The Haines police have arrested four people on drug charges in recent weeks. The department has received assistance from other agencies through a regional collaboration program.
The Haines Borough Police Department is part of the SouthEast Alaska Cities Against Drugs task force or what’s known as “SEACAD”. This regional task force is run by the Juneau Police Department, and allows local departments to collaborate on drug trafficking cases. Besides police departments, it also includes U.S. Coast Guard, the Alaska State Troopers, the post office, the FBI and the DEA. This gives investigators a broad reach.
Haines Police Chief Heath Scott says the local department signed a memorandum of understanding with the task force.
Scott: “We support it largely with intelligence and communication. We do from time to time allow officers to be involved in direct action, such as the arrests that occurred in Juneau.”
Scott does not think the recent spate of arrests reflects an increase in drug trafficking in Haines.
Scott: “I think what we’ve seen is our ability to engage individuals that have for a long time been active in the distribution of narcotics, and we’ve just been able to acquire the necessary evidence to investigate those crimes and charge those offenders.”
Scott says the best strategy is to stop the movement of drugs as early as possible.
Scott: “I don’t want to wait to arrest people till they get into our community. We want to take the earliest opportunity to arrest those individuals.”
This is where the task force shows its usefulness and collaborating with other agencies comes in.
Campbell: “SEACAD’s gone through some various name changes throughout the years, it’s been going on quite a while though, in different forms.”
Krag Campbell is SEACAD’s operations commander in Juneau. He says the task force received a boost in 2018 when most of Alaska was designated as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, or HIDTA. It’s not as dramatic as it sounds, all fifty states have areas under that designation. But the designation comes with federal funding, and those funds allow officers to investigate drug cases.
Campbell: “Combating drugs takes money, because you got to pay people overtime, you got to pay for travel, you got to do training for people, it all comes from people’s budgets and we all have competing budgets to do things. So with the HIDTA [funding] being initiated, that kind of revitalized that because now we don’t have to scramble for funding, it’s coming from the federal government. It allowed us to work a little bit more together, just start sharing those resources.”
Campbell says drugs is a community problem. Departments do not have enough people to combat the flow of drugs by themselves. He says they rely heavily on tips from the community to identify drug traffickers. The state of Alaska has even issued an app that allows informants to relay tips anonymously to the police.
Once a department has identified a potential investigation, it assesses the resources needed to conduct it. Campbell says SEACAD can provide additional resources.
Campbell: “They can reach out to us and say hey, we’ve got some drug stuff here that we are trying to investigate, are you guys able to assist, and that can be us sending one, to two , to three depending on how big it is, ten additional staff to help.”
Because SEACAD includes some state and federal agencies, the assistance can be substantial.
Haines Police Chief Scott says departments around the region are taking a hard look at drug trafficking.
Scott: “Many chiefs in the Southeast are taking the subject extremely seriously right now, and they are applying the efforts of their officers towards eliminating as much of this as we can.”
Scott advises people struggling with addiction to seek help before getting in trouble with the law.
Scott: “For people that are straddled with this problem of addiction, now is the best time to find help.We would prefer them seek help as early as possible, as opposed to being arrested, and seeking help while they are incarcerated in an institution. That is no time to deal with an addiction.”
Scott says behavioral health with the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium and the SEARHC clinic can assist people struggling with addiction.