Sun Staff Reporter
Sunday, March 23, 2008
*To see this story as it originally appeared in the Daily Sun, click here
Nobody wants a crack house in the neighborhood.
But that's what James Pennington and other Foxglenn residents had in the houses on North Elk Run Street and North Goodwin Circle. From these Flagstaff homes, a few long wood shots from the Aspen Valley Golf Course, agents with the Metro anti-narcotics task force hauled away more than $20,000 in powdered and crack cocaine and Ecstasy tablets during a March 4 raid. Pennington said he didn't know alleged drug dealers were based in the upper-middle class, mature neighborhood. He was taken quite by surprise when a neighbor called him on the morning of the raid asking him if he knew why police cars were surrounding the house on Elk Run.
"I think sometimes we can be blind to it," he said. "I guess you wouldn't think there's a lot of drug-dealing going on."
But Metro agents know it. Members of the multi-agency task force focus especially on the local drug trade and investigate the dealers and traffickers who push meth, cocaine, marijuana, heroin, mushrooms and acid.
But facing a major cut in its federal funding, Metro's days could be numbered unless the money is restored.
In their 20-plus years in northern Arizona, Metro agents have seized several tons of illicit drugs and made about 3,500 narcotics-related arrests.
Pennington said he knows the owner of the house on Elk Run -- she was not arrested -- and said she is friendly, an apparently nice person. But he also appreciates what Metro does.
This year alone, the team has served about 10 search warrants. Among them were raids on a large marijuana-growing operation in the Mountainaire-Parks area, a visible midday arrest of an alleged methamphetamine dealer outside the west Flagstaff Home Depot, and the two-part bust in Foxglenn.
Congress, however, recently slashed funding for teams like Metro nationwide, leaving states with about one-third the amount of money to fight narcotics.
With only $1.7 million to spread about all of Arizona this fiscal year, some rural counties are forecasting having to dismantle their task forces.
Law enforcement is alarmed. The consequences aren't lost on citizens like Pennington, either.
"Drugs are dangerous. Not only does it ruin people's lives, if we just let it go, and we don't have somebody fighting it then it's gonna get worse," he said. "We need it. We definitely need people that are focused just on that."
FUNDS CUT BY TWO-THIRDS
Metro, also known as the Northern Arizona Street Crimes Task Force, draws officers from the Flagstaff, Williams, and Northern Arizona University police departments, the Coconino County Sheriff's Office, and the Department of Public Safety. Most of the officers' salaries are paid for by the federal Byrne/Justice Assistance Grants program.
2006 was a noteworthy year for the unit. Agents seized about one-quarter the amount of meth as had been racked up in the team's first 16 years combined. Agents also shuttered a meth lab near Winona and gathered up more than 1,400 marijuana plants.
2008 has started at a brisk clip, with search warrants served about once every three weeks, on average. A non-exhaustive list of seizures this winter includes $13,700 worth of cocaine, $7,000 worth of crack, about 60 tablets of Ecstasy, 150 live marijuana plants, and four pounds of psychedelic mushrooms, more than 250 pounds of marijuana, tens of thousands of dollars in cash, and at least one gun.
"Those investigations won't happen without (the) Byrne grant," said Jim Molesa, a Flagstaff-based representative of Arizona Narcotic Officers Association.
Drug task forces across Arizona are funded by Byrne/JAG dollars. In FY 2007, task forces nationwide received $520 million -- $5.6 million in Arizona.
Courts, including drug courts, also receive money to offset increased caseloads. The grants also pay for additional criminalists and criminal history records improvement projects.
But when the omnibus appropriations bill came to the President's desk in December, the funding nationwide had been reduced to $170 million.
Law enforcement representatives said they feel blindsided.
"The thing that really caught us off-guard was that during the entire process we had been told again and again that this is important," said Mary Marshall, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission, a coordinating body for criminal justice agencies that administers the grant.
CHOPPED IN CONFERENCE COMMITTEE
The House and Senate recommended about $600 to $660 million, respectively, for such programs in their FY 2008 spending bills. When the budget entered conference committee, it was chopped.
"Different philosophical backgrounds have different reasons why they're either for it or against it," Molesa said. "The fact of the matter is homeland security begins at home, and this literally is a homeland security issue to the finest degree where it affects every community that gets Byrne/JAG funding."
Molesa has lobbied in Washington D.C. to have funding restored. But Arizonans are not the only ones concerned.
Congressional delegates from several states have backed bills to create emergency funding. Myriad national police organizations and anti-drug coalitions have rallied in endorsement.
"It isn't just a local issue. It's as big as the drug issue itself. It's a local issue, it's a county issue, it's a regional issue, it's a national issue. It's an international issue," Molesa said.
Brian Wilcox, commander of the Department of Public Safety's Narcotics and Organized Crime Bureau, described the cut as "disconcerting." He said drug task forces face disbanding despite heavy trafficking throughout the state.
"It's just going to put a lot of folks out of business," he said. "And when you look at the fact that Arizona comprises about 13 percent of the southern border, yet according to statistics from DEA, 40 percent of all illegal drugs in the United States come through our 13 percent."
Metropolitan Phoenix and Tucson benefit from Byrne/JAG money, but they also have more financial resources that smaller counties do not.
"There are different pots of money that the metropolitan areas can dip into that the rural parts of Arizona don't have access to," Molesa said.
Rural northern Arizona has relatively few residents but proven trafficking activity on the Interstate 40, and significant land mass -- Coconino County, for example, is the second-largest county in the United States, at more than 18,000 square miles.
"If the funding is cut off the individual counties will have to assess their own priorities and they'll have to decide -- 'can I put narcotics officers co-located with state and federal officers in order to work on a joint task force?'" Marshall said. "Maybe they can, maybe they can't. We absolutely know in the rurals that this will be unlikely."
DAUNTINGLY COST-PROHIBITIVE
Lt. Michael Terrin of the Flagstaff Police Department oversees management of the Metro unit. He stopped short of saying the six-man outfit would disintegrate without Byrne/JAG monies, suggesting that if the community wants a task force and police and local government heads are willing to commit the resources, they could go at it anyway.
Two deputies from Coconino County Sheriff Bill Pribil's agency currently work in the unit.
Pribil said he would ask the county government for support in continuing narcotics enforcement, but speaking for his own department, he said the project would be dauntingly cost-prohibitive.
"We would try and make it last as long as we could with RICO funds -- seizure funds and things like that -- and I think we could keep it going to an extent, but probably a pale image of its old self," he said. "I am not really optimistic that if the Byrne grant goes away that we'll be able to continue to fund the multi-agency task force."
Terrin recalled the temporary loss in 2003 of the Gang & Immigration Intelligence Team Enforcement Mission, a state-funded anti-gang task force.
"I almost look at it like when GIITEM went away for that short amount of time -- and gangs flourished, and got a little foothold, and we're still battling the ripple effect from that. But the drug trade would be very difficult to interdict and control," he said.
Flagstaff Police Department spokesman Sgt. Tom Boughner said the teamwork and shared intelligence of a multi-agency task force is ideal. And while officers, even drug agents re-absorbed into patrol duties, will always have something to do, without a dedicated force, the pressure isn't there.
Of the impact, socially and fiscally, of re-directing agents back into regular police work, Boughner said, "I don't know how you'd measure it. I can't even think of how you would."
'IT'S IN YOUR COMMUNITY'
Molesa said an administration not too fond of putting federal dollars toward problems at state and local levels cut off the money. He also suggested that a growing need for money to reimburse regional governments for housing criminal illegal aliens took a large chunk out of the anti-narcotics funds.
Pribil is disappointed, and frustrated with the attention paid to fighting drugs but not the money.
"We're talking out of both sides of our face. We're pumping billions of dollars into Iraq to make Iraqis safe. But let's keep thinking about keeping our citizens safe," he said. "We've got real problems in our country, and the crime rate is starting to creep back up -- and I think this isn't the time to be cutting funds to law enforcement."
James Pennington said police are needed to preserve neighborhoods like his.
"Nobody wants to see that in their neighborhood. Nobody wants to see their next-door neighbor's house surrounded by cops. Nobody wants to see a car burnt in front of their house," Pennington said. "Now we've had that happen."
But if drug dealers aren't up the street, police say they're not far.
"It matters to everyone because even if it's not in your neighborhood, it's in your community," Wilcox said.
Hillary Davis can be reached at 556-2261 or hdavis@azdailysun.com.
