Four Lancaster County police officers were recently honored as “Top Guns” for their efforts to combat impaired driving.
Lancaster County District Attorney Craig Stedman was a keynote speaker at the Pennsylvania DUI Association’s 37th annual meeting where the officers were honored.
Stedman told the audience that DUI is not a victimless crime, as police and prosecutors encounter families of all types of individuals killed in DUI-related vehicle crashes: a parent driving to work late night to support their children; a young student with the world ahead of them.
Lititz police Sergeant Jaren Hahn and Manheim Township police Patrolman Bradley Redinger were honored for their work as drug recognition experts, trained to detect signs of not only drunk drivers, but drivers under the influence of narcotics.
State police Troopers Peter Minko and Stephanie Schiavoni received Top Gun awards for their number of DUI arrests in 2015.
Stedman stressed that law-enforcement’s role is not only to arrest and prosecute DUI drivers, but to “work towards a point that we never have to meet a (victim’s) family this way again.”
Stedman pointed to a number of initiative in Lancaster County to combat future offenses, including:
- A DUI Repeat Offender Program, which places first-time offenders on SCRAM monitoring, supervised bail, and other conditions to deter subsequent offenses;
- DUI Central Court, which consolidates all new DUI charges at Lancaster County Court for preliminary precedings – rather than having cases scheduled individually at district courts across the county.
Also at the meeting, Assistant District Attorney Ande Gonzalez was elected secretary for the Pennsylvania DUI Association.
MEDIA CONTACT: Brett A. Hambright, 717-295-2041; bhambright@co.lancaster.pa.us; Twitter: @BrettHambright