Q&A with New Fifth Precinct Commander Matt Clark

Minneapolis Police Department Inspector Matt Clark—recently named commander of the Fifth Precinct—says he doesn’t want to make any major changes from the priorities of his predecessor, Inspector Eddie Frizell, who is leaving for a tour in Iraq with the Red Bulls.

Since Clark joined the Minneapolis Police Department in 1993, he’s been on the streets and dealing with internal logistics. During the collapse of the I-35W Bridge, Clark was promoted to head the Emergency Services Unit. “So that would have been K-9, bomb, swat and arson,” he says. “It was a crazy deal. I was there a half and hour after the bridge collapse. And it was just chaos. My job was to be in charge of logistics.”

Clark, who has a masters degree in public administration from Concordia University, says he’s served in the First precinct and the Third Precinct, where he worked in criminal investigations and on a community response team. He’s also worked swat at the Republican National Convention and as an undercover narcotics officer. Internally, he’s directed the Police Academy and commanded the Pre-Service Training Unit, which deals with recruitment and field-training.

When pressed about highlights in his law-enforcement history, Clark hesitated. “Cops are—just to fill you in—they don’t really like to talk war stories,” he said. “There’s a lot of—too many to explain—incidents where you say at the end of that call or whatever, ‘That’s why I’m a cop.’”

Talking about directing the Police Academy, Clark points to a Winston Churchill quote posted in his office: “It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.”

“That was two years of my life training new cops, 168 that made it through,” he said. “And that feels good, because you know what? They hit the street knowing it right.”

By Clark’s calculations, he’s now presiding over a precinct staffed with six civilian personnel, four lieutenants, 18 sergeants and 80 officers. Southwest Minneapolis Patch sat down in the Fifth Precinct office, off 31st Street and Nicollet Avenue, for an interview.

Southwest Minneapolis Patch: Can you walk us through a typical day of your job?

Clark: A lot of what I do is twofold. It’s either internal or external. The internal part would be dealing with personnel issues, managing personnel to address our crime trends or patterns.

Obviously, we’ve had some robberies in the Fifth Precinct. That’s very concerning to us. I want to make sure that we’re taking a number of steps to solve that crime, to deal with any robberies that occur, those tactics and techniques that we want to deal with when those incidents occur—and then dealing with the intelligence of making sure our officers understand and follow the intelligence we’re getting from investigators, from our strategic information center and from our other partners in law enforcement in the Edina, Bloomington, Richfield areas, as well as Hennepin County. So that’s internal stuff I deal with.

The other half is external. So any of the community stuff. If an executive director of a neighborhood says, ‘Hey we had this incident occur, can you tell me about it?’ Or if we have a crime trend, ‘Can you tell us what you’re doing about that?’ A lot of that external stuff I want to make sure is dealt with. We have a lot of great people here, we have the. They may come in and say, ‘What do we do about this crime trend?’ And we’ll work together on how we’ll get information out to the community on that.

Southwest Minneapolis Patch: Is that tough to balance?

Clark: I think that’s basically the job. Learning to balance that and trying to tie the two together—community with the needs of the officers that are out there everyday.

You start to understand more when you talk to the folks on a meeting basis versus on a call. A lot of our calls deal with high-stress emergency situations, they deal with volatile home life incidents, and one of my goals is to bring the officers into some of these low-key, lower stress, hey-these-are-what-our-long-term-issues-are meetings.

So one of the things we did is sat down with our crime prevention specialist and went the over the list of all the meetings we had for every neighborhood and said, ‘Okay, let’s start reassigning this to some of the officers, some of the sergeants — not just the lieutenants — and try to get them into this so they can recognize some of the long term problems for the communities.

Southwest Minneapolis Patch: What are your priorities for the Fifth Precinct? Are you going to make any major or minor changes from Inspector Frizell’s priorities?

Clark: Well first off, I’d say no major changes. I think we’ve had a great 2010 under Inspector Frizell. We’ve had crime drop. Part I crimes—our kind of FBI reporting crimes, from burglary to rape to homicide—and those are down from last year. And if that’s working, I don’t think there’s a need to fix it. I want to continue to improve on that, but I don’t want to make major changes to the operations of the precinct if it’s being successful and if the public agrees with how things are being run.

But my major push—my three major goals—the first one is community engagement. And that’s bringing our officers out to the community meetings and different things, and trying to get that input from the community, face-to-face input. Not all of that is going to change overnight. But I want that to be a slow, consistent process. 

And additionally to that, I’d like to look at pushing a community, a precinct newsletter basically. If you can’t make it to the meeting, because you’re a busy resident, you’ve got a lot going on, you’ve got family, you’ve got issues with kids and all the other things and work, if you can’t make that meeting, then we’d rather give you our information and let you take a look at it.

And so that community engagement piece not only deals with the newsletter but also with our officers. So that’s one item.

Number two would be prompt and professional service. And again, I know that we have great cops here. I get a lot of great letters. I want to maintain that, because I’m saying that’s going on right now—that you’re getting prompt and professional service. And that when the public recognizes that, I make sure the officers know about that.

So on one end, internally, we’re doing a process of making sure that makes it to their personnel file. If somebody takes the time to write a letter and sends that to the police department, not only should you see that letter as the officer, but you should get something from one of your supervisors saying, ‘That’s what we want you to do. Good job.’ And that letter, along with the letter from the supervisor, should make it to your file. So if you said, ‘I’d like to know about officer John Smith,’ and you looked in his file, not only would it tell you about information of where he’s been in the department, but hey these community members think he’s great. So that’s internally.

Externally, prompt and professional service means if we have an issue, I want the supervisors to get on it right away. So if I have somebody calls up and says, ‘I never saw the officers. I called because there was somebody loitering on my block.’ Well, I want that addressed quickly by the supervisors here. What happened if we didn’t show up? Was it a matter of we went to the wrong address? Was it a matter of the information at dispatch got crisscrossed? But we need to maintain our professionalism and prompt service into 2011...

We are a department that has laid off officers for the first time in its history last year. We are a department that is not having any police academies in the near future. We’re actually allowing officers to leave without replacement. We are shrinking. So what we need to do is to manage that reduction by making sure we’re putting officers where they need to be.

Southwest Minneapolis Patch: And you mentioned robbery. Do you have any other big concerns for the Fifth Precinct other than that in terms of crime, crime trends or recent crimes?

Clark: Let me give you some stats. Though, one of my big things I learned downtown—I think it applies here—is statistics and numbers don’t mean anything for a resident. What the residents are concerned about is, ‘Do you feel safe?’ I hate to say that perception is everything. But in some instances for safety, perception is key. People want to feel safe in their homes. So I take that from downtown and I want to apply that here with, you know, if you don’t feel safe, or if you don’t feel safe as a business or a resident, what is it we can do to make you feel safe?

But essentially, our Part I crimes, which are the major crimes, are down 17 percent and our property crimes are down 27 percent.

Southwest Minneapolis Patch: And that’s from last year?

Clark: So far this year-to-date compared to 2010. Yes.

The robberies are an issue for me. We’ve reached out statewide, countywide, other police departments, every unit we have in the police department is looking at that. We have what’s called code 4. Once a week, we meet with chief [Tim] Dolan, assistant chief [Janeé] Harteau, and the other chiefs and all the inspectors, and we go over our crime issues in a kind of semi-public forum. We do a lot of intelligence-sharing at this meeting. And we really go over what we have for crime, most recent crime.

And I tell you, we’ve committed a lot of resources to the robberies. I don’t want to talk about exactly what we’re doing, who we’re looking at, and what we’ve done to suppress or investigate those. But it’s a multi-faceted approach, as it always needs to be.

My best example of crime is it’s like cancer. You’re not going to apply just radiation to cancer. You’re going to try a number of different things to prevent the cancer from spreading and get rid of it. And it’s the same thing for crime.

Southwest Minneapolis Patch: And as the Fifth Precinct commander, what do you think the public should expect of you and what, if anything, do you ask of the public in terms of safety?

Clark: Always call if you feel there’s an issue. For example, we had a robbery of a local business. A suspect ran approximately a block into another business. And the lady behind the counter grabbed the tip jar and kind of pulled it back behind the counter because she said she had the ebby jebbies about this person. Just didn’t have the right feeling. Literally thirty seconds later, some of our undercover officers followed that person and arrested him for robbery. But she even said, ‘I had that feeling.’ If you have that feeling about somebody outside your house, on a corner, in your business, I have no problem sending an officer to check that. And we want you to call on that.

The other part is if you have something that we need to know and it doesn’t apply to 911, then give us a call. For long-term stuff, we want to address those issues. We don’t want people to having long-term community problems without, you know, us being able to look at it, and address it, work with them on it. Does that kind of answer your question?

Southwest Minneapolis Patch: Yeah, and then that other part of the question: What do you think the public should be expecting out of you and the Fifth Precinct?

Clark: I think those top three things that I talked about. Professional and prompt service. As a commander of the precinct, I expect that out of the officers and so should the public. We should be taking our time with long-term incidents and if you call with a complicated situation, we should be taking a step back to look at that. And I know that the officers here are doing at that. I know because we get so many write-ups on them, of appreciation. The other part is that we should be addressing community issues. And we should be putting resources at that.

Now obviously, it’s limited. There’s no endless supply of resources. But as we develop as a police department, we need to address our community crime problems effectively and efficiently. They should see that. And finally, you know, community engagement. We’re always going to reach out to the community to better our relationships with anybody.