UMSL Chief of Police Dan Freet holds up the Chancellor’s Medal he received at Friday’s State of the University Address. (Photos by Derik Holtmann)
University of Missouri–St. Louis Chancellor Kristin Sobolik had a surprise in store as she neared the end of her annual State of the University Address on Friday morning.
Speaking to a crowd of faculty, staff, retirees and alumni in the Blanche M. Touhill Performing Arts Center, Sobolik described the many university leaders who regularly make a significant impact without much fanfare. In fact, they prefer it that way.
“It’s important to bring their remarkable work to light and celebrate their achievements,” Sobolik said.
She noted how she caught retiring Director of Athletics Lori Flanagan off guard last February when she presented Flanagan with the inaugural Chancellor’s Medal, in recognition of her work to advance the mission and values of the university, during the annual UMSL Sports Hall of Fame induction ceremony.
UMSL Police Chief Dan Freet looks down at his Chancellor’s Medal after Chancellor Kristin Sobolik surprised him by bestowing the award on him at the end of her State of the University Address on Friday morning.
Now, she was ready to bestow the honor on someone else, calling UMSL Police Chief Dan Freet to the stage as his picture suddenly appeared on the screen in the Anheuser-Busch Performance Hall.
She talked briefly about Freet’s connection to the university, which began when he was a student in 1975, his 23 years with the St. Louis County Police Department and, most notably, the mark he’s made over the past 11 years with the UMSL Police Department, the last seven as chief and director of institutional safety.
“We are deeply grateful for your service and commitment,” Sobolik said as the audience applauded. “It is with great pleasure that I present you with the Chancellor’s Medal in recognition of your outstanding contributions to UMSL.”
Freet was moved by the unexpected honor. It came only a few weeks ahead of his planned retirement – something that’s put him in a reflective mood.
“Everyone, when they’re not just leaving a job but when they’re actually retiring out of a chosen field, would love to leave on a high note, on a positive note, feeling good about what they’ve done but also feeling good about the people that they’ve served,” Freet said. “That’s exactly how this feels.”
It goes well beyond any public acknowledgements.
“I’m walking out the door with a police department that’s in excellent condition, not because of me, but because of the team and the administration support,” he said. “I’m walking out the door from a place where our colleagues really think highly of us.”
Under Freet’s leadership, the UMSL Police Department was reaccredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies last year after displaying an exemplary public safety record and dedication to CALEA’s latest public safety standards. The department has now received CALEA accreditation eight times since 2000.
UMSL was also recently named the fifth-safest college campus in the country in a report from SafeHome.org, which examined data from the U.S. Department of Education on violent and property crimes at more than 600 colleges and universities nationwide with enrollments of at least 5,000 students.
“Safety is paramount,” Freet said. “Nobody’s going to come and study or live here if they don’t feel safe.”
But the connection the department has built with the community has made it easier to maintain that type of environment.
“It’s an amazing culture and climate to work,” Freet said. “It’s community policing at its best. What I’ve enjoyed the most about being the chief here – and I’ve got a lot of experience in different places in St. Louis County, in different styles of neighborhoods – is how we’re uniquely set up to do the very thing that communities cry out for when they’re trying to say what they want their police departments to look like.”
He didn’t fully grasp that when he first joined the UMSL Police Department in 2013. He just knew that the university had been good to him from the time he first enrolled as a student pursuing a bachelor’s degree in administration of justice – a precursor to criminology and criminal justice – almost four decades before.
Freet had been looking to get back into police work after 23 years with the St. Louis County Police Department and several more years in law enforcement as a bailiff with the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office, where he worked in a domestic violence court.
“I thought, ‘Maybe I could go there and be a policeman and sort of pay it back, right?’” Freet said of exploring job opportunities UMSL. “That was my theory.”
He visited the department’s website and discovered it had an opening for an officer and was even more encouraged when he learned that several of his former colleagues had already transitioned from the St. Louis County Police Department to UMSL.
Among the variety of roles Freet had during his years with St. Louis County, he served time as assistant director of the St. Louis County Emergency Management Office. The experience he gained there proved immediately valuable during his tenure at UMSL. Not long after he started, he found himself helping the campus prepare for potential issues stemming from the civil unrest in nearby Ferguson in 2014.
But his expertise was even more important when, as chief six years later, he was appointed to lead UMSL’s unified command team as it steered the university through the COVID-19 pandemic. He provided a critical calm voice as the team worked to protect the health and safety of the UMSL community and maintain campus operations amid unprecedented circumstances.
Freet is reluctant to accept too much credit for that or any of the other successes that have occurred on his watch.
“Anybody would be able to say, ‘Well, it’s not just me; it’s everybody with me pulling the load,’ Freet said. “But especially so in police work. I send people out there at 2 in the morning while I’m asleep. It’s the team. I just have a lot of thanks to everybody who made it happen.”
