NEWS

Prosecutor overhauls handling of drug cases

Douglas Walker
dwalker@muncie.gannett.com
Chief Deputy Prosecutor Zach Craig in his new office at the Delaware County Building Wednesday afternoon.

MUNCIE, Ind. – Delaware County Prosecutor Jeffrey Arnold began 2017 with a somewhat ambitious goal: to overhaul the manner in which his office handles drug-related prosecutions.

“I got to thinking that what we needed was some consistency with all these drug cases,” Arnold said in a recent interview. “When you go into five different courts, you can get five different sentences, five different outcomes. And that’s not right.”

Effective this month, a single member of Arnold’s staff – Chief Deputy Prosecutor Zach Craig – will oversee all drug cases.

“If (police agencies) have a drug question, if you have a warrant issue, you get ahold of Zach,” Arnold said. “He’ll be the go-to guy. He’ll do the training, and he’ll pick up the new cases.

“He’ll then negotiate those, or try them, with a concern for the alternative to incarceration (in some cases)."

Both Arnold and Craig said, however, they will continue to routinely seek incarceration for those who manufacture and deal drugs.

Local police agencies – most frequently the Muncie Police Department’s narcotics unit and the Delaware County Sheriff’s Drug Task Force – “are going to be running all cases through me, anytime they have questions on anything,” said Craig, now in his eighth year as a deputy prosecutor.

“We’re going to try to make sure we’re consistent ... as much as possible, how drug cases are investigated, pursued and then prosecuted.

"Our hope is to really focus on the actual dealers and pushers," he said.

Local law enforcement officials said they felt the new system would be beneficial in their anti-drug efforts.

“All prosecutors are different,” said Lenny Popp, the corporal who leads Sheriff Ray Dudley’s drug task force. “We’ll know exactly what Zach wants. ...

“It will make our job much easier and much quicker. We’ve got one guy to get ahold of. Trying to get a warrant is so much quicker now.”

Joe Winkle recently returned as Muncie’s police chief after a hiatus of nearly nine years. Earlier in his law enforcement career, he was assigned to the Muncie Police Department’s drug unit.

“That’s huge for us,” Winkle said of Craig’s new assignment. “Having a full-time guy dealing with us is going to speed a lot of things up and keep some continuity for how we do things. We’re very pleased.”

The ‘war on drugs’

Prosecutor Arnold, to put it mildly, is not a fan of references to a “war on drugs.”

“There’s never been a war on drugs,” he said. “There was a government policy that never really turned into a war. There was a lot of money spent, but the policy on drugs was defective.

Delaware County Prosecutor Jeffrey Arnold

“That’s what has changed. Our policies toward drug use, abuse and enforcement have changed based on what we’re seeing, based on what we find is effective, and years of research that shows mass incarceration is not effective.”

A dramatic revision of the state’s criminal code that went into effect in 2014 reduced the penalties – in some cases substantially – for many drug-related crimes.

“I think the pendulum needs to swing back toward the center,” Arnold said. “I think the drug laws were changed a little too much toward leniency. Now they need to come back a little.”

Federal and state officials have “pushed hard for alternatives to incarceration for (offenders with) addictions,” the prosecutor said.

Delaware County Sheriff Ray Dudley

But little money has been supplied to create those alternatives, such as treatment facilities.

“You’ve got to provide more services (for those battling addiction),” Arnold said.

Sheriff Dudley said more effort is needed to coordinate the community’s drug-treatment options.

“We need a solution and (to) come up with more avenues to get these people help,” he said. “We’ve got to do a better job taking care of these people.

“If that means houses where we can help with people’s addictions, then we need to do that. And everyone needs to start working together and quit worrying about who’s going to (control) the money.”

The year ahead

Dudley reviewed the statistics tied to the drug task force’s 2016 cases. Slightly more than 100 involved cocaine, with heroin finishing a close second and methamphetamines ranking third.

Popp said he anticipated the task force – which recently won a federal grant to supply “drug-buy” money and now has the services of a National Guardsman provided by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security – would have “a phenomenal year” in 2017.

He and Dudley said they believed use and sales of crack cocaine and crystal meth – a change from the locally produced meth that has plagued the local community in recent years – could be on the increase this year.

Muncie Police Chief Joe Winkle

In the wake of news there will be fewer Indiana State Police troopers assigned full-time to anti-meth efforts, Dudley is also contemplating seeking meth-related training by the FBI for some of his deputies.

Winkle said he felt Delaware County’s meth-related notoriety – the county has led the state in meth-lab discoveries for the past three years – was actually the result of aggressive law enforcement.

“We don’t want to be known in this county as a drug haven,” he said.

He admitted, though, to being startled by the frequency of heroin overdoses of late.

The police chief said he might, in the coming year, combine his department’s drug and violent crime teams, noting that at least 80 percent of violent crime is believed to be drug-related.

“We’re hoping to start attacking that a little better from a different unit,” he said.

Contact news reporter Douglas Walker at (765) 213-5851. Follow him on Twitter: @DouglasWalkerSP.

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