After a week on the job, North Judson Town Marshal John Ramos says he’s settling into the position.
“The transition’s going smoothly,” he told the town council Monday. “I’ve been meeting a lot of the townspeople and I’ve been going through and meeting most of the business owners, and everything’s going really, really well there.”
Ramos says he’s already been dealing with some vandalism at the town’s park facilities, “At Norwayne Field, I guess they broke into the small building over there, and they broke the Christmas lights that were in there. And then in the park, they stole the speed bump. I talked to [Town Superintendent] Marshall [Horstmann], and he said it’s not the first time.”
Meanwhile, Ramos says he’s begun some cleanup efforts at the police department. “There’s a lot of old, damaged, and broken pieces of equipment there,” he says. “There was like old boxes and there’s old Ford car parts from, I guess, the old Crown Vics that they used to have, and I mean, the stuff is broken. And so we just started cleaning it up and basically filling up that dumpster to clean out the entire department.”
Similarly, Ramos says there’s a lot of old evidence sitting in the police station, some of which dates back to the 1980s. He says police departments are allowed to destroy evidence after seven years, and he plans to work with Town Attorney Rachel Arndt to begin the process of getting rid of evidence that’s no longer needed.
However, he also plans to create a dedicated storage area for pieces of evidence that need to be kept. “There’s a room next to the garage at the police department, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to build a cage, an evidence cage, because sometimes you get very large pieces of evidence and there’s no place to put those, like there’s actually a mattress that’s actually a piece of evidence, and so we need someplace to store that stuff.” He says he’s working with Town Superintendent Marshall Horstmann to install a chain-link fence or a similar solution to create the storage area.
