Published in the April 27 – May 10, 2016 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Staff Report
Police Chief David Swing
Morgan Hill Life Publisher Marty Cheek was a guest of Rotary Club of Morgan Hill member Chuck Berghoff at the April 13 lunch meeting to hear about the state of public safety in the city in a talk given by Morgan Hill Police Chief David Swing, a fellow Rotarian with Berghoff.
Swing told the “unbelievable” story about how MHPD officers Greg Dini, and Fidel Rios caught three suspects in a very short amount of time the day before the Rotary club meeting.
“Someone decided to come to our fair city from the city of Oakland and was staying in one of our hotels. Our proactive officer Dini saw a suspicious vehicle and found out it was stolen,” Swing told the club members. “We called our auto theft task force and they came down in unmarked vehicles to help apprehend the subject and when he decided to take off, they blocked him in.”
The suspect tried to escape and another vehicle blocked him in so he couldn’t get out the passenger door.
The officers took the subject into custody and found heroin, a loaded gun, and property from a burglary that he committed in Morgan Hill the day before.
Dini didn’t call it a day after that arrest. He went to a different hotel and was doing some snooping around and found a suspicious car that was tied to a theft that had just occurred in Gilroy. And so he did a search and recovered the property there and arrested the subject.
While officer Rios was transporting that second subject to San Martin to do the prisoner exchange with Gilroy PD, his license plate reader got a hit on a different occupied stolen vehicle in San Martin. That third subject was taken into custody as well. All three incident happened in a very short amount of time.
“That just helps to illustrate how we use technology and how we work with the community,” Swing said.
Watch for our story on the state of public safety, based on Swing’s talk, in the May 11 issue of Morgan Hill Life.
