By SUSAN TEBBEN
Glasgow Daily Times
GLASGOW —
Most news reports on drug raids end with the arrest of suspects and amount of drugs that were collected. But after the arrests are made, law enforcement officers have more to do, even before it hits the court system.
Criminals have adapted to the laws in place against drug crimes, and many of the crimes are hard to prove, however there are still ways the state, county and city can police the streets and attempt to keep them clear of illegal substances.
Drugs are not the only thing that can come out as evidence against a drug criminal, in many cases there are many more pieces that are used in court to support a conviction.
Inside the city limits, not a lot of homes are seized when they are found to be involved in drug activity, according to Lt. Col. James Duff of the Glasgow Police Department.
“We’ve seized weapons, cars, that kind of thing but not a lot of homes,” Duff said.
They don’t just arbitrarily seize property like cars because they are on the property, Duff said. The vehicles must have been used in the transport or sale of drugs, for instance those driven by criminals when the police conduct a drug buy. After they seize the vehicle, the GPD can then use it within the department or auction it off if it’s worth it. At auction, the GPD tends to take the highest bid on the cars.
“If it’s paid for or they owe very little money on it, we’ll often auction it off and put the funds in our drug account for equipment or vehicles,” Duff said. “But if they owe a lot of money on it or try to appeal saying it was their sister’s car or their mother’s car ... The longer it takes the less it’s worth it to keep the car.”
The department receives a percentage of the proceeds from these seizures, as well as the commonwealth’s attorney who prosecutes the cases.
Property such as farms and tracts of land are more likely to be used — and afterward seized — in drug cases outside of the city. But drug cultivators rarely use their own property because they know the potential for what will happen if they do.
In the county, property that has been used in the sale or cultivation of marijuana can be seized, and the Drug Task Force can sell it at auction, reporting this as income for their budgets. Even property that has been mortgaged or has a lien can be sold at auction.
“If we take property it’s because we feel it was obtained using money received through ill-gotten gains like illegal drugs,” said Jeff Scruggs, director of the Barren-Edmonson Drug Task Force.
In a majority of the cases, though, the property owner has no involvement in the cultivation. The only way to truly prove these cases and make arrests is if the DTF conducts surveillance or receives confidential information about the case.
The first thing they do in cases of marijuana crops found on properties or anhydrous ammonia tanks found for the manufacture of methamphetamine, for example, is contact the owner and interview them. The anhydrous ammonia tanks are commonly the size of propane tanks used for barbecue grills, Scruggs said, but can range in size from the size of an oxygen tank to commercial tanks — also called “nurse tanks” — that can hold 300 to 400 gallons of ammonia at a time. Farmers use the ammonia legally for crop fertilization.
“Generally, the smaller tanks get stolen or [criminals] will use the smaller tanks and steal from the nurse tanks on farms or at the agricultural businesses,” Scruggs said.
As for the state’s role in drugs, they do sweeps of the area by helicopter twice a year, usually at the beginning of the growing season in early summer and again around harvesting time. This is how the KSP found the nearly 3,300 mature marijuana plants in Hardin County in late August.
After locating the marijuana they send in a ground crew to pick up the crop and attempt to locate the property owner. Kentucky State Police officials agree that it usually isn’t the property owner who is running the operation, or even has any knowledge of it happening. If it is on residential property, the state police often see it on farms with hundreds of acres, and the drugs are found in ravines or far ends of the farms that the owners rarely or never visit.
“We ask them if there have been any strangers on the property and sometimes we will observe properties, but a lot of times it’s dead ends,” said Trooper Charles Swiney, public information officer for the KSP Post in Bowling Green. “But if we have leads we certainly follow up on them.”
Part of what makes the crimes hard to prove is the tendency for growers to cultivate on highway right-of-ways and state property just off the highways.
“They know if they grow it on their property it will be seized, so they just go somewhere else,” Swiney said.
Any property that can be proved to be used in drug cultivation is then put under foreclosure proceedings so that the state can take the property under its control.
But laws do not make catching the criminals any easier, because the criminals always find ways to circumvent the laws, the law enforcement officials all said.
“It’s just a cat and mouse game,” Swiney said. “It’s really not any easier.”
