By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — The Hutchinson Police Department is keeping up enforcement of some crimes, even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Through our criminal intelligence tracking and crime trends, we identified some areas in the city and some certain crime trends that we kind of deem as a public safety risk," Chief Jeff Hooper said. "We are actively now enforcing those type of crimes, to try to keep that portion of our crime under control, as we battle with the balance of keeping our employees safe and protecting the community and keeping our crime rate down."
Police are also continuing traffic enforcement, especially in the downtown construction zone.
"We are executing more traffic stops than we did just a couple of weeks ago," Hooper said. "We still are tiered on that response, only having contact with the public when we really need to. Like I said, we loosened things up a little bit, just simply based off of the crime trends and problems that we saw starting to creep up in the community. We really thought we ought to get a handle on that."
Police still have a modified response and will do as much of their business as possible by telephone. The non-emergency number is (620) 694-2816.