There’s A New Corvette In Town
The Wake County Sheriff’s Office has a new sports car to add to their fleet, thanks to criminals.
Sheriff Donnie Harrison says the department received the new black Corvette just a few days ago after it was confiscated from a drug dealer and will be used to help catch criminals.
Harrison adds that adding the car to the department’s current fleet makes more sense than selling it.
“With the budget like it is…I think this is very important. It gives us some tools that we wouldn’t normally have. Some folks say why not sell it back or auction it off and give the money to the schools? But when you auction off equipment you only get a portion of what its worth. Thru drug enforcement and speeding, it’ll pay for itself three fold,” said Harrison.
The Sheriff’s Office may be on the right track; within hours of hitting the street, the corvette took part in a drug bust.
Kalamazoo honors canine hero
A dog who risked his life to chase down bad guys was honored by city leaders in Kalamazoo.
On Monday night, the Kalamazoo City Commission issued a proclamation for a police dog named Ranger.
Never before has a K-9 received such an honor from Kalamazoo.
Officials from the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety say Ranger had a great career, but suffered serious injuries when he was hit in the head while chasing a suspect a few years earlier, so now he’s retiring from the police force.
“He’s come to work with me for eight years, he’s always been between me and the bad guy, he’s always putting himself first to make sure I go home every night, now it’s my turn to take care of him,” said Marc Riffenberg of KDPS.
Officer Riffenberg was Ranger’s partner, and now says his family is anxious to have Ranger as a stay at home dog.
New Bern police dogs get bulletproof vests
Three lucky dogs with New Bern police K-9 units received new bulletproof vests Monday.
At a ceremony at the Eastern Carolina Internal Medicine Center at Berne Square, the three dogs, Clyde, Zorin and Bak,
were nervous and fidgety since it was their first day wearing the vests.
“The dogs have to get used to the vests,” said K-9 handler Christopher R. Lind. Lind handles Clyde, a German shepherd.
The vests, which cost $1,800 each and are customed-tailored, were donated as a show of appreciation from
Eastern Carolina Internal Medicine to the police dogs and their handlers.
T. Chaconas, office manager for ECIM, wanted to get the vests for the dogs to show appreciation to the K-9 units
for the work the dogs do at the facility.
“Whenever we have an alarm, the dogs are here searching the building for intruders,” Chaconas said.
ECIM is located in a 60,000-square foot building. Staff members allow the dogs to train there during
early-morning hours before patients arrive. “The dogs learn how to search a large building with slick floors,
desks, and supplies,” Chaconas said.
The way the dogs received the vests from ECIM came after an employee of the medical facility, Jackie Thompson,
came up with the idea.
The staff at ECIM came up with donations to buy the vests. A non-profit organization called VestN’ PDP
(Police Dog Protection) in New Mexico found a N.C. state grant to help with the purchase.
Officer Jim Rowe, senior handler and trainer and partner to Bak, said the vests are about safety.
“Now the dogs are safe. We appreciate the donation of the vests for our partners,” Rowe said.
Rowe is proud of Bak, who was donated to the police department by the Highway Patrol. “He has been
in service 8 months and already has confiscated a pound-and-a-half of marijuana and cocaine,” Rowe said.
Deputy Police Chief Ed Preston said the vests would not have been possible without the help of ECIM.
“We just didn’t have the money in the budget for the vests,” Preston said.
K-9 officer Thomas Carter was just as appreciative that his dog Zorin received a new vest.
Carter handles the only Belgian Malinois; the other two dogs are German shepherds.
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Dallas PD to require officers to cover tattoos
The next time you see a Dallas police officer wearing a long-sleeved shirt when it’s hotter than a furnace outside, it may be because he or she is hiding something.
A tattoo.
The department is planning to require police officers to cover up their tattoos, even if it means wearing makeup or a skin-colored patch over a hard-to-obscure place such as the neck or wrist.
“A lot of officers are coming in with tattoos,” said Lt. Andrew Harvey, a police spokesman.
“It’s more normal now than it ever has been,” he said but added that the department wants officers “to display a more professional image.”
The department’s personnel division is drawing up the official policy. It could go into effect as soon as this summer.
The old rules are silent on tattoos and state only that employees must “present a neutral and uniform image to effectively relate to all segments of the population they serve.”
The department largely left it up to the individual commander to decide whether an officer needed to cover tattoos.
A number of other cities also require officers to cover tattoos, including Los Angeles, Arlington and Houston, though they typically exempt officers working undercover. “This is in stride with what other cities are doing,” Harvey said.
Officer Nick Novello has four tattoos on his arms, including an American Indian on his right forearm that was there when he was hired by the city in 1982. He said he believes the department should consider grandfathering in current officers and thinks it’s a mistake to have an across-the-board policy.
“If I got hired in 1982 and had that tattoo on my forearm, how can you expect me to cover my tattoo up in 2009?” Novello asked. “If you have to cover up your arms, they’re going to have a lot of problems staying hydrated. You put a guy in long sleeves and he’s not going out of the car unless it’s an absolute emergency” during the hot summer months.
Novello, who also has an eagle bursting out of an American flag on his left arm, said he can understand requiring officers to cover up tattoos if they are offensive in some way.
“In culture at large, tattoos are extremely prevalent,” he said. “We’re not divorced from society at large.”
Another officer, who asked that his name to be published because he feared retaliation, said he’s worn a long-sleeved uniform for years because his tattoos cover his entire arms. But he said a portion of the tattoos still peeks out on his left hand.
“Are they going to make me wear gloves or makeup?” he said.
He suggested that a more reasonable approach would be to require officers to cover tattoos if they cover a certain percentage of the body part or if the tattoos are larger than a specified size.
“What are you going to do with that guy who is 300 pounds, and you put him in long sleeves in the heat of summer, and he drops out on you?” the officer said. “There’s other alternatives than saying everybody with tattoos has to cover it.”
Big Creek’s K-9 Cop Gets New Protection
Big Creek Police Chief David Poynor was reading a Sunday newspaper when he came across a story that caught his eye.
The story was entitled “Protecting K-9 Cops” and highlighted the work of Susie Jean of Douglasville, Georgia. Jean, who was at the time grieving the loss of her two German shepherds, saw a fleeing criminal shoot and kill a police dog on her local news. She decided she had to do something.
After contacting her local police department and discovering they couldn’t afford bullet-proof vests for their dogs due to the expense (approximately $700), she began raising funds herself.
Her efforts soon grew into a non-profit organization called Vest N P.D.P. (Police Dog Protection). The organization has distributed more than 260 vests to police departments across the country since 2002.
Poynor’s daughter Kayla decided she would contact Jean via email on behalf of her dad and his police drug dog Sheba.
“She responded very quickly,” Kayla said.
Three months later, Sheba has a bullet and stab-proof vest, which Poynor takes great pride in.
“I have one myself and she’s my partner,” said Poynor, who has served as Big Creek’s chief for 16 years. “She goes everywhere I do. You never know what kind of situation you’re going to get in.”
Poynor has used Sheba to assist several area law enforcement agencies outside of Big Creek.
“The mayor and board of aldermen of Big Creek have been very encouraging for us to help others best we can,” Poynor said. “Sheba is here for whomever needs her.”
Thanks to Kayla’s efforts to contact Susie Jean and the Vest N P.D.P., Sheba is will now have first-rate protection when she answers those calls in a potential hostile situation.
“It just took a little time and effort on our part,” said Kayla, who is working on her EMT license.
The Poynors are also assisting Chickasaw K-9 officer Lee Womack and his drug dog Max in securing a protective vest as well. The Poynors and Womack expressed their thanks for Jean and her organization and what it’s doing for K-9 units.
“A dog goes out with no fear and does what he’s been trained to do without a thought for personal danger,” Jean said in a February 2009 article in American Profile. “My efforts are a small price to pay for our police dogs that protect their human partner as well as our communities.”
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