Meet Brooklyn Center's New Crime Prevention Specialist

"People want to feel safe, and people deserve to feel safe," that's according to Dan Jerzak, the new Crime Prevention Specialist for the Brooklyn Center Police Department. If he looks familiar to residents it might be because he spent 15 years in code enforcement for the city. "I retired, the joke is, for 3 hours. I had actually retired, they gave me a send-away party and everything else." And that's about the time when the crime prevention position opened up.
He says, "it just intrigued me because I thought I had a lot to offer with my experience, which has really turned out to be very, very helpful, because of my understanding of the various departments, and how it relates to the community as a whole."
He's made good use of that knowledge in working with the public whether he's recruiting Neighborhood Watch block captains, taking part in neighborhood meetings, or educating residents about the latest crime trends and scams. He adds, "It takes education, it takes information, it takes involvement, and feedback and engagement from all of the stakeholders."
And engagement is exactly what he's hoping for with the police department's new camera registration program, where residents and business owners can help the police by voluntarily registering their security cameras. Jerzak offers an example of how the program works, "Let's say that we had a crime in this neighborhood, okay we have X amount of cameras in this location, so we have a telephone number, an email so we can get ahold of them, we would say, 'Could you possibly review your camera between the hours of 6:00 and 8:00 on the 20th, and see if it captured anything that would be of value?' So you say, 'Okay, Dan, I'll go back and look', and we'll say, 'Okay, if you do, could you preserve that evidence and let us know?"
If you're interested in Brooklyn Center's Camera Registration Program, or would like to learn more about crime prevention, you can contact Dan Jerzak at the Brooklyn Center Police Department at (763) 503-3272, or email him at djerzak@ci.brooklyn-center.mn.us.


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