Police department Web site offers crime information
From staff reports
With the click of a mouse, Lincoln
residents can now check up on police
activity in their neighborhoods.
Last week, police added a map-dri
ven listing of incidents reported in the
city broken down by police reporting
district to its Web site.
Lincoln Police Chief Tom Casady
said the Internet was a useful tool for
police to communicate with the com
munity.
On an average day Lincoln police
officers will be dispatched to about 400
incidents,” Casady said in a statement
“(On the Internet) we can organize this
information in a way that lets citizens
check on trends in their own neighbor
hood.”
A listing of calls to police in a spe
cific area of Lincoln is available by
clicking on an area of a city map.
The police Data Processing Unit
and its manager, Clair Lindquist, creat
ed the new feature for the Web site.
“For most police departments,
accomplishing something of this mag
nitude would require a six-figure grant
and a year or two of consultants,”
Casady said. “For Clair, it was a Coke
and a weekend.”
Also available on the police Web
site is a list of outstanding warrants, a
daily call summary and a stolen items
list as well as general information about
die department.
The police site is located at
http . //interline, ci. lincoln. ne. us.
Together, We're Making Lives Better
621 Rose Street, Lincoln
www.mdsharris.com/rcrt/recruithtm
i..—..—..—.... .
Alcohol-related
tickets double
East Lincoln target of project
By Josh Funk
Senior staff writer
Lincoln Police handed out more
than double the usual number of
DWI tickets in March as part of a tar
geted enforcement project in the
city’s east end.
With St. Patrick’s Day and state
basketball tournaments, which bring
thousands of visitors to town, police
chose March to focus on alcohol
offenses, especially drunken driving
and underage drinking.
“We knew that in this month
there were a lot of high-risk activi
ties,” Lincoln Police Sgt. Mike
Bassett said.
Officers on the southeast and
northeast teams prioritized alcohol
enforcement, in addition to their reg
ular duties.
In the east end of the city, police
cited 102 people for driving while
intoxicated, and 222 were cited city
wide, police said.
“We were surprised to see that
many people behind the wheel
drunk,” said Bassett, who works
with the southeast team.
Bassett said that more than 20
percent of those cited for driving
drunk were underage, and many had
open containers of alcohol with
them.
Lincoln Police Chief Tom
Casady said this year’s numbers of
alcohol offenses were the highest in
recent memory.
“We’re on a record pace this
year,” Casady said.
In their enforcement, police used
undercover and uniformed enforce
ment in combination with education
to impact alcohol violations.
To locate the house parties,
police either used informants or fol
lowed the congested parking and
steady stream of teen-agers.
Then undercover officers went
M-—
We were
surprised to see
that many people
behind the wheel
drunk”
Sgt. Mike Bassett
Lincoln Police
into the parties and observed the
operation before police broke it up.
“We were surprised how easily
our officers could do this,” Bassett
said. “These people don’t care about
age or if they know the people.”
At one party, where officers paid
five dollars at the door, a 13-year-old
girl was taking money at the door
while running the party with her 16
year-old sister, Basset said.
Police said the girls threw the
party with 75 teen-agers while their
mother was working a third-shift
job.
When they broke up these par
ties police confiscated all the cash
and alcohol as evidence and cited the
party hosts for procuring alcohol for
minors and maintaining a disorderly
house.
Thirty-six minors were cited for
possessing alcohol as part of the pro
ject in east Lincoln.
“The sheer volume and sheer
numbers precluded us from enforc
ing all the violations we saw,”
Bassett said.
Police also worked with liquor
stores to eliminate alcohol sales to
minors.
Judging by the success of this
enforcement, Bassett said officers
would likely use similar techniques
in the future.
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