Spring break is here and that normally means a “break” for us too. Since Lytle isn’t a spring break destination we can enjoy the simple things in life that come with the schools being shut down like the absence of all the school related traffic. Now we do occasionally have families headed to the beach and they stop here in town and ask for directions, we have to tell them that they need to be on IH-37 not IH-35. Sure the kids are out of school but we don’t really have much trouble with our youth, I guess there are some places where juvenile crime is a real problem but I think we are fortunate in that area.
Last week we responded to sixty calls for service and filed sixty-four Class C citations with the municipal court. A lot of those citations were for speeding and for no insurance, with a lot of the speeding citations being for offenses that occurred on residential streets. We also issued a handful of citations for people who parked / stood on the railroad tracks. We have a couple intersections in town where the traffic backs up onto the railroad tracks, you know you pull forward too soon and next thing you know you are sandwiched on the railroad tracks with vehicles in front of and behind you. It’s a dangerous situation; we have a lot of trains that run through town both day and night and they move through quickly (the speed limit on the tracks in Lytle is 60 MPH).
We didn’t set any records with arrests this past week, we only had two. One traffic stop resulted in a warrant being served for theft out of Bexar Co. and while inventorying the vehicle heroin, as well as fraudulent documents were recovered so the fellow picked up some felony charges. The other arrest, also the result of a traffic stop, was for driving while license invalid with a subsequent conviction. Both of these guys were booked into the Atascosa Co. Jail.
Our property crime reports this past week were even more boring than our arrest reports. Only one property crime was reported this past week, a vehicle parked at Quicksilver was burglarized and a stereo was taken, I can’t imagine that being a very lucrative crime, who wants some old stereo that’s been “yanked” out of a dash. I doubt the thief professionally removed it.
Our budget this year provided for two new fully equipped police vehicles, we purchased a 2017 Ford SUV and a 2017 Ford F150 P/U. The SUV has been in service for about thirty days and I’m hoping the truck will be outfitted with all the equipment within a week or so. Police vehicles are so complicated with all the junk we have to install in them; radios, radar, computers, in-car video, prisoner screens, storage boxes, wireless hotspots, decals, emergency lights and sirens, etc. Even if you try to keep it simple it is complicated. We don’t have any specialty vehicles, like ATVs, motorcycles or armored personnel carriers, though we do have some bicycles. There are some neat vehicles available through military surplus but I don’t want any part of that. Nope, those things are too big and as long as I am chief of police I don’t want any vehicle in my fleet that won’t fit through the drive thru of a fast food restaurant.