After Three Decades, Inver Grove Heights Police Chief to Retire

The first time Chuck Kleckner set foot in a police car, he knew he wanted to become a police officer.

At the time, Kleckner was a student taking every class “under the sun” at Inver Hills Community College, simply because he couldn’t decide what career he wanted to pursue. After speaking with a South St. Paul police officer, Kleckner accepted an invitation to ride along on a patrol. Together, he and the officer responded to a fight in the parking lot of a local bar. The experience was Kleckner’s first taste of police work.

“It was the adrenaline rush,” Kleckner said, when asked what drew him to become a police officer. “If there’s a thread that runs common with cops, it’s that they’re adrenaline junkies.”

The memory of his first patrol is one that Kleckner remembers fondly. After 30 years of police work in Inver Grove Heights and seven years as the police chief for the Inver Grove Heights Police Department, Kleckner is hanging up his hat.

His retirement, effective on Thursday, marks the end of a long, accomplished career in Inver Grove Heights. After becoming a member of the police reserve, completing an internship in South St. Paul and going through training, Kleckner was hired as a patrol officer in Inver Grove Heights in 1981. He worked investigations before being promoted to sergeant in 1990. Eight years later, he made the position of lieutenant, and in 2004, was promoted to chief of the department.

Along the way, the chief has overseen plenty of changes in the department and met many of the goals he set out to fulfill—including the creation of a new school resource officer to help the department take a proactive approach to school enforcement and the .

During his tenure, Kleckner also helped the department establish a police bike patrol program, oversaw numerous training programs for officers, served as the Dakota County Drug Task Force vice president and received a community peace award for helping fight domestic violence in the county, according to City Administrator Joe Lynch. He also helped expand the city’s crime scene technician team—a unit responsible for processing evidence.

“He’s been a tremendous asset for the city and for the police department, a great ambassador and someone that you could look to see the meaning and message of a person enjoying their job,” Lynch said at the Inver Grove Heights City Council meeting on Monday night.

Kleckner also supervised three, high profile murder investigations, Lynch said at the meeting. But it is a fourth, unsolved kidnapping and murder that Kleckner remembers most. The victim in the case, five-year-old Corrine Urstead, was never found, although police recovered a bloody sundress that she was wearing on the day she disappeared, Kleckner said. Officers arrested a suspect, but a jury failed to convict the man. The lack of resolution on the case, Kleckner said, has stuck with him to this day.

Inver Grove Heights Police Department Lt. Larry Stanger will replace Kleckner. Stanger, who began working with the department in 1989, will serve as the interim chief for a six-month period. At the end of the period, the council will decide whether to appoint Stanger as the department’s permanent chief.

Kleckner is the second high-profile member of the department to retire this month. Earlier in June,

“It’s hard to believe that 30 years can go by that quickly,” Kleckner said. “I’ve always believed that if you’ve hired the right people and trained them well, you can just get out of their way and let them do their job … that for the most part is what we have here, and I’ve been very proud to work with these people.”