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Highway team intercepts drugs
YOUNGSTOWN
A newly formed Mahoning Valley highway drug- interdiction team is dedicated to stopping illegal drug shipments before they reach their destinations.
“Mahoning County’s a main thoroughfare for drug [hauling],” said Maj. William Cappabianca of the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office, who noted that the county is crisscrossed by a network of major highways, including Interstates 76 and 80 and state Route 11.
“We have a drug corridor that runs through the Maho- ning Valley’s backyard,” said Sgt. Larry McLaughlin of the sheriff’s office, who oversees the new highway enforcement effort that was launched in October.
“We want to try to put a stop to it,” or impede its effectiveness, said McLaughlin, who added that large quantities of heroin, cocaine and marijuana are transported along major highways passing through Mahoning County.
“One of the weakest links of a criminal enterprise is the transportation of its illicit goods,” said Lt. Jeff Solic of the Austintown Police Department, commander of the Mahoning Valley Law Enforcement Task Force.
“We want to intercept that,” said Solic, whose task force serves as the local drug task force, which includes the highway team.
“If we can stop it before it gets to its retail location, we can keep it out of the hands of our citizens,” he said.
Large quantities of illegal drugs flow through the Mahoning Valley from such places as New York City, Detroit and Columbus, said Martin P. Desmond, an assistant Mahoning County prosecutor assigned to drug prosecutions.
Some of those drugs are for consumption here and others are passing through to other destinations, McLaughlin said.
“They’re patrolling the routes that are most widely used to come into town from out of state,” Desmond said of the highway team, which he called a “proactive approach” to drug enforcement.
“It’s not just stopping the flow of drugs, but there’s a likelihood that there’ll be firearms and illegal proceeds” of the drug trade, including cash, that police also can seize on the highways, Desmond said.
The highway task force consists of uniformed officers patrolling in marked police vehicles, who stop vehicles based on prior intelligence, driving errors or vehicle defects, McLaughlin said.
Participating agencies include the Austintown, New Middletown and Youngstown police departments, the Liberty Police Department and its drug-sniffing dog, and the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office and two of its drug-sniffing dogs.
“You can’t battle the drug problem in the Valley without collaborating,” McLaughlin said of the need for cooperation among local law-enforcement agencies.
So far, the new highway team has made arrests on outstanding warrants, for firearms law violations, and for possession of illegal drugs, and at least one drug trafficking arrest, but it has not yet found and seized any large quantities of drugs, McLaughlin said.
McLaughlin declined to comment specifically on what suspicious driver behaviors or vehicle characteristics the highway team looks for. The team alerts to “basically anything out of the ordinary,” he said.
“Our primary mission is criminal patrolling, but we’re also going to enforce the traffic laws while we’re out there,” McLaughlin said.
“We also want to keep everybody safe,” he added.