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HUDSON — Good police work combined with great luck recently paid off handsomely for the Hudson Police Department and Town Marshal Ward Odom.
At the 2009 Operation Pullover banquet held last month in Carmel, Odom returned with a 2010 Ford Crown Victoria police car for his town. The car and all the equipment is valued at $30,000, but Odom and the town will pay absolutely nothing for the car.
Odom won the new squad car in a drawing held among 11 different law enforcement agencies in northeast Indiana receiving honors as part of Operation Pullover (OPO). It’s the statewide effort sponsored by the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute that puts extra police officers on Indiana’s streets and roads at different times of the year.
“I was absolutely dumbstruck,” Odom said when he realized he had won the new car, which his Steuben County department was in need of.
As part of the OPO banquet, each of the award-winning police departments had a chance to grab a small gift box. Each box had a toy vehicle in it, such as an ambulance, tow truck or firetruck. Only one of the boxes contained a police car.
Odom was the first of the 11 officers to pick a box.
“I opened it and pulled out a white truck thing with lights on it. I thought it was an ambulance and didn’t think I had won. Then I started looking at it, and saw it had ‘Police’ written on the bottom. It took a few seconds to sink in that I had won the new car.”
The town of Hudson currently has a 2004 Chevrolet Impala as its police car, and Odom said it would soon need a lot of repairs, so the timing to win a new car was great.
The Ford he won is valued at $22,000, plus it has about $8,000 in accessories, such as lights and sirens.
“All we have to do is add our own graphics and our radios, and switch the video camera out from our old car and we’re ready to go,” he said.
The town of Hudson and its marshal’s office were honored with three awards for working with OPO and related efforts this year. In addition to Operation Pullover, Hudson with recognized for being part of DUI Task Force and as a partner with the Federal Crash Reduction Effort.
The extra time needed to be part of those taskforces comes from grants. “We apply for grants every year and have been fortunate to receive them over the years,” Odom said.
OPO and the other projects are part of a partnership Hudson and many other communities in northeast Indiana have with the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute and the National Highway Transportation Administration.
The goal of the partnerships is to crack down on drunk drivers and increase safety and awareness among all Indiana drivers. The partnerships work to increase seat belt use and prevent crashes, injuries and fatalities that occur due to impaired and dangerous driving behaviors.
Each campaign consists of two weeks of public awareness using television, radio and outdoor advertising and two weeks of increased enforcement.
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