Just when I thought I’d heard
everything, I get this plea from a high-ranking Springfield Police
Department official, begging me not to write about a certain
officer.
“Please don’t write about Matt
Fricke,” he says. “You’re gonna scare everybody
away.”
By now, I’m accustomed to brass trying
to shoo me off when I’m inquiring about a cop who may have
done something wrong. I’m a little stunned to get that same
recoil when I’m asking about an officer known for doing
everything right.
But with Fricke on the verge of being
promoted out of his post as the neighborhood police officer for
beat 300 — all of the East Side north of South Grand —
there’s some concern about whether any of his colleagues will
even try to fill Fricke’s black high-top crosstrainers.
For one thing, there’s the geography.
Fricke’s turf encompasses some of the most volatile real
estate in Springfield — a densely populated, low-income,
high-crime zone where responsible, righteous, hardworking people
live cheek by jowl with ne’er-do-wells who have given up
honest living in favor of stealing aluminum siding and
selling crack.
For another, there’s Fricke’s
comic-book-hero reputation — that whole
nice-guy/crime-fighter amalgamation, wrapped in a shy, boyish,
aw-shucks veneer.
“He’s just remarkable. I
can’t praise him high enough,” says Mari Swaggerty, an
East Side resident who hopes to see Fricke replaced with a clone.
He returns her calls even on his days off and lets her know when
he’s going to be out of town. “He’s always
willing to listen to us and believe what we say. A lot of officers
won’t believe us: ‘Well, how do you know it’s
gunfire?’ I’ve lived here 17 years,” Swaggerty
says, “and it’s now very easy to differentiate between
firecrackers and gunfire.”
Fricke even gets the tacit endorsement of the
legions he handcuffs. Ald. Frank McNeil, whose ward includes beat 300,
says that, unlike previous NPOs, Fricke has never been the subject
of a citizen complaint.
“If you’re breaking the law, you
get arrested. He doesn’t cuss you out or beat you up, but you
are going to jail,” McNeil says. “Even the unsavory
characters, Matt treats them with respect.”
There’s no yardstick by which to gauge
his success. Fricke doesn’t keep arrest stats or track how
many nice letters people write about him to the police chief.
“As an NPO, you judge yourself by neighborhood feedback,” he says.
By that measure, he rates at least an A. When
I went on a ride-along with Fricke last year, shortly after he had
helped SPD’s narcotics unit identify and arrest 40 drug
dealers in a single massive sweep, he got waves from the seniors,
grudging acknowledgment from teens, and kids shouting,
“Freaky! Freaky!” on every street corner. One man
flagged him down to ask, “Do I have a court date
tomorrow?”
Some people were happy to see him; others
weren’t. But everybody knew him, and he knew everybody, often
by name, nickname, family connection, and, in some cases, gang
affiliation.
“My job is to get to know
people,” he says. “If you’re going to succeed
over there, that’s something you have to know.”
He has his own way of getting acquainted. I
remember watching Fricke and his friend Officer Chris Russell, NPO
of the adjacent beat, at last summer’s Juneteenth
celebration. It was one of those saunalike days, yet these two cops
were going full-throttle with the kids on the sunbaked basketball
court — gun belts, radios, Kevlar vests, and all — as
their colleagues sat watching from the shade.
Still, Fricke doesn’t see any
difference between himself and the other officers. “I’m
not that special,” he insists. “Ninety-nine percent of
the guys, especially on the East Side . . . there’s some
really good officers working over there.”
He admits to being a creative thinker,
teaming up with Russell to install security cameras at a
problematic convenience store and barricades at a popular teen
cruising ground. They carry basketballs and lawn chairs in their
cars, giving them the ability to instigate a pickup game or camp
out on a drug dealer’s front lawn.
Swaggerty, who lives on a street where six
drug dealers were caught in last spring’s sweep, says that
Fricke found a novel way to get rid of the crew that took their
place: “Matt would just park in their driveway to do his
paperwork. He caught them with illegal weapons a number of
times,” she says. Now they’re locked away for good.
But when I tried to find out why he’s
supposedly irreplaceable — why writing about him would scare
everyone away from the East Side NPO job — no one had a
logical explanation. Each anecdote I heard about Matt Fricke boiled
down to two notions: Work hard and treat other people with respect.
No way could these simple ideals be rare
commodities at SPD. These are basic concepts that all officers
should have running through their veins. There must be an ample
supply of Springfield cops just like Fricke. With all my heart and
soul, I believe that is so.
This article appears in Jun 9-15, 2005.
