A St. Paul police commander reported notable progress this year in the department’s efforts to slow shootings in the city, which have increasingly been carried out by teenagers in recent years.

The conversation with St. Paul Police Gang/Gun Unit Commander Jeff Stiff came on the heels of charges filed against three young men — the oldest of whom is 20 years old — in connection to a shootout in a Cub Foods parking lot on the city’s east side last month.

That parking lot shootout is just one example of a new era of gang activity, Stiff said.

“I’ve been with St. Paul for 25 years, so seeing kind of the change in culture in the gang and group community has been fairly significant,” he shared.

Today’s gangs are as small as three to four neighborhood teenagers, Stiff said, adding that the conflict between groups is not so much over money or territory, but notoriety.

“It’s like, they’re not stealing a car and selling it to a fence, and there’s no monetary gain with that. They’re stealing a car so they can drive around and run around with a car and post it on social media,” Stiff explained.

The impact of the violence that spills over on the public has not changed, though, especially when two teenagers and a 20-year-old allegedly opened fire at one another in a busy grocery store parking lot before 11 a.m. on a Sunday.

Police reported that a 16-year-old was grazed and cars were damaged, and court documents later said that a Girl Scout was packing cookies right on the other side of a window that was hit during the exchange of gunfire.

Shootings in broad daylight remain a rare occurrence in the city, but Stiff couldn’t recall it happening at all “when I was a street cop almost 20 years ago,” Stiff said, adding, “I don’t like to use absolutes, but we didn’t have shootings during the day.”

A 19-year-old facing felony firearm possession charges related to the shooting told police the parking lot dispute traced back to a 2019 homicide, the criminal complaint read. The complaint also noted that the teenager was barred from possessing guns or ammo because of a prior felony.

“If you’re 19-20 in a gang, you’re starting to get old,” Stiff remarked. “So they’re younger and younger. That’s really been the difference that we’ve seen.”

Stiff said policing in St. Paul has changed to adapt in the last couple of years.

“Right now, we really focus on intelligence. So, we worked really hard on being pinpoint-focused on who’s pulling the trigger in the city, and we’ve been very successful,” he shared.

A St. Paul Police unit was recently dedicated to solving those non-fatal shootings and they are at about a 70% clearance rate as of this report, Stiff said.

30% fewer people have been hurt in connection to non-fatal shootings this year compared to the same time in 2023, a spokesperson added.

“At the end of the day, I think that the City of St. Paul is better today than it was yesterday,” Stiff concluded. “And we continue to kind of work that model. Like, we’re pushing hard to be better tomorrow than we are today.”