Eastside drug task force folds amid emerging heroin epidemic

BELLEVUE, Wash. — For years, marijuana was a big target for the Eastside Narcotics Task Force, a coalition of police from Bellevue, Redmond, Kirkland and Mercer Island.

Now, pot is legal in Washington. Police no longer get much revenue from forfeited drug property.

And federal grants to the task force that once reached up to $400,000 have shrunk to $125,000.

So, as of June 30, after nearly 43 years, the task force is disbanding.

"Decisions were made to pull resources back to their own jurisdictions for other law enforcement activities," said Maj.

Patrick Spak of the Bellevue Police Department.

Spak said his city will still have the same number of detectives assigned to drug cases.

"What we're losing is some outside help from other agencies," Spak said.

The task force is folding during an emerging heroin epidemic.

Although Bellevue police report no significant rise in heroin-related crime, University of Washington researchers say between 1998 and 2013, the rate of heroin-involved deaths on the Eastside rose 116 percent.

"One of the things we noticed in mapping a couple of years ago, we had seen almost no deaths in the Kirkland area.

All of a sudden we started seeing deaths, and most of those deaths were people in their 20s," said Dr. Caleb Banta-Green with the University of Washington Alcohol & Drug Abuse Institute.

Spak says even without the task force, Eastside police will still work together, including on big drug stings with the feds.

Those declining federal grants have long been criticized by drug policy reformers, who say they encouraged police to go after small-scale drug crimes, like marijuana possession.

An ACLU spokesman on Friday suggested there's also a larger shift toward a public health approach to drugs instead of arresting and jailing people.

Cox Media Group