Hutchinson Police Chief Dick Heitschmidt stands between Hutchinson City Manager John Deardoff (left) and Hutchinson Mayor Dave Razo (right) during the presentation Tuesday at Memorial Hall.

A special luncheon was held over the noon hour Tuesday, to recognize employee service to the city of Hutchinson. That included recognition to Police Chief Dick Heitschmidt. He has been in law enforcement in the city and county for 40-years.

In an interview with the Hutchpost, he says he still loves his job adding, it’s full filled a life long dream. He says, “it’s been fun, I’ve enjoyed it, I still enjoy it.” He says for the most part he enjoys coming to work everyday. He says he works with great people that make it enjoyable saying its his career and fills fortunate to have been in this line of work for as long as he has.

As for the changes in police work over the years. The chief says the biggest change has been technology. He talked about when he started with the Sheriff’s Office in 1973. He says in those days, they had one dash mounted radio, and one switch to turn on the gumball light on top of the car. He says now we have computers, two different radio outfits, audio and video for all the cars, automatic ticket writers and printers. He says the technology is the biggest change, but adds the officers for the most part still do the job the same. He says there have been some court decisions that have changed some of the ways they do things. But, says Heitschmidt, officers are still out on the street trying to help people with whatever they come up with.

The chief also mentioned to us that although technology has helped them with their jobs, its also created a whole new set of crimes. That would include computer crimes and says they have a whole lot of victims of computer crimes, juveniles and adults, identity theft and those kind of things. He says they have had to take the time to get some officers trained in how to deal with those sorts of things.

He says back on the old days, they didn’t have to worry about such things saying, “we didn’t even know what a computer was.” He says the only thing that even resembled a computer was the old teletype machine which they used to communicate county to county and across the state. He says “now its all done on computers and everyone has a computer and everyone has a smart phone and says there all kinds of things happening on those that make it more complicated.” He says they do have people trained and able to respond and investigate issues from those technologies.

Hutchinson City Manager John Deardoff when presenting the award to the chief poked a little fun at him by showing what he said was a photo from the first day he started with law enforcement. It was actually a photo of “Barney Fife” on the old Andy Griffith show from the 1960’s. The chief took the kidding in stride.

Heitschmidt has been the Chief of Police in Hutchinson since 1992.