Nestled within the northwestern Minnesota landscape, Polk County is thought to be relatively calm and safe. Lurking in the shadows of this rural area, though, is a more sinister element: the illegal drug culture. The County Board of Commissioners learned more about this problem from a PowerPoint presentation by the Pine to Prairie Drug Task Force (P2P DTF) Tuesday.
The P2P DTF is a force to be reckoned with. While realizing the drug problem is impossible to eliminate completely, the DTF has been working hard to alleviate it in Polk County over the past two years.
“We hit the ground running as soon as we got going in 2008,” said Scott, a task force member who gave the presentation. P2P DTF officers asked that only their first names be used to protect their identities in regard to ongoing and future investigations. “We knew there was a serious drug problem in this area.”
History of county's DTF involvement
Polk County had been part of other DTFs from 1988 to 2004, he explained, the last being the Northwest Minnesota DTF involving four other counties. While this DTF had great success identifying, arresting and prosecuting illegal drug activity, in part thanks to hard work and dedication from an assistant Polk County attorney, it disbanded in 2004 due to budget and staff reductions.
“The effect was immediate,” said Scott. “With less coordination of manpower and resources, each agency noted a reduction in larger scale drug investigations.”
The drug-related execution-style murder of Lee Avila in East Grand Forks in 2005 illustrated the importance of having the county involved in a DTF. Avila was murdered because he owed money to a drug trafficking organization (DTO) for five pounds of methamphetamine, with a street value of something in the neighborhood of $300,000, he said. The resulting investigation, termed Operation Speed Racer, netted more than 60 people pleading guilty to various charges in the drug conspiracy, including the shooter.
“Polk County law enforcement agencies were aware of his involvement in illegal drugs,” said Scott, “but not the scope of it. He was involved in many illegal activities we didn't know about.”
The East Grand Forks and Crookston Police Departments, Polk County Sheriff's Office and Polk County Attorney's Office decided to get the ball rolling on another task force and applied for funding. The result was the P2P DTF.
HIDTA
The first task at hand was crossing the river and networking with the Grand Forks Narcotic Task Force (GFNTF). Both task forces continue to meet weekly and share drug intelligence throughout the Red River Valley, said Scott.
Grand Forks and several neighboring North Dakota counties are what the federal government considers High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA), he explained. These are areas that serve as significant drug activity centers, where drug-related activities are having a significant harmful impact on the area and in other parts of the country, in which law enforcement agencies respond aggressively to the drug problems, and an increase in federal resources is necessary to adequately respond to drug-related activities in the area.
While Polk County itself is not a HIDTA, “it borders Grand Forks County and so the federal government realizes that the county has an issue. Highway 2 and I-29 have had a significant impact to the drug flow in our region. Highways 32, 75 and 59 are also thoroughfares for the transportation of illegal drugs throughout the county,” said Scott.
Although the P2P DTF works with its Grand Forks counterpart most often, it also, from time to time, coordinates with other DTOs, including two that cover the Fargo-Moorhead area and the other 21 in Minnesota, he added.
Steve, a Bureau of Criminal Apprehension officer and coordinator of the GFNTF, said Crookston, Grand Forks, East Grand Forks and areas north are all hotbeds for drugs. In fact, he said, the majority of DTOs are based out of northern Polk County.
“They're bringing the dope to Grand Forks – we're talking multiple pounds of meth coming from the Twin Cities to us,” he said. “College students are bringing in high-grade marijuana. They're staying away from meth, which is good, but bringing in just about everything else and having pharm parties.”
At pharm parties, attendees, usually high-school and college-aged, bring in a hodgepodge of prescription drug pills – like potent painkillers, anti-psychotics and tranquilizers – and dump them in a large receptacle for all to indulge in. Some of these mixtures have turned out to be dangerous and deadly.
The drugs and the people holding them move around the area a lot, said Steve, and the river separating the states seems to have played a big part in this.
“They would hold their dope in Minnesota and sell it in North Dakota,” he said. “When I took over in 2005 I was constantly crossing the bridge, even though I had no jurisdiction over there, and following our guys to the east side.”
The reason for this, he explained, is that North Dakota drug laws are more generous than Minnesota's. “They better get caught on our side instead of doing the minimum mandatory sentence in Minnesota.”
Since the P2P DTF came about, though, offenders are finding it more difficult to work around this because the two task forces work together in all aspects of the case, from the initial investigation to prosecution, said Scott. This means drug offenders could feasibly end up serving the longest possible sentence for their crimes.
“If the P2P DTF were to dissolve, we'd be going right back to square one with issues in the past, and that would be very unfortunate,” Steve said. “We've making progress.”
Making progress
Scott emphasized that progress in terms of numbers and auxiliary benefits. The P2P DTF conducted133 felony investigations in 2008 and 125 in 2009. These resulted in nearly 100 drug-related arrests in our jurisdiction and numerous arrests in other jurisdictions. Some investigations also led to non-drug-related arrests, such as felony warrants for failure to register as a predatory offender. But very few felony-level offenses are not drug-related, he noted.
“A great majority of crimes are related to drugs in one way or another,” he said. “You wouldn't believe the amount of firearms we've confiscated while conducting these investigations. Sexual assaults often involve an offender under the influence. And even thefts, a lot of them happen because the thief wants money for drugs.”
The majority of suspects arrested had prior criminal histories, he added. Some task force investigations have solved other crimes, such as welfare fraud, child abuse and recovery of stolen vehicles.
Drugs taken off the street by the P2P DTF include 4 kilos of cocaine, 10 lbs. of marijuana, 6 lbs. of meth and 12 oz. of crack, Scott said. It helped get numerous other illegal drugs off the street in other counties as well.
The P2P DTF conducts community drug awareness presentations, 33 so far with more than 1,000 people attending.
There are some local trends the task force is currently dealing with. For one, prescription drug theft and diversion have become major issues for healthcare institutions.
“The task force is being requested to conduct more and more investigations in our area,” said Scott. “It's become a serious issue in Polk County.”
People are abusing prescription drugs, which are legal if used and dispensed properly, in many different ways, he pointed out. They obtain the drugs legally and then divert them into illegal channels, which can be a money-making venture for the seller. A 40 mg table of Oxycodone, for example, goes for $40 on the street. They steal prescription pads to forge prescriptions, alter those already written out and steal pills from pharmacies, often located in their places of employment.
“A shocker to me: In our investigations, the offenders are generally 30 to 40-something white females who are mothers, wives, well-educated,” said Scott. “They know it’s wrong but can’t stop. They have unresolved issues with addiction and by the time we get involved they're pretty far gone.”
One of the things the P2P DTF does in terms of prevention is to increase public awareness on the issue. This includes training healthcare employees. Scott said members recently conducted training sessions for all 600-plus RiverView Health employees.
Another disturbing trend is the upsurge of meth labs in the county. The number of these had gone done a few years ago and from 2005-07, the county conducted very few meth lab investigations. But in 2008 and 2009, the task force conducted about 15 such investigations.
“As meth labs have increase, we started to retrain the public on this, something we we'd kind of gotten away from,” said Scott.
He urged people to report any suspicious activity to either the P2P DTF at 218-470-8295 or the county's anonymous tipline at 1-877-204-7505.
