Gnome more messing around

Newport police get their… man?

By Gretchen Ammerman

Oregon Coast TODAY

The other day I had the opportunity to chat with Officer Thomas Lekas of the Newport Police Department, and it was no garden-variety interview.

Last December, Officer Lekas was involved with taking down a gnome felon.

“We got a hot call about a little guy who was putting “G" stickers all over town,” Lekas said. “I arrived on the scene where he was last sighted, and there he was on top of a sign — I knew I’d caught him red-handed.’”

Officer Lekas was aware that, no matter how much he tightened them, regular cuffs just would not have stayed on the little guy’s wrists. Luckily, he had come prepared.

“I had on me a pair of gnome-cuffs,” he said. “I cuffed him up, but this being my first time in this situation, I still didn’t get them tight enough because I turned my back for a minute and when I turned back, the cuffs were on the ground and he was gone.”

At this point, Lekas had been joined by two members of the Newport Fire Department, with whom NPD shares a famed, if usually all for fun, rivalry.

“Those fire guys are no better than the gnomes,” Lekas said. “I asked them where he went and they each pointed in an opposite direction, so I asked them again and they each pointed in a different opposite direction; it got really confusing. They might have been his accomplices; to this day I’m still not sure.”

Lekas, who describes himself as a “spry 50-year-old,” sprang into action and quickly found the half-a-foot-high felon.

“I gnabbed him and this time I cuffed him to me, took him to the car and put him in the passenger seat. Somehow, in that time he managed to slap up more stickers. I’m not sure how he did it, but he got a G on a Newport sign and even managed to put one on my spotlight. I didn’t realize it until the next time I turned it on and it threw out a great big G-shaped shadow.”

Once in the interview room, things didn’t go much more smoothly.

“I pulled out my gnote-pad and my first question was, ‘Did you put up those G stickers?’” Lekas said. “He just answered ‘Gnome.’"

The officer continued his line of questioning, trying different ways to get the gnome to admit to his G-shaped crimes but he just kept getting the same answer: “Gnome.”

“I finally thought I would be clever and asked him what letter gnome starts with,” Lekas said. “He just looked at me blankly. Then I faced him with irrefutable evidence of the stickers actually IN his pocket. He said he didn’t gknow where they came from.”

Despite the stickers all over town and plenty of hearsay sightings, with no video evidence of the malfeasance, the Gnewport Gnome got off with little more than a slap on his tiny wrist.

“There was a lack of substantial evidence, so he’s currently on probation for the rest of his gnome years,” Lekas said. “He hasn’t been spotted since.”

All kidding aside, the exploits of the Gnewport Gnome, played out in a series of very popular Facebook posts on the NPD page, is part of a regular campaign with changing themes.

“Our approach is to communicate with the community in a way that shows our lighter side,” said Kit O’Carra, who serves as the NPD special projects/social media specialist. “We want people to feel like they can be comfortable approaching and communicating with us. It’s especially important for people to see the officers in that light instead of always being associated with a bad situation.”

The Gnewport Gnome is only one of the fun things they’ve done during the holidays.

“We used to do the Elf on the Shelf,” O’Carra said. “But one of our canines got to him so we had to come up with something new.”

Officer Lekas has been with the NPD for 14 years, including serving as the school resource officer at Newport High School for three years.

“When I first started in the school I was talking to the chief and said I was a little scared and wasn’t sure what to do,” Lekas said. “He told me, ‘Just go be Lekas.’”

So he started working with the kids in the media department to produce funny videos on important safety topics, always casting himself as the fall guy. The videos not only circulated through the high school, but ended up being seen by many other members of the community, especially kids in other schools.

“This is me doing what I enjoy,” he said. “The best part of the job is doing things to put people at ease.”

Lekas is clear that they aren’t doing this to just have fun.

“We really want kids to be able to feel okay around police officers, that despite the uniforms, we’re just normal people you can trust. It’s a different way of community policing. When child welfare shows up to a house, for example, if I show up with them it’s a different situation because the kids recognize me and they know they can come to me. It’s helpful for the parents, too.”

The department is also working on ways to reach Newport’s Hispanic families.

“For all of our community members to see as in positive situations is so important. This is the side that people don’t normally see, that we have a sense of humor. Without it we would be robots, it would be horrible.”

Go to the Newport Police Department Facebook page for the continuing exploits of Officer Lekas and his fellow officers as they put the aw into law enforcement.