Former YPD officer heads up reality show task force

By JOE GORMAN

jgorman@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

Robert Clark went from police officer to agent in charge to commander, and says all of the career advances were made possible because of the start of his career with the Youngstown Police Department.

Clark, who retired from the FBI in 2016 after assignments hunting fugitives in Chicago and combating the MS-13 street gang in Los Angeles, is the head of a 40-member group in the new CBS reality show “Hunted,” which premieres after the AFC Championship game Sunday.

“I remember where I came from,” Clark said.

In the show, Clark and his team will track nine teams of two people over 100,000 square miles in the Southeast. The teams will be doing their best to elude Clark and his crew, who take on the role of law enforcement in the show.

It is up to Clark and the others to track them down.

Clark said by phone last week that his rise to hosting the show and his rise in law enforcement – which also saw him as a member of the personal protection detail of former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft the day before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks – could not have been possible without the 6 1/2 years he spent as a YPD officer.

Clark, a Mooney High School graduate who played football for Bill Narduzzi and Jim Tressel at Youngstown State, said that when he first began in law enforcement he was working undercover. It was there, he said, that he learned how to keep cool in stressful situations and assess information as it was coming in.

One of the keys to a high-stakes manhunt is assessing information in real time, Clark said. He said reading the information wrong can lead to someone getting away or prolonging the hunt.

Clark could not say how the show turned out, but he did say it was very “intense.”

“It was very much akin to a real law-enforcement situation,” Clark said.

One thing he said was a common theme is how resourceful people on the run can be. Often, he said, they would do something unexpected as his team closed in, because the stress of the situation forced them to act differently from anticipated.

“We very frequently had to shift gears to locate them,” Clark said.

Clark lauded the team he worked with, made up of ex-law enforcement and military and intelligence personnel. He said that while the show was a game in a sense, he and the team took it very seriously.

“I was surrounded by a tremendous team of professionals,” Clark said.

Clark said he got the job after a friend of his recommended him to CBS.