Monday, December 2, 2024
The City of Long Beach and the Long Beach Police Department have been awarded a grant that will fund not only the monitoring of drug use in the city, but also more advanced methods to combat it in an entirely new division of the department.
The city announced the $300,000 grant at the Nov. 6 City Council meeting. It was awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, a division of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs, and is part of the Rural and Small Department Crime Reduction Program. To qualify, a police department must have fewer than 250 members.
“With this money, we’ll be able to recreate a narcotics unit,” Acting Police Commissioner Richard DePalma said. “The narcotics team is very important. The city hasn’t had a narcotics unit the past three years.”
There hasn’t been enough money in the budget for a narcotics division during those years, but now, thanks to the DOJ, there will be. The funding will be distributed over the course of three years, at $100,000 per year. It will allow for the creation of the new division and the hiring of a new detective to help staff it.
To facilitate the changes, the department will have to slightly rearrange its corps of officers. An existing officer will be promoted to detective, increasing the number of detectives to eight, and a new officer will be hired to replace the promoted one. An existing detective will then be assigned to work with the new detective in the narcotics division.
“Narcotics detectives will concentrate on drug crime, the sale and use of illegal drugs,” DePalma explained. “Narcotic crime basically ties into all sorts of crimes, because if you’re selling drugs, you’re involved in other criminal activity. So this will greatly help not only the drug problem, but also the quality of life for the city.”
While the department has been without a narcotics division, narcotics crimes have been handled by its field services detectives. That arrangement, DePalma said, is less than optimal, because narcotics is a unique field and requires specialists.
Officers who will work in the new division will need specialized training, so the department will send them to training sessions. The New York City and Nassau County police departments offer such training, DePalma said, along with some other departments around the state.
City Council President Brendan Finn is a retired NYPD detective who worked in the Organized Crime Investigation Division. He was also an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and worked as a private investigator. He said he knows how important having a narcotics division is for Long Beach.
“I’m a retired detective, and I spent three years in Brooklyn South Narcotics,” Finn said. “There’s a warm spot in my heart for narcotics work, because I feel that it deals with the cross-section of society. There are people from every angle of society who somehow come across the narcotics issue, whether they’re victims or they’re patrons or their kids are. So the narcotics unit, I think, is really a bonus to any police department. We have a really well-run police department here, so I know it’s going to be managed very well.”
DePalma also has some experience in narcotics. He joined the LBPD in 2002, and was initially a member of the plainclothes street crime unit. He was promoted to sergeant in 2008, and patrolled in uniform before becoming the street crime unit sergeant. Over the course of four years with the unit, he supervised the plainclothes narcotics unit as well.
“I’d like to thank the city manager for allowing us to go into this grant,” DePalma said. “I want to also want to thank the entire City Council for approving this position — enormously, because it will be an added cost. I appreciate the entire City Council and city manager for allowing me to go forward with this.”
