said. His “mother understood all this too well,” Sole said. She got him involved in basketball, which he excelled in, to try to keep him on the right track.

As an eighth-grader, to take a bit of financial burden off his mother, Sole got a job delivering the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper before school. But he encountered a man who he said was a pedophile and who tried to solicit him.

“It rocked my world,” Sole said, adding that he quit his job and told a friend he needed a gun for protection. “That same day, I said, ‘If i’m going to have a pistol, I might as well sell dope.’ This was in a matter of 24 hours that all these decisions happened and that’s when things changed for me.”

Sole said he joined a gang at 14 years old.

But after his mother found the stash of drugs he was selling, Sole said, “she didn’t want me to be lost in that world” and she she sent him to live with his aunt in Waterloo, Iowa. He became captain of his basketball team and graduated from high school.

EDUCATING HIMSELF IN PRISON, THEN COLLEGE

Sole enlisted in the Air Force, but said he was told just before boot camp that his severe asthma as a child disqualified him.

“Now I’m checked out, I got no aspirations, I got no hope, pistol’s on my waist,” Sole said. He moved to the Twin Cities.

At 20, Sole was shot in the leg at University Avenue and Victoria Street. He still has rods and screws in his leg from the injury.

He had run-in after run-in with police. He said he frequently faced excessive force at their hands.

Sole was convicted of possession of a firearm with an altered serial number in 1997, and drug possession in 2000 and 2006.

“When I made it to court, all they said was, ‘Black guy, 9mm, confirmed gang member from Chicago,'” Sole said. “Nothing about my commitment to the Air Force, nothing about four years of basketball, nothing about my leadership. … It didn’t make sense to me. … But this became my narrative. Now I’m a felon … and you know how that changes your life.”

In prison, as Sole read books by black authors, he said his eyes were opened to the “systemic issues” linking race, poverty, housing, education and incarceration.

“A lot of narrative is, ‘These kids live in bad neighborhoods,'” he said. “It’s not bad neighborhoods. They’re economically deprived. The only way I could make some money in my neighborhood is by doing what? Slinging drugs, probably robbing people. That’s it. That shouldn’t be the case for a young person, but it’s designed that way. When I look here in the cities, there’s not a lot of jobs for kids, but when I look in Eagan and Edina, there are ‘Help wanted’ signs everywhere and jobs for a number of kids.”

After being incarcerated, Sole said he thought he would return to St. Paul and get “a second chance.” Instead, he found himself turned down at every apartment he tried to rent because he was a felon.

He often passed Metropolitan State University and one day, feeling desperate, he went inside.

“It changed my life,” Sole said. He met a professor who told him, “I’m not going to let you go back to prison.”

Sole said he completed his four-year degree in three years and met the woman he later married. They now have two daughters, ages 6 and 11.

“I give them everything I wish I had,” Sole said. “I’m the father I wish I had.”

SOLE WANTS TO LOOK AT POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY

Sole wrote an autobiography, “From Prison to PhD: A Memoir of Hope, Resilience, and Second Chances,” which was published in 2014. And he said his “Humanize My Hoodie” project has received international attention. He started it to see “if he could reduce the threat perception of black people in hoodies,” Sole said.

He also has traveled around the country to do training at police departments. He said he wants to focus on police accountability in St. Paul and challenge “the institution.”

“If you can’t meet this standard, you got to find another occupation,” Sole said. “… I know it’s going to take rolling up the sleeves and really having some uncomfortable conversations. … I didn’t come to this position to get comfortable. I came here to really do my most important work.”

City Councilmember Dan Bostrom, a retired St. Paul police sergeant, said he doesn’t know Sole or what his position involves. But he said police are already feeling as though they’re under constant scrutiny.

“Officers are in absolutely a no-win situation,” he said. “People want crimes solved, but nobody wants to cooperate.”

Bostrom said he believes the result is people not being held accountable for crime and feeling emboldened to continue on.

‘CLASSROOM JUST BECAME A LITTLE BIT BIGGER’

Sole has taught at Metro State and Hamline University. He stepped down an assistant professor to take his new job, but is still an adjunct instructor at Hamline.

Hamline President Fayneese Miller said the word that best describes Sole is “impressive.”

“What he brings to the classroom in the terms of his knowledge of his subject matter, he teaches it in a very authentic way,” Miller said. “He also connects it to theory and practice, so he knows his subject matter.”

In his new position, Sole said he wants “to give light to things that people aren’t even considering. My classroom just became a little bit bigger in this role.”

But for some matters, Sole adds, “I don’t have reinvent the wheel.”

He said it’s been proven around the country that gun violence is reduced when young people have jobs and things to occupy them — “if we give them an outlet, give them things to do, let them do some art, let them take some field trips, let them get a college plan,” Sole said. The challenge, he said, is convincing people to invest in these ideas.

Jean Muller, a Cathedral Hill resident who attended one of Sole’s speeches last week, said she isn’t fearful, but she hears from people who are concerned about safety in the skyways and on public transit.

“Is there anything we can do as citizens to help?” she asked Sole.

Sole said he understands why young people hang around downtown St. Paul or the skyways — they don’t have anywhere else to go or else to do. He did the same thing with his friends when he was 18 and 19 years old and he said he remembers “the looks” people would give them. Related Articles Marchers shut down I-94 through St. Paul to protest Breonna Taylor decision

Metro Transit workers reject contract offer, vote to authorize strike

St. Paul man charged in connection with gang-related drive-by shooting

St. Paul City Council approves $600,000 charge for downtown improvement district

St. Paul schools superintendent gets high marks, but board wants progress on equity, enrollment, student achievement

“There’s not places for them to hang out and just be kids downtown,” Sole said. He said he doesn’t know how difficult it would be to find a space for young people downtown, but he wants to talk to Carter about it.

IF YOU GO

Jason Sole has three community gatherings remaining at St. Paul Public Libraries.