| Sheriff’s View #14 for March 29 to April 2, 2010 |
By: Sheriff J.B. King
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Posted: Saturday, March 27, 2010 11:03 pm
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Sheriff J.B. King
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Welcome aboard one more time for another trip around Pulaski County with the employees of the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office. We have good news today. On April 1, the Drug Enforcement Administration will award the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office $733,000 in cash from a drug investigation that we assisted with in 2009. The money may be used for police vehicles, equipment, and drug investigation overtime expenses. At long last, we will have the money to be able to have a decent vehicle fleet for our deputies. The members of the department are very excited over this news.
April fool! Don’t believe everything you see in print.
The date given above was April 1, and this was a joke from the first word. In real life, a DEA drug forfeit would be a nice bit of news. The reason that I brought this topic up for the column was that I just finished sending in our amended 2009 forfeiture report to the feds. I had filed it on time, but I had failed to include a forfeit that we did receive in 2009 and had to redo the report to account for the purchases we made with the forfeiture money.
I will admit that the large amount of money I listed in the first paragraph would be a real dream if we could get such a large DEA drug forfeiture, but that is not very likely to occur. However, at this time we are on the paper trail for a possible forfeit in at least two cases with which we helped the DEA in 2009. It takes time to run these cases through the federal system to get to the point where the forfeit will take place. Neither of these cases would generate a very large amount of money, but we can use every drug dime we can get. It would give me great pleasure to know that one of our new used cars was “purchased” for us by a drug dealer, especially a former Pulaski County drug dealer who is on “vacation” in one of Uncle Sam’s best federal hotels.
Before anyone asks, the DEA cases were and still are active criminal investigations, so there will be no further comment.
I have not reported on the vehicle front for some time, but I believe that all of our cars are up and running right now. I would say that Maj. Tom Cristoffer, our fleet manager, is loafing this week but I know he is working on getting one of our older cars back in shape to become a backup car. Once he gets that car done, he will take one of the current backup cars off line and strip it out. One of these days we will need to have a vehicle auction to get rid of a number of cars. I believe I mentioned in a previous column that one of my goals for this year was to remove any car older than 2003 from our fleet. The better shape that our fleet is in, the fewer times a deputy on duty will be towed back to town by a wrecker and the less money we will spend on gas and routine maintenance of the vehicle. Those transmission and engine repairs quickly eat the budget up.
I am behind on the latest drug news. I know we got another partial mobile meth lab this week, but I did not get the time to ask the right questions. I also know the drug troops had another operation planned for Friday night and I do not yet know if they did any good on that case. Hopefully I will get a chance to complete a few news releases soon.
On Monday of this week, we presented the new jail study to the county commissioners. Our local media have carried the story in a fair amount of detail and I am not sure I should say much here. I do want to thank the commissioners for the open minded way they examined the study. I think both the sheriff and the commissioners are of the same basic opinion that we do need a new jail, but that sure is a pile of tax expense money to worry about. If we are successful in launching a new jail, it will only be after a few dozen meetings to hammer out the details of the project.
Once again I am at the requested word count. I would again ask that you all drive with care and keep your actions legal. We do not want or need your body in our jail, but if you must visit us, be assured that the jail lights work just fine. The light bulb still burns.
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