‘We need to do better’: St. Paul police sergeant says building trust with community vital in reaching common ground

With police departments nationwide under the microscope following the death of George Floyd, Sgt. Matthew Koncar is launching an investigation of his own.

He wants to find out how police can build trust between themselves and the communities they serve.

“Just that trust is at an all-time low,” he says. “Some departments do better, some do worse.”

Koncar, 40, is an elder abuse investigator with the St. Paul Police Department.

He has 14 years of law enforcement experience and he’s the recipient of a Bush Fellowship: one of 24 finalists selected out of 746 applicants.

The St. Paul-based Bush Foundation chooses “visionary leaders… who are thinking big about how to solve problems, and shape a better future for their communities.”

"Of course we need to do better,” he says. “And I think there’s a lot of facets to that.”

A crucial part, he adds, is what he calls "over-policing" by officers.

"They cast a wide net and they gather up good people, people engaged in petty crimes or little things, they get swooped up in the criminal justice net,” he explains. “I think that leads to a lot of mistrust and animosity."

But Koncar says there’s a flip side.

"Under policing" he calls it– where criminals go free because police don’t have the resources to fully investigate crimes.

Koncar applied for the fellowship last year, long before George Floyd’s death while in police custody.

"I can tell you the conversations I’ve had at the St. Paul Police Department, we’ve all thought it was pretty outrageous,” he says.

But Koncar feels the timing of his research is now more crucial than ever.

"Every call, we need to make sure people are leaving, that officers are leaving people feeling better about the police department than before they got there,” he declares. “How do you organize that into a training, best practices in training that can be exported nationwide?”

Across the country, city leaders, including in Minneapolis, are talking about dismantling or defunding their police departments.

Among the ideas under discussion include a complete restructuring, budget-cutting, and using EMS workers or mental health professionals to respond to non-criminal calls.

But Koncar hopes police budgets won’t be cut in order to fund other agencies.

"No one else can investigate criminal law,” he says. “That has to be the purview of the police, but other agencies could investigate or assist on these non-criminal things, these social issues, and I think most officers would welcome that."

Koncar says 80% of police calls are of a non-criminal nature.

"Order maintenance, dispute resolution, policing poverty, chemical dependency,” he says.

Instead, Koncar believes officers could spend that time in community policing.

Walking a beat. Establishing relationships, and hopefully– building trust.

And he has many Ideas he wants to look into during his fellowship.

"Just talk to them in a way, not on a call, but just in passing,” he explains. “And to see if we can then measure, does that increase public trust in the police, does it increase public perception in helping us solve crimes."

Koncar had hoped to travel the country, to learn from other law enforcement agencies about how they are building bridges between police and the community.

Because of the pandemic, he’s doing that virtually.

But he hopes gathering that information will make a difference, in the Twin Cities and elsewhere.

Making each encounter between officers and the public a learning experience.

"Every one of those is an opportunity for us to leave a better impression about the police department and to build trust,” he says. “A lot of officers do that, but I think we need to make it a more ingrained part of our culture."