December 11, 2024 • 15 mins
That "More" includes flammable homeless encampments and juvenile crime in this conversation with Douglas County Sheriff Aaron Hanson.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Scott Vorge.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
We now welcome back to the studio. Douglas County Sheriff
Farren Hanson is back in here. Merry Christmas, Sheriff, Good morning. Yeah,
we're going after porch pirates here we are, and not
shooting them on site.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
No, No, definitely not.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Why not?
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Well, probably a lot of really good reasons why we
wouldn't jump right to that. Love.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Okay, well you've I don't know if you noticed in
the news here recently or in social media circles, but
murder is now legal and encouraged in some instances. A
lot of people really enjoy that kind of thing. I
won't get you into that conversation. But for those who
aren't familiar here porch pirates, they maybe have heard the term,
but they're not sure what we're talking about here. What
(00:43):
are we talking about?
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Yeah, we're talking folks that will drive around our community
and sometimes they'll even follow delivery vehicles, maybe ups FedEx, Amazon,
and wait for packages to be left on porches and
then run up and steal those packages. And I tell
you what makes me nervous is you know, we get
(01:05):
a lot of them reported to law enforcement. I really
wonder how many people don't report. Maybe they report it
to Amazon, or they vent on the next door app.
You see them mentioning it all the time on next
door app. But I think it's a it's a pretty
serious prolific problem right now, especially given the holiday season.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
They probably do what I do. I just call up
Amazon and the retailer I bought the thing from and
say someone stole it, and then they send me a
new one for free, and now I've got two.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Is that okay? Do we do that? Yeah? This is
probably the part where I read you your Miranda writes,
oh okay, well no, no, that's not okay.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
I'd like to meet this Miranda.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
But it hurts It hurts business. I mean that's a point,
whether someone reports it or not. I mean someone's paying
that cost. And there's a criminal, you know, incurring a
cost on some innocent business or some innocent citizen, right.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
And I wonder how many people are like, oh, if
you get you know, enough money to get all this
fancy stuff sent to your home here, you deserve to
have some of it stolen from here. These are the
same people that have no problem going out and vandalizing storefronts.
They vandalize your Christmas decorations and then then they steal
stuff from your porch here. So the Douglas County Sheriff's
Department has announced an operation to try and go after
(02:19):
those who are stealing some of these packages from people's porches.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
What are you doing, Well, it's a multifront effort. So
number one is the actual enforcement effort itself. We are
acquiring a variety of different boxes of different shapes and
sizes from different delivery companies, and we have acquired a
very tiny GPS tracker that we are hiding in the
(02:45):
box or amongst the items in the box. And also
with the GPS tracker in the box, we're going to
put items of value, and actually the items of value
that we're going to use are items of felony value
fifteen hundred dollars or more in value. And so that
means that when the porch pirate steals, hopefully they don't.
Hopefully no one steals any of these boxes, but we
(03:07):
know what's happening a lot around our community. So when
someone steals the box, we'll get them on camera because
there will be cameras in place recording the incident, and
then we'll quickly move in to stop and arrest them
and book them into jail.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
They've already started this.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
We have, we started this week. And the reason why
we're telegraphing this punch. I know there's probably some people saying,
Jesus sounds great, Why would you talk about it? Because
we don't want to have to book anybody into jail, Scott,
I mean, we want people to do the right thing. Deturren. Yeah,
get a job, earn your own money, buy your own
gifts the right way, and quit victimizing innocent people in
(03:46):
Mike County and businesses.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
I would think was everyone seemingly having ring doorbells, that
you'd probably have a lot of people that wouldn't go
steal anything from a porch because you're right there on camera.
But you know a lot of times they cover their
face or you know, the homeowner calls the law enforcement
and says, here's a picture of someone who stole my
package from my porch. You know it's a thirty dollars
(04:09):
pair of socks or something like that. That's pretty expensive socks.
But it doesn't rise to the level of fell anything.
And it's not like police are going to put out
an all points boilton for this fuzzy picture of someone
on your ring doorbell camera. So this is a much
better effort. People are saying, what about entrapment. Gary Sadelmeyer
was talking about this on kfab's Morning News. Is this entrapment?
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah, it's not, because entrapment in Nebraska means that you're
inducing someone to do what they crime that they would
not otherwise do. So. For example, if I left a
box on a sidewalk, that could be entrapment. If you
left it out in public property, that could be entrapment.
If we put it on someone's porch and said a
(04:52):
sign that said free with a narrow pointing to the package,
that would be entrapment. But if you're taking the steps
to drive into anighborhood, park your car, walk onto someone's
private property, grab someone's package that's on a porch, run
back to your car, regardless of whether you're picking one
of the GPS tracker packages that the Sheriff's office put
(05:14):
nowt that was your intent the old time. Your intent
was to steal.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Mark email Scott at kfab dot com via the Zonker's
custom What's Inbox and says I want to volunteer my
home as being a location for one of these porch
pirate sheriff packages and can people sign up and help
you with this or how does that work?
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Yes, So there's a couple criteria. Number one, if if
you are in an area that's getting hard hit by thefts,
and again I wish we knew where all the thefts were,
we know the ones that are reported. I bet you'll
only twenty five percent of the thefts are actually being reported.
But if you're in an area that you know and
you can prove as being hard hit by package thefts, potentially, yeah,
we'd want to consider you if you've got a good
(05:56):
camera system on your house already, and you'd be a
cooper with us so that we can make sure we
know exactly who came and picked it up, Because if
we stopped the car and the package is in it,
we don't have a camera system to see who actually
grabbed it, and there's four people in the car, you know,
it gets a little tougher to prove who actually made
the theft. So if you've got good camera equipment, if
(06:16):
you've got a history of package theft, and you're willing
to cooperate, get a hold of us on our social
media and we can connect you with our detective group
for see what we can put together.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Douglas County Sheriff's Department on social media. Aaron Hanson, Douglas
County Sheriff, is here in the studio on news radio
eleven ten KFAB. You also have aggressively been going after
those who are speeding across Domaha's streets. I used to
hear this a lot in the evening in West Omaha.
Since you announced that you're confiscating phones and cars a
(06:46):
couple of weeks ago, I'm not hearing it.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
We've been getting that feedback from around the county a
lot of people. I mean, it still persists in some areas.
You know, you're never going to be one hundred percent
successful in any effort, but definitely we're hearing that the
aggressive driving is minimizing across the county. Now we're going
to keep up the effort. We want to keep the
pressure on this group. But the other thing that we're
(07:12):
doing is we know that a lot of these are
young people that like cars and they're making poor choices.
I mean, we lose more people in our community to
traffic fatalities than we do drive by shooters. So we're
actually working with the owner of I twenty nine Speedway
in Iowa, and we'd like to set up three events, Spring,
summer and fall out of I twenty nine Speedway free events.
(07:34):
Bring some of these kids out there at Some of
these young people a lot of more car heads, gear heads.
They might make good cops some day unless they ruin
their life making poor choices on the road. But if
we could get some sponsors out in the public, in
the business community that would be willing to work with
this on it, we think we could have a spring,
summer and fall drag race event, burnout event in a
(07:55):
safe environment designed for that type of behavior. Kind of
scratch the itch at. A lot of these kids are
engaging in keep their records clear and keep people safe
in our community.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
I like the sound of that. That sounds really great here.
Do you get the sense that those that you have
picked up and in some cases taking phones and cars,
that they want to be law abiding citizens or what
kind of mindset are we dealing with. We've had a
couple of fatalities here, one who seemingly killed himself by
going well over one hundred and forty miles an hour
(08:27):
and destroyed his vehicle on one hundred and forty four Street,
and we had the terrible situation downtown where a guy
who was coming back from working the mill of the
night got rear ended by someone who was going well
over one hundred and fifty miles per hour here. So
what are we talking about here?
Speaker 1 (08:43):
So, in my view and talking with my deputies, with
the CAT Team deputies that are out on the prowl
for these aggressive drivers all the time, you've really got
that dense core nucleus of the real troublemakers, and they're
out there. They don't care, they don't care about your
family's safety, their own safety. They're doing a lot of
different criminal actions, not just driving behavior that maybe drug
(09:06):
dealers and maybe gang members. But then around that core group,
you've got some of these hang around associates, and those
are the ones that we really are nervous. We want
to make sure that we pull them back from romanticizing
that behavior to keep them from becoming that dense core
nucleus where someone gets killed or they kill themselves. And
(09:26):
that's really the group that we want to try to
educate because you never know, I wouldn't be surprised if
a lot of the young people in that hangaround group.
They might be great cops someday, you know, I mean,
we train in police profession. We train high speed driving.
We have to drive fast with due regard. That might
(09:46):
be an area that some of these kids that maybe
aren't intended to be bad, but they're going down the
wrong path. Maybe they'd make great cops or deputies someday.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Let's kind of Shriff Aaron Hanson. We've got increased efforts
to go after porch pirates, to go after these beating
gangs here in Omaha. You don't have a whole legion
of employees there with the Douglas County Sheriff's Office here,
how much do you work in partnership with Omaha police
Because a lot of this is happening within city limits
of Omaha. People are wondering, well, where does your jurisdiction
(10:17):
begin and on things like.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
This, Well, my jurisdiction is Douglas County from the Missouri
River to the Platte River, from dutch Hall Road to
Harrison Street, and we assist any of those municipal police
agencies that are within that county wide jurisdiction. We love
to help complement their efforts and we do. We work
very closely with them with the Oma Police Department Traffic
(10:41):
Unit on aggressive driving. Our criminal investigators work very closely
with the Omah Police Department's criminal investigators to pursue high
risk repeat criminals. So it's about teamwork, positive teamwork.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Excellent, good to hear. You've also talked on this program
a lot over the years here about some of the
homeless encampments and situations that you've seen. You and I
have gone out and talked to people who are living
under overpasses, living on the streets, living in some of
these tents given out by some of these nonprofit groups
to help pacify the homeless population of Omaha. We just
(11:16):
had another fire. This was in a pavement structure, a
parking garage, a concrete parking garage. This doesn't just spontaneously combust.
I wasn't the least bit surprised to find out it
was materials left by an encampment in the Crossroads parking
garage that caused a huge fire there yesterday. And this
is something that as we get into these cold winter nights,
(11:37):
we're going to see more and more of, aren't.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
We We are? And it makes me nervous as well.
I mean, just like that seventy year old man a
couple weeks ago that lit himself on fire a block
and a half away from the Santa Francis House the
ten o'clock at night. Thank got two Omah police officers
drilled by and extinguish him third degree burns. I mean,
he'll be probably disfigured for the rest of his life.
But I think what what we're really narrowing in on
(12:02):
is we need that good, smart public policy that balance
between helping people and enforcing the law and protecting innocent people.
Right now, we have state law that makes it expressly
prohibited to camp in an unauthorized way on county and
state property, and I think it does not include city property.
It's a loophole in the state law. So I think
either next session that needs the city property needs to
(12:24):
be included in the state law, or city councils around
the county or in the Omah metro area struggling with
this issue probably needs to implement a city ordinance that
mirrors that state law. And the state law is not
it's not too heavy handed. There's no jail time, and
it's a five hundred dollars fine, and the folks have
(12:45):
to pay for the cost of cleanup. But if you
get ahead of these homeless encampments when they're small, they
won't be so big and cost so much money to
clean up. The neighborhood around them will be safer and cleaner,
and I think it's better also for these individuals. Folks
need to be in a shelter. All of positive ending
stories usually begin in a shelter. That's where you will
(13:08):
get the services that you need to eventually live in
dignity in your own apartment. But there's no.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Shortcuts aimen to all of that. Finally, we've got a
new legislature getting together here in just a matter of weeks.
Is juvenile justice reform going to be on the docket
for this upcoming legislative session. We just had a couple
instances in town in the last few days. Sixteen year
old shot and killed someone who seemingly had an issue
(13:35):
with his mother. Not sure what was going on there.
Then you had a fourteen year old kid who was
shot several times near forty second and Ames the other night,
and police are looking for what seems to be a
teenage criminal in that instance here. So juvenile crime has
been something We've talked a lot about any indication that
some of these laws that coddle young criminals in our
(13:58):
community might change, a lot.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Of positive indications. I've never seen so many different players
in government working well together and talking. Not that we
agree on everything, but from the judicial branch to the
governor's office, to state senators, to law enforcement, county attorneys,
even public defenders to some extent, I don't want to
(14:23):
speak for them, but I think you've seen some recent
interviews in which I think they've been admitted that certain
public policy decisions, at least on infrastructure, were shortsighted. I
think we're going to see an alignment of the stars
and we're going to be able to claw back some
of these well intended but quite frankly naive juvenile justice
reforms that were pushed by nonprofit groups. Reality has sunk in.
(14:46):
People have lost their lives, kids have lost their futures,
families have been disrupted, and I think everyone realized we
have to fix it. And we're going to have a
great chairman of the Judiciary Committee. I believe it's going
to be Senator Bosan at a link and former county attorney.
So everything's shaping up to get some real success out
of this next legislative session.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Douglas County Sheriff Farren Hanson. You can find him in
the Douglas County Sheriff's Department, on social media, and oftentimes
on this radio program. Thank you very much for the
time today, and again, Merry Christmas to you and all
the members of the Douglas County Sheriff's Department.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Same to you and your listeners.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Scott Rooys mornings nine to eleven our News Radio eleven
ten KFAB
Scott Vorge.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
We now welcome back to the studio. Douglas County Sheriff
Farren Hanson is back in here. Merry Christmas, Sheriff, Good morning. Yeah,
we're going after porch pirates here we are, and not
shooting them on site.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
No, No, definitely not.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Why not?
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Well, probably a lot of really good reasons why we
wouldn't jump right to that. Love.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Okay, well you've I don't know if you noticed in
the news here recently or in social media circles, but
murder is now legal and encouraged in some instances. A
lot of people really enjoy that kind of thing. I
won't get you into that conversation. But for those who
aren't familiar here porch pirates, they maybe have heard the term,
but they're not sure what we're talking about here. What
(00:43):
are we talking about?
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Yeah, we're talking folks that will drive around our community
and sometimes they'll even follow delivery vehicles, maybe ups FedEx, Amazon,
and wait for packages to be left on porches and
then run up and steal those packages. And I tell
you what makes me nervous is you know, we get
(01:05):
a lot of them reported to law enforcement. I really
wonder how many people don't report. Maybe they report it
to Amazon, or they vent on the next door app.
You see them mentioning it all the time on next
door app. But I think it's a it's a pretty
serious prolific problem right now, especially given the holiday season.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
They probably do what I do. I just call up
Amazon and the retailer I bought the thing from and
say someone stole it, and then they send me a
new one for free, and now I've got two.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Is that okay? Do we do that? Yeah? This is
probably the part where I read you your Miranda writes,
oh okay, well no, no, that's not okay.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
I'd like to meet this Miranda.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
But it hurts It hurts business. I mean that's a point,
whether someone reports it or not. I mean someone's paying
that cost. And there's a criminal, you know, incurring a
cost on some innocent business or some innocent citizen, right.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
And I wonder how many people are like, oh, if
you get you know, enough money to get all this
fancy stuff sent to your home here, you deserve to
have some of it stolen from here. These are the
same people that have no problem going out and vandalizing storefronts.
They vandalize your Christmas decorations and then then they steal
stuff from your porch here. So the Douglas County Sheriff's
Department has announced an operation to try and go after
(02:19):
those who are stealing some of these packages from people's porches.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
What are you doing, Well, it's a multifront effort. So
number one is the actual enforcement effort itself. We are
acquiring a variety of different boxes of different shapes and
sizes from different delivery companies, and we have acquired a
very tiny GPS tracker that we are hiding in the
(02:45):
box or amongst the items in the box. And also
with the GPS tracker in the box, we're going to
put items of value, and actually the items of value
that we're going to use are items of felony value
fifteen hundred dollars or more in value. And so that
means that when the porch pirate steals, hopefully they don't.
Hopefully no one steals any of these boxes, but we
(03:07):
know what's happening a lot around our community. So when
someone steals the box, we'll get them on camera because
there will be cameras in place recording the incident, and
then we'll quickly move in to stop and arrest them
and book them into jail.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
They've already started this.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
We have, we started this week. And the reason why
we're telegraphing this punch. I know there's probably some people saying,
Jesus sounds great, Why would you talk about it? Because
we don't want to have to book anybody into jail, Scott,
I mean, we want people to do the right thing. Deturren. Yeah,
get a job, earn your own money, buy your own
gifts the right way, and quit victimizing innocent people in
(03:46):
Mike County and businesses.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
I would think was everyone seemingly having ring doorbells, that
you'd probably have a lot of people that wouldn't go
steal anything from a porch because you're right there on camera.
But you know a lot of times they cover their
face or you know, the homeowner calls the law enforcement
and says, here's a picture of someone who stole my
package from my porch. You know it's a thirty dollars
(04:09):
pair of socks or something like that. That's pretty expensive socks.
But it doesn't rise to the level of fell anything.
And it's not like police are going to put out
an all points boilton for this fuzzy picture of someone
on your ring doorbell camera. So this is a much
better effort. People are saying, what about entrapment. Gary Sadelmeyer
was talking about this on kfab's Morning News. Is this entrapment?
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah, it's not, because entrapment in Nebraska means that you're
inducing someone to do what they crime that they would
not otherwise do. So. For example, if I left a
box on a sidewalk, that could be entrapment. If you
left it out in public property, that could be entrapment.
If we put it on someone's porch and said a
(04:52):
sign that said free with a narrow pointing to the package,
that would be entrapment. But if you're taking the steps
to drive into anighborhood, park your car, walk onto someone's
private property, grab someone's package that's on a porch, run
back to your car, regardless of whether you're picking one
of the GPS tracker packages that the Sheriff's office put
(05:14):
nowt that was your intent the old time. Your intent
was to steal.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Mark email Scott at kfab dot com via the Zonker's
custom What's Inbox and says I want to volunteer my
home as being a location for one of these porch
pirate sheriff packages and can people sign up and help
you with this or how does that work?
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Yes, So there's a couple criteria. Number one, if if
you are in an area that's getting hard hit by thefts,
and again I wish we knew where all the thefts were,
we know the ones that are reported. I bet you'll
only twenty five percent of the thefts are actually being reported.
But if you're in an area that you know and
you can prove as being hard hit by package thefts, potentially, yeah,
we'd want to consider you if you've got a good
(05:56):
camera system on your house already, and you'd be a
cooper with us so that we can make sure we
know exactly who came and picked it up, Because if
we stopped the car and the package is in it,
we don't have a camera system to see who actually
grabbed it, and there's four people in the car, you know,
it gets a little tougher to prove who actually made
the theft. So if you've got good camera equipment, if
(06:16):
you've got a history of package theft, and you're willing
to cooperate, get a hold of us on our social
media and we can connect you with our detective group
for see what we can put together.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Douglas County Sheriff's Department on social media. Aaron Hanson, Douglas
County Sheriff, is here in the studio on news radio
eleven ten KFAB. You also have aggressively been going after
those who are speeding across Domaha's streets. I used to
hear this a lot in the evening in West Omaha.
Since you announced that you're confiscating phones and cars a
(06:46):
couple of weeks ago, I'm not hearing it.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
We've been getting that feedback from around the county a
lot of people. I mean, it still persists in some areas.
You know, you're never going to be one hundred percent
successful in any effort, but definitely we're hearing that the
aggressive driving is minimizing across the county. Now we're going
to keep up the effort. We want to keep the
pressure on this group. But the other thing that we're
(07:12):
doing is we know that a lot of these are
young people that like cars and they're making poor choices.
I mean, we lose more people in our community to
traffic fatalities than we do drive by shooters. So we're
actually working with the owner of I twenty nine Speedway
in Iowa, and we'd like to set up three events, Spring,
summer and fall out of I twenty nine Speedway free events.
(07:34):
Bring some of these kids out there at Some of
these young people a lot of more car heads, gear heads.
They might make good cops some day unless they ruin
their life making poor choices on the road. But if
we could get some sponsors out in the public, in
the business community that would be willing to work with
this on it, we think we could have a spring,
summer and fall drag race event, burnout event in a
(07:55):
safe environment designed for that type of behavior. Kind of
scratch the itch at. A lot of these kids are
engaging in keep their records clear and keep people safe
in our community.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
I like the sound of that. That sounds really great here.
Do you get the sense that those that you have
picked up and in some cases taking phones and cars,
that they want to be law abiding citizens or what
kind of mindset are we dealing with. We've had a
couple of fatalities here, one who seemingly killed himself by
going well over one hundred and forty miles an hour
(08:27):
and destroyed his vehicle on one hundred and forty four Street,
and we had the terrible situation downtown where a guy
who was coming back from working the mill of the
night got rear ended by someone who was going well
over one hundred and fifty miles per hour here. So
what are we talking about here?
Speaker 1 (08:43):
So, in my view and talking with my deputies, with
the CAT Team deputies that are out on the prowl
for these aggressive drivers all the time, you've really got
that dense core nucleus of the real troublemakers, and they're
out there. They don't care, they don't care about your
family's safety, their own safety. They're doing a lot of
different criminal actions, not just driving behavior that maybe drug
(09:06):
dealers and maybe gang members. But then around that core group,
you've got some of these hang around associates, and those
are the ones that we really are nervous. We want
to make sure that we pull them back from romanticizing
that behavior to keep them from becoming that dense core
nucleus where someone gets killed or they kill themselves. And
(09:26):
that's really the group that we want to try to
educate because you never know, I wouldn't be surprised if
a lot of the young people in that hangaround group.
They might be great cops someday, you know, I mean,
we train in police profession. We train high speed driving.
We have to drive fast with due regard. That might
(09:46):
be an area that some of these kids that maybe
aren't intended to be bad, but they're going down the
wrong path. Maybe they'd make great cops or deputies someday.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Let's kind of Shriff Aaron Hanson. We've got increased efforts
to go after porch pirates, to go after these beating
gangs here in Omaha. You don't have a whole legion
of employees there with the Douglas County Sheriff's Office here,
how much do you work in partnership with Omaha police
Because a lot of this is happening within city limits
of Omaha. People are wondering, well, where does your jurisdiction
(10:17):
begin and on things like.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
This, Well, my jurisdiction is Douglas County from the Missouri
River to the Platte River, from dutch Hall Road to
Harrison Street, and we assist any of those municipal police
agencies that are within that county wide jurisdiction. We love
to help complement their efforts and we do. We work
very closely with them with the Oma Police Department Traffic
(10:41):
Unit on aggressive driving. Our criminal investigators work very closely
with the Omah Police Department's criminal investigators to pursue high
risk repeat criminals. So it's about teamwork, positive teamwork.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Excellent, good to hear. You've also talked on this program
a lot over the years here about some of the
homeless encampments and situations that you've seen. You and I
have gone out and talked to people who are living
under overpasses, living on the streets, living in some of
these tents given out by some of these nonprofit groups
to help pacify the homeless population of Omaha. We just
(11:16):
had another fire. This was in a pavement structure, a
parking garage, a concrete parking garage. This doesn't just spontaneously combust.
I wasn't the least bit surprised to find out it
was materials left by an encampment in the Crossroads parking
garage that caused a huge fire there yesterday. And this
is something that as we get into these cold winter nights,
(11:37):
we're going to see more and more of, aren't.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
We We are? And it makes me nervous as well.
I mean, just like that seventy year old man a
couple weeks ago that lit himself on fire a block
and a half away from the Santa Francis House the
ten o'clock at night. Thank got two Omah police officers
drilled by and extinguish him third degree burns. I mean,
he'll be probably disfigured for the rest of his life.
But I think what what we're really narrowing in on
(12:02):
is we need that good, smart public policy that balance
between helping people and enforcing the law and protecting innocent people.
Right now, we have state law that makes it expressly
prohibited to camp in an unauthorized way on county and
state property, and I think it does not include city property.
It's a loophole in the state law. So I think
either next session that needs the city property needs to
(12:24):
be included in the state law, or city councils around
the county or in the Omah metro area struggling with
this issue probably needs to implement a city ordinance that
mirrors that state law. And the state law is not
it's not too heavy handed. There's no jail time, and
it's a five hundred dollars fine, and the folks have
(12:45):
to pay for the cost of cleanup. But if you
get ahead of these homeless encampments when they're small, they
won't be so big and cost so much money to
clean up. The neighborhood around them will be safer and cleaner,
and I think it's better also for these individuals. Folks
need to be in a shelter. All of positive ending
stories usually begin in a shelter. That's where you will
(13:08):
get the services that you need to eventually live in
dignity in your own apartment. But there's no.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Shortcuts aimen to all of that. Finally, we've got a
new legislature getting together here in just a matter of weeks.
Is juvenile justice reform going to be on the docket
for this upcoming legislative session. We just had a couple
instances in town in the last few days. Sixteen year
old shot and killed someone who seemingly had an issue
(13:35):
with his mother. Not sure what was going on there.
Then you had a fourteen year old kid who was
shot several times near forty second and Ames the other night,
and police are looking for what seems to be a
teenage criminal in that instance here. So juvenile crime has
been something We've talked a lot about any indication that
some of these laws that coddle young criminals in our
(13:58):
community might change, a lot.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Of positive indications. I've never seen so many different players
in government working well together and talking. Not that we
agree on everything, but from the judicial branch to the
governor's office, to state senators, to law enforcement, county attorneys,
even public defenders to some extent, I don't want to
(14:23):
speak for them, but I think you've seen some recent
interviews in which I think they've been admitted that certain
public policy decisions, at least on infrastructure, were shortsighted. I
think we're going to see an alignment of the stars
and we're going to be able to claw back some
of these well intended but quite frankly naive juvenile justice
reforms that were pushed by nonprofit groups. Reality has sunk in.
(14:46):
People have lost their lives, kids have lost their futures,
families have been disrupted, and I think everyone realized we
have to fix it. And we're going to have a
great chairman of the Judiciary Committee. I believe it's going
to be Senator Bosan at a link and former county attorney.
So everything's shaping up to get some real success out
of this next legislative session.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Douglas County Sheriff Farren Hanson. You can find him in
the Douglas County Sheriff's Department, on social media, and oftentimes
on this radio program. Thank you very much for the
time today, and again, Merry Christmas to you and all
the members of the Douglas County Sheriff's Department.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Same to you and your listeners.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Scott Rooys mornings nine to eleven our News Radio eleven
ten KFAB
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