Police share their side of story
By Jerry W. Kram
The photos stretched across two walls of the New Town Civic Center.
The 49 photos – taken by officers of the New Town Police Department, showed enough guns to start a small war, bags and bricks of marijuana, baggies of harder drugs plus the needles, pipes and other paraphernalia needed to used them. This was just a small sample, said acting New Town Police Chief James Johns, of what his officers and other law enforcement officers in New Town found during routine traffic stops through the city.
Part of the reason Johns shared the photos with a crowd of about 25 members of the public and another 20 law enforcement and emergency service personnel was to get out the message that there are reasons local police handle situations in a particular way.
Johns said that one of the questions he often fields was why there are often two or more police cars handling what looks to the casual observer to be a routine traffic ticket, sometime causing a traffic slowdown in the process. Johns said that in New Town, there isn’t such a thing as a routine traffic stop, and many times an officer will need backup when they discover contraband.
