YORK, Maine — Police Chief Douglas Bracy said for the past 10 years, he’s seen the need for a detective devoted exclusively to drug investigations and drug-related community outreach. As opiate use has skyrocketed, he said he’s watched as his existing detectives are pulled away from cases like burglaries or larcenies to concentrate on these priority drug cases. Meanwhile, prevention efforts have suffered from lack of dedicated staff, he said.
For the past three years, he has asked that funding for a drug detective be included in the municipal budget, “but we needed a person even before that,” he said. This year, he successfully secured selectmen’s approval to put the matter before voters. The position is embedded in the department’s overall budget, Question 5 on the May 19 ballot.
“This is really an investment in the future,” he said. “We’ve seen the problem coming for a long time and it’s not going to be cured overnight. But it can be beaten. We’ve seen people rise from the despair.”
If Question 5 passes, the police department will add another detective to its roster, at a cost with salary and benefits of $91,000. According to supervising Detective Sgt. Thomas Cryan, one of the detectives is assigned full time to the federal Drug Enforcement Agency task force, a Seacoast-wide group of officers who work with federal agencies on drug cases. He and the third detective investigate all local crimes.
The task force detective does not cover York-specific drug cases, but instead is assigned as a task force member to drug investigations that have multi-jurisdictional federal reach. He mentioned, for instance, a 2016 drug overdose death in York that was taken up by the task force. “Within three hours, we had eight arrests. It gave us the ability to go over the border. Because we have someone assigned to the task force, they will prioritize our cases and send us assets.”
Whether or not a case is ultimately referred to the task force, however, York detectives are required to put in a lot of investigative time. “Drug cases are tedious work,” said Cryan. “These days, everything requires a search warrant, like phones, laptops and records. That takes time. There’s so much more work today than when we started working on these cases.”
In the station, there are currently three detectives. One exclusively handles electronic crimes and department-related information technology. That leaves Cryan and the other detective investigating all other crimes in York — including, in 2017, 56 burglaries, 170 larcenies, 64 vandalisms, 10 child pornography cases, 6 rapes and 27 criminal trespass cases, among others. In 2017, the York Police Department also responded to a total of 275 drug offenses.
“The two of us are really busy. Now we’re coming into the good weather season, our workload will triple easily. Cottages are broken into, there are petty thefts, nuisance crimes will start adding up very fast.
“Then if you have an overdose, you’re dropping everything and chasing the last 24 hours, chasing warrants. It’s a lot of work. Having another detective would lighten the load.”
For Bracy, this detective will be much more than an investigator. He said he wants the person who takes the job to become involved in the community in ways visible and perhaps not so visible. “We have to work on changing the reason that people become addicted. Much like a school resource officer works in the school on a one-on-one basis, we need to be working with community members and their families on a one on one basis.”
Bracy said in a small town like York, it is not difficult to pinpoint those who are addicted to opiates. “We know them, we know their families, we know their parents and their grandparents. And they’re all crying for help.”
Both Bracy and Cryan lauded the recently opened recovery center at York Hospital, which provides medicated-assisted treatment of opiate addictions — the only MAT program in all of southern York County. They see this detective working with the staff and sitting on a stakeholders committee that the hospital has formed.
Moreover, said Cryan, he or she will be able to “use the courts as a recovery tool during the disposition of a case. ‘You have an option. You can be treated and get better or you can stay in a cell.’ Most people want to get help.” And, said Bracy, with this detective already laying the groundwork with the family, the MAT program may be the deciding factor to staying clean.
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