MT. PENN, Pa.- It’s day two on the job for the new Central Berks police chief.<\/p>\n
“It’s pretty surreal; it’s exciting though,” says Chief Justin Johnson.<\/p>\n
Johnson is adjusting to his new leadership position at the Central Berks Regional Police Department after longtime Chief Ray Serafin retired.<\/p>\n
“I think we’ve been one of the more successful ones over the years because some regional departments have disbanded over the years and we’ve kind of maintained,” said Johnson.<\/p>\n
“We got through those growing pains and under Chief Serafin previously, he grew us to almost double the size of our department by taking on new areas with contracted coverage.”<\/p>\n
Central Berks covers Mt. Penn, Lower Alsace, St. Lawrence and Oley and has a wide focus.<\/p>\n
“There’s been an increase over the years in violent crime in the area,” said Johnson. “Mt. Penn has kind of seen its challenges with being so close to Reading that a lot of the crimes kind of filtered over, over the years.”<\/p>\n
The incoming chief has experience in many areas like patrol, field training, and crash reconstruction.<\/p>\n
Johnson spent his entire career at Central Berks Police Department, starting in 2001. It was in his 25th year that he stepped into the chief’s role.<\/p>\n
“We have a good group of people here that everybody has their specialty, so I’m lucky in that sense,” said Chief Johnson. “I’m taking over a group that’s pretty established”<\/p>\n
He says safety is paramount and he’d like to focus on more community policing initiatives.<\/p>\n
“We kind of want to bridge the gap between law enforcement and the community. There’s been fractures over the years with how police are perceived and I kind of want to focus going forward to correct that a little bit,” added Johnson.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MT. PENN, Pa.- It’s day two on the job for the new Central Berks police chief. “It’s pretty…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":105389,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[50932,50934,50931,1856,29643,50933,28,50935,128,130,129],"class_list":["post-105388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-central-berks-regional-police-department","tag-incoming-chief","tag-justin-johnson","tag-law-enforcement","tag-mt-penn","tag-oley","tag-pennsylvania","tag-ray-serafin","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105388\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/105389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}