 - The Shoshoni Police Department has recorded a decrease in calls for service across all categories for the past three years, according to the annual SPD report that was presented to the Shoshoni Town Council this month.){kind=link}
(Shoshoni, WY) – The Shoshoni Police Department has recorded a decrease in calls for service across all categories for the past three years, according to the annual SPD report that was presented to the Shoshoni Town Council this month.
SPD Chief Chris Konija attributed the decline to an increase in more proactive policing in town over the past several years, especially related to traffic enforcement.
“I know we get a lot of comments about (how) we do traffic stops,” Konija said. “But the fact of the matter is that when you see a police officer driving through the community (and) they make a traffic stop, that shows that we’re being proactive. … It deters people.”
It also helps that the SPD is now fully staffed, Konija said, with officers on active patrol seven days a week, something that wasn’t always possible in the past.
“We actually have a full police force that has the ability to investigate crimes (and) do everything that a typical police department would do,” he said. “So we’ve been pretty consistent over the last four years of our traffic (enforcement), and that correlates directly with the reduction in crime. …
“It helps keep the community safer, and it helps protect your property. And it has multiple benefits beyond simply just stopping traffic.”
Konija’s annual report showed an increase in traffic citations and a decrease in criminal citations in 2025 compared to 2024.
“Our criminal citations … kind of peaked,” Konija said. “In 2024 we had a lot, (but) we saw a decrease in that pretty significantly, pretty much on par with the year prior. So that’s something we track, and we want to maintain a downward trajectory.”
Most of the criminal citations the SPD issues are not in response to calls for service, he added – instead, they are the result of proactive policing.
“These are self-initiated,” Konija said. “These are things that we’re going out actively finding off of traffic stops, off of just going through the community, seeing something happen and interjecting when you see it.”
The SPD issued 36 misdemeanor criminal citations last year, Konija said.
The agency also cleared all five of the felony cases it took on in 2025 – a statistic Konija called “awesome.”
The “biggest” felony case of the year resulted in the seizure of 2.5 pounds of methamphetamine and multiple firearms that were being held by a disqualified person or were illegal “because of the way they were made,” Konija recalled.
“That was in our community, and we were able to take that out through a full investigation,” he said, noting that officers from Riverton assisted with the operation as well.
“We had a trail of patrol cars about a mile long coming into town,” Konija said. “And that was the culmination of a six-month-long investigation that (was) initiated from the Shoshoni Police Department all the way to fruition.”
It’s not common to see that kind of “huge operation” in a town of Shoshoni’s size, Konija said, commending his staff for being “capable,” “ready,” and “responsive.”
“That’s the police department that we have here,” he said. “We’re part of the community. … That’s why we’re police now and EMS. We truly want to serve the community, and this is the way we serve it, is by doing everything we can to lower the crime, to make everybody feel safer, and being proactive about it – not reactive. That’s our mission.”
For more information, call the Town of Shoshoni at (307) 876-2515.