By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — Policing in a pandemic is a balancing act, according to Hutchinson Police Chief Jeff Hooper.
"You balance maintaining community safety and also keeping your employees and your officers safe," Hooper said. "Based on our tiered response, we did scale back on our community contacts. We really limited traffic stops for a period of about six weeks."
The only stops allowed during that period were those that mitigated a public safety risk.
"We've kind of ramped that back up a little bit," Hooper said. "Just because we saw an uptick in accidents and major accidents and so we're doing some selective enforcement to try to prevent those. We're doing more traffic stops now than we did a few weeks ago."
Criminal activity that isn't an immediate threat to the community is also being treated differently.
"On the criminal side of things, when we do have to take any type of enforcement action, previously, that action may have resulted in an arrest," Hooper said. "Now, we're doing more either issuing a summons or what we call long-forming or writing up a report to send it up either to Municipal Court or the District Attorney's Office for prosecution at a later date."
If you have an emergency, still call 911, but if you just need to report something where the danger is not imminent, call (620) 694-2816.