Meet Girardville’s new police chief
SUBMITTED PHOTO - Mayor Michael Zangari and Chief of Police Fred Lahovski.
GIRARDVILLE – For the past month or so, Girardville has had a new top cop.
Frederick J. Lahovski Jr. was sworn in at February’s borough council meeting as Girardville’s police chief, and sat down with the Sentinel Saturday to discuss his experience and initiatives.
Lahovski has a wealth of experience, primarily in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania.
“I’ve been a police officer for 25 years. I started out as one of the originating full-time members of the Colonial Regional Police Department in Bethlehem,” Lahovski said. “After two years, I was hired by the Bethlehem Township Police Department, which is a direct suburb of Bethlehem city, approximately 20,000 people today.”
“I worked as a patrol officer there and retired in 2005, then I spent the next eight years as a full-timer in Nazareth, where I was a detective for several years,” Lahovski added. “I worked in a small town, much like Girardville, called Tatamy, I was a Corporal there.”
“At the same time, towards the end of my Nazareth tenure, I was hired as the chief of police in Forty Fort, a suburb of Wilkes-Barre, and I spent a little more than a year there,” Lahovski said. “And I’ve always worked in a variety of part-time police departments.”
In 2016, Lahovski left the Lehigh Valley for a full-time position in McAdoo, where he stayed until last April.
“I figured I was in the twilight of my career when this opportunity came up,” Lahovski said.
The key difference between his experiences in the Lehigh Valley and the Coal Region is the amount of available resources, which isn’t necessarily a detriment, he says.
“I can remember very early on in my career, we had laptops in the car, we had floppy disks. We don’t even have laptops in cars here yet,” Lahovski said. “There’s a lot of old school policework that goes on here, which I’m well-versed in, and they’re still applicable, and they still work.”
One step to try to utilize modern technology to solve crime is the Girardville 360 initiative, a joint initiative between him and Mayor Michael Zangari.
The initiative is seeking homeowners who would be willing to allow the police department to use their home security cameras during investigations.
“The initiative is one of a multitude of things that are simultaneously going on right now as the police department starts to sail in 2021,” Lahovski said. “The 360 Initiative mostly is a database or collecting of information of an existing resource, which is the home surveillance [systems] of our citizens.”
“The back half of my police career, I solved many, many crimes on grainy video images of convenience store video surveillance, people’s home surveillance, Ring doorbells,” Lahovski said. “In the initial stages of a police incident is a canvass. We would be canvassing a neighborhood front, back, left, and right to see if anyone had seen anything, and with the onset of technology in our society, we started looking for cameras.
“It can be a laborious process,” he added. “We thought if we created a database or a file system that we would have this information up front, it would expedite the investigation.”
Zangari said registries will remain confidential, and forms are available at borough hall. If a resident wants to register and doesn’t want to come to borough hall in person as a coronavirus precaution, they can call borough hall at 570-276-1635.
Another change under Lahovski’s tenure, Zangari said, is the addition of a Facebook page. The Facebook page provides regular updates on the activities of the department, and for people who don’t have access to Facebook, the same postings are physically posted to a bulletin board in borough hall.
Zangari also highlighted a prescription drug take-back box in borough hall. The box is sponsored by Rite Aid, and allows a way to safely dispose of unneeded, unused, or expired prescription drugs, no questions asked. The box is accessible for drop-off during normal business hours at borough hall. The box was installed under the tenure of prior police chief Jody Long.
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