[BobbyB]

Craig Kinney, led South St. Paul police
BY LESLIE BROOKS SUZUKAMO
Pioneer Press
Visitation services will be held Wednesday for retired South St. Paul Police Chief Craig R. Kinney, who died Saturday from ALS, or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. He was 64.

Kinney was police chief from 1983 until his retirement in 1999, which capped a 33-year career with the South St. Paul Police Department.

He had joined the force at the age of 24 when he tagged along with a friend to take South St. Paul's civil service test. He wasn't intending on a career in law enforcement; after returning from three years in the U.S. Marine Corps and some other work, he was simply looking for an interesting job that would get him outdoors.

"It becomes a part of you after 33 years. You walk like a cop, you think like a cop, you talk like a cop, you must be a cop," he told the Pioneer Press upon his retirement in March 1999.

But he wasn't a hard-boiled cop. "Craig was always kind of laid-back," said his sister Claudette Holzemer of South St. Paul. "And he was very, very funny. He could hit you with a zinger but sometimes it took you awhile to realize it, it was so subtle."

Holzemer said her brother derived satisfaction from meeting and helping people.

Kinney earned his bachelor's degree in criminal justice in 1973 after attending Lakewood Community College and the University of Minnesota. He took additional courses at the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Va.

In 1985, he was included in a delegation of about 25 U.S. law enforcement officials who journeyed to China to explain Western police work to officials in the Chinese Ministry of Public Security. The trip was organized by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Citizens Ambassador Program.

Kinney never talked about his job with his family, but his department handled the tragic and the offbeat. In a 1984 murder case, a man burst into a wedding reception and fatally shot one of the guests and wounded three others. In 1993, his department nabbed a St. Paul man caught taking a book from a South St. Paul Library and subsequently uncovered a cache of 30,000 stolen books and tapes in the man's apartments and two storage rooms.

After he retired, Kinney worked part time as a security officer at Inver Hills Golf Course, where he also liked to play golf, and did volunteer work for the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association in Woodbury, his sister said.

Besides his sister Holzemer, Kinney is survived by his son Ryan, two grandsons and sister Patricia Needham of Hot Springs, S.D.

Visitation will be from 4 to 8 p.m. Wednesday at English-Meeker & Kandt Funeral Home, 140 Eighth Ave. N., South St. Paul. Funeral services will be at 11 a.m. Thursday at English-Meeker & Kandt, followed by burial at Fort Snelling National Cemetery