As St. Paul police Sgt. Mike Ernster worked at a recent Minnesota Wild game, a group asked him to snap their photo by a Snoopy statue.
He mentioned it was his last day in uniform and one man, Ed Nowak, replied: “You’re like the voice of St. Paul police.”
“As of tonight, it will be was,” Ernster said. The sergeant didn’t know Nowak, but like many people, Nowak recognized him from the sergeant’s appearances years ago on Animal Planet’s reality show “K9 Cops” and as the department’s spokesman in more recent years.
Ernster was the face of the St. Paul Police Department for most of the past 10 years. His name was often in the newspaper, his voice on the radio and his face on TV news during media briefings about homicides and other tragedies.
Chief Axel Henry said Ernster’s authenticity lets him connect with people in person and when he appeared on television.
Sgt. Mike Ernster was honored with a personalized Minnesota Wild jersey during his last shift on Dec. 31, 2024. (Courtesy of the St. Paul Police Department)
“When he stands there and talks, the community really connects with him because they don’t feel like he’s reading a script,” Henry said. “He’s everybody’s police officer in St. Paul and he’s there to tell them what’s going on.”
After 30 years as a St. Paul police officer, Ernster is retiring from the department. He’s 55 and, after some time off, said he plans to seek another job in the media relations/communications field.
Born and raised in St. Paul, Ernster sat down with the Pioneer Press to talk about his life, his career and how he worked to get information to the public. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sgt. Mike Ernster Q&A
Q: After graduating from Cretin (the last class in 1987 before the school became Cretin-Derham Hall), what did you do?
A: I didn’t know what my path was going to be, and I needed a job. I got offered a job at Hiway Credit Union, where I banked, and I was a teller from 1987 until August 1994. I started the police academy in September 1994.
Q: How did you like working at the credit union?
A: I made a lot of lifelong friends and I met my wife there. We worked together as tellers. (Chris and Mike have been married for 26 years and have two children who are now 22 and 24.)
Q: Could you go back to your growing-up years? E Street, right?
A: E Block! Edmund. I was born and raised in Frogtown, so I grew up on the 1000 block of Edmund. We had our little group of Ernsters that lived in this area. My grandma and grandpa lived across the street. My uncle and aunt and cousins lived next door to us.
Q: How did working at the bank help you decide your career path?
A: One of the bigger groups that banked there was state troopers and I was able to speak to them, go on some ride-alongs, and that’s where my passion for law enforcement began. It was a light-bulb moment for me. I went to Normandale Community College and got my two-year degree while I kept working.
Q: When you started on patrol, where were you located?
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A: In the West District, so the district I grew up in. The Dale-University area. I worked 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. I was driving around in a squad car, but I still felt like that little kid that was riding his bike around the neighborhood.
Q: You’ve talked about in the K-9 unit: What would happen in the courtroom when you were called to testify?
A: With the last name of Ernster, my nickname is Ernie. With my first K-9, it was a natural fit that he’d be named Bert. So Bert and Ernie. It would come up in court and it would always lighten the courtroom a little bit and everybody would get a chuckle out of it.
Q: Was the show “K9 Cops” the first time you were on TV?
A: Yes. They came around in 2008 and anybody in the K-9 unit at that point was kind of thrust into the spotlight. Camera crews were riding with every shift on a daily basis for months. Some liked it, some didn’t.
Alyssa Arcand (a civilian police spokeswoman who was present during the interview): Mike liked it.
Mike Ernster: If there was somebody that was uncomfortable having (a TV crew) in their car, I said, “OK, you could ride with me.”
Q: What did you like about it?
A: It was something I wasn’t used to and I also wanted to show people what the other side of K-9 was, what does the daily environment look like. Having the dog come home with you, it really integrates home with work.
Q: How did you become the department’s public information officer?
A: In September 2015, I transferred to the PIO spot. I’d expressed interest in it years before. I had no idea what was coming.
Q: What do you mean by that?
A: What you think a job is and what it is sometimes are two different things. And with PIO, the attention that can be drawn to the position and the topics and how they’re covered, was something that was so new to me.
Q: I don’t know if stereotype is the right word, but there’s an idea that law enforcement generally doesn’t like to talk to the media, but the public information officer has to. How did you deal with that?
Sgt. Mike Ernster during Mayor Carter’s budget address at Wigington Pavilion on Harriet Island on Aug. 18, 2022. Ernster has been the face of the St. Paul Police Department for most of the past 10 years. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)
A: You’re representing the police department and I knew I would be talking to the media. Thankfully, I was partnered with somebody (Steve Linders, then a civilian spokesman for St. Paul police) who had a ton of experience and he was able to guide me through my early years of PIO.
There are state laws that govern what we can and can’t share, and we work through those pieces and try to provide information to the people who are requesting it. There’s a lot of phone calls and emails and just general busy work on the backside.
We also believe in transparency to the community. We want to get information out, but we also need to preserve the integrity of investigations. We have to think about families of people that have been injured or killed.
Q: Did you have to break down a mindset of not talking to the media? (Other than the police chief or his designee, St. Paul officers have to get permission from the department for media interviews.)
A: The first misconception I had was that it was going to be like doing “K9 Cops” and talking to a camera and having them cut all that video down to a show. It was nowhere near what being a PIO is. For this job, a lot more thought goes into what we’re going to say and why we’re going to say it. Being on camera is less than 5% of what a PIO does. The bigger piece is behind the scenes and working through information.
There’s three things that dominate the PIO world. The biggest is reactive — something happens and we’re providing information. Beyond that, we are also trying to tell the good stories of the police department, so we’re always looking for the times where really interesting things happen. The third is the crisis piece where something bad has happened and an officer is involved somehow. The spotlight of attention is very bright on those situations. We have to be sharing information because, if we don’t, I think we’ve seen in the past few years that the lack of information will create a void which people will try to fill with information that’s not factual.
Q: What kinds of things would you get called out to in the middle of the night?
A: Mostly homicides or we could be called on a fatal traffic crash or an officer-involved incident, whether an officer was involved in a shooting or whether an officer was injured, God forbid.
Q: Do you get recognized most places you go, either from “K9 Cops” or being public information officer?
A: It happens more on duty because I’m in uniform. If I’m not in uniform, they don’t know where they recognize you from. I was volunteering at the tree lot at St. Pascal’s (church) and people always say, “You look really familiar. Did you go here?”
People will come up to me and address me by name, and I’m racking my brain trying to remember who they are, how I know them and, in the end, I don’t even know them. They just come up and speak to you like they know you because they see you on TV.
Arcand: I think Mike, growing up in the city and everything that he’s done in his whole career, contributes to people remembering him everywhere, all the time. It made me think of how much time you spent at Children’s (Hospital) with your dog.
Mike Ernster and K-9 Buzz, left, pose with other St. Paul officers and police dogs featured on Animal Planet channel’s “K9 Cops” in October 2008, from left: Ernster with Buzz, Nick Kellum with Juda, Brady Harrison with Sully and Mark Ficcadenti with Shadow. (Courtesy of Animal Planet / Jean-Marc Giboux)
Ernster: When we delivered gifts for Christmas, I soon learned that Santa was very popular, but Buzz (his second K-9) was also really popular, so I suggested to Children’s Hospital that we start doing regular visits with the dog. We did that for years. The dog was kind of an ice breaker and it was also a time for them to not think about whatever illness they were facing. People might think that going into a children’s hospital would be a sad place, but I found it to be a place that was resilient, a place that was full of energy, a place that had a lot of hope. And I think those visits were as therapeutic for me as they were for the kids.
Q: How has your job changed with the increase in scanner listeners sharing information on social media?
A: Officers used to talk, after calls in the middle of the night, that if the whole neighborhood knew what was happening, they’d probably be really worried, though they weren’t situations that were a danger to the community. Then the scanner follower groups came along and now neighborhoods that didn’t know about everything that was happening are starting to learn about it, and their anxiety levels started to rise.
As a PIO, it definitely increased our emails and phone calls for information. If it’s information that is available and can be shared, we would share it.
The information that comes across scanners is unvetted. It’s just raw information and it has to be verified. We battle that, a little bit, as we provide information that’s confirmed, but everybody wants information right away. We will always lean to accurate, and so sometimes the information doesn’t come out as fast because we want that accuracy to be there.
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Q: How did the George Floyd situation change your job, after the Minneapolis Police Department initially put out a statement that said he’d had a “medical incident”?
A: It caused us to make sure that we’re in constant communication with the leaders of our department and the investigators to make sure that everything that we were going to be saying was completely accurate.
Q: What’s next for the PIO job?
A: Sgt. Toy Vixayvong takes my place (he’s been a St. Paul officer for 23 years and worked most recently in the department’s gang/gun unit). Nikki Muehlhausen recently joined the department (she fills a vacant civilian spokesperson position and has 18 years of news media experience). Alyssa (Arcand) will still be here.
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