RVC police continue fight against opiates

Authorities cooperate to battle national epidemic

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Heroin is rampant on Long Island, and the Rockville Centre Police Department is in the middle of fighting the spike in opiate use that has shaken local communities in recent years.

The department has taken a three-pronged approach to combat opiates, according to RVC Police Commissioner Charles Gennario, which includes enforcement, education and treatment.

By partnering with federal authorities and Long Island’s Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as Rockville Centre schools and treatment centers, the department is helping to lead the charge against current national trends that are invading RVC’s borders.

The current fight against opiate use has forced local police to change their approach toward drug enforcement, police said, as the epidemic differs from previous ones — like the increase in crack and cocaine use in the 1980s and ’90s — in more ways than one.

“With the crack epidemic, you had people selling it on the corners,” Gennario said. “Now with the opiate epidemic, there’s a totally different way of getting it. It’s very closed.” It is more common for users to buy the drugs from an outside source and then bring them into communities more covertly, he added, and police are learning on their feet how to best combat the problem.

Lt. James Vafeades said that amid this epidemic, RVC police have shifted their focus from arresting drug dealers on the spot to finding out the origins of the drugs. Though more difficult and time consuming, such investigations can have the largest impact, and can lead to longer prison sentences to keep dealers off the street.

“Anything other than getting to the source is going to put a band-aid on it,” Vafeades said. “What we’ve been trying to do this whole time is keeping the source from coming in.”

Last year in Nassau County alone, 190 people died from opiate overdoses. Of those, fentanyl, a synthetic narcotic painkiller, was the most common killer, accounting for 62 of them. Heroin and Oxycodone led to 50 and 48 of the fatal overdoses, respectively.

Even more deadly in Suffolk County, opiates claimed the lives of 303 people, including 171 fentanyl-related deaths, 119 from heroin and 60 resulting from a mix of the two drugs.

Last month, two detectives from the Rockville Centre Police Department worked with the FBI Long Island Gang Task Force and Nassau detectives on its surveillance team to help arrest 14 people involved in a heroin ring in Brooklyn, Queens and Nassau County.

More recently, Nassau Police announced last week that the Long Island Task Force arrested four people for dealing and supplying heroin — mixed with fentanyl — and causing overdoses in the Massapequa area.

“It’s not just our borders,” said Jeanne Mulry, program director of the Rockville Centre Coalition for Youth. “We have to be aware of what goes on in the entire county and even Long Island, because that’s where things flow through and they can show up here.”

The police department — namely Officer Nicholas DeLuca — has worked with the school district to coordinate information programs regarding substance abuse for students and parents, Mulry said, adding that police constantly share data with the coalition to help it assess the extent of the problem and how to respond effectively.

The coalition, which focused its efforts on fighting underage drinking and marijuana use when it formed several years ago, began also attacking the issue of heroin use when data found that it existed in Rockville Centre. Mulry said the staggering statistics of opiate use throughout Long Island is alarming, and is a threat to all communities.

“All it takes is for someone to jump on the Southern State and park their car on the corner of Park [Avenue] and Sunrise [Highway],” Mulry said, “and all of a sudden we have a problem.”

Many users begin taking painkiller pills, and once addicted, they resort to heroin because it’s cheaper, Gennario said. “People get hooked on it legally, by being overprescribed,” he added, “so it’s a different type of war.”

Detective Frank Marino, a member of the DEA’s task force on Long Island since 2013, recalled noticing an increase in prescription drug abuse around 2011. He noted that he was among those who investigated two physicians in the Rockville Centre area who were illegally selling prescriptions for drugs such as Vicodin and Percocet.

“It’s going to be a long, hard battle, I think, because it’s a difficult addiction to deal with, and it affects many people across the board,” Marino said. “You can’t pinpoint it to say a specific socio-economic group or anything like that. Every demographic has been hit by it, unfortunately.”

Last year, Rockville Centre police made 39 opiate-related arrests, and have made 19 so far this year.

Just as many migrated from using painkillers to heroin, a shift to fentanyl, deemed more dangerous, is beginning nationally, though Vafeades said he has not seen much of it in Rockville Centre yet. Still, the department held a training to teach officers about fentanyl — 100 times more potent than morphine, according to the county — and carfentanil, which is even more deadly.

“A small amount could kill hundreds of people,” Vafeades said of carfentanil. “[Addicts] need their fix, and when the last one’s not good enough, they have to up it.”

Officers continue to educate themselves and one another on the forms these opiates can take, and precautions to take when handling them. Police agreed that they expect the opiate use to continue for at least several more years, but pointed to the sharing of knowledge among different departments and other groups at the local, state and federal levels as the key to best combat it.

“It’s no one department or anything that’s going to defeat it,” Marino noted. “We’ve all basically joined together and helped one another as best we can with dealing with this, and it’s going to take a long time and a lot of different approaches to get a handle on it.”