Tim Ryan, tryan@wolfrivermedia.com
Shawano police reported a 93 percent increase in drug arrests and citations in 2016 — one of the few annual statistics that changed significantly from the year before.
Drug arrests rose from 56 in 2015 to 108 last year, according to the Police Department’s annual report.
“It’s due to a concerted effort on all of our officers’ parts to increase awareness of drugs and watch for drugs on other calls that are not just drug calls,” Lt. Dan Mauel said. “They might be in a house for an ambulance call. They might be in the house for a welfare check and happen to see drugs sitting out. Instead of just forgetting about it, they take action and they find more drugs.”
Still, Mauel said, it’s hard to quantify whether the higher rate of arrests and citations is due only to stricter enforcement or increased drug use.
“The drug situation is not getting better, but hopefully it’s not getting any worse either,” he said. “There’s a significant drug problem in the state of Wisconsin, and in the United States.”
Heroin, prescription pills being stolen or sold to other parties, and marijuana top the list locally.
Methamphetamine has reportedly become an issue in Shawano County, though city police have not yet seen a rise in it, Mauel said.
The city began allocating an additional $25,000 per year to the department in 2013 for a drug unit. That money has remained in the budget even as some cuts have been forced elsewhere.
The department’s 2017 budget for overtime pay was reduced by about $45,000.
That reduction comes from expectations the department will be able to reduce overtime due to the new 12-hour patrol shifts that went into effect this year, which essentially require officers to work longer hours but for fewer days in a row.
The department has already seen a 44 percent reduction in overtime pay since the beginning of the year, Mauel said.
It remains to be seen how that will play out through the rest of the year.
In the meantime, the budget cut has meant temporarily dropping two of the department’s highly touted programs.
“We decided at this point not to do some of the crime prevention stuff,” Mauel said, including the citizen’s police academy and radKIDS, a self-defense program.
“Those cost us some overtime,” Mauel said. “We have a real high hope that by September or October, by the fall, we’ll be in a position to be able to offer those programs this year.”
Another category that saw an increase in 2016 was code violations, which rose 20 percent over 2015, from 226 to 271, part of the city’s efforts to enforce quality-of-life issues. Violations include junked vehicles, long grass and weeds, unshoveled sidewalks, and garbage piled up in yards.
Mauel said residents appreciate enforcement of city zoning codes.
“They don’t want to look at junk cars. They try to keep their yards nice and their houses nice and if the neighbors don’t do that, that’s discouraging for them,” he said. “The quality of life stuff is very dear to us. We stress that.”
The department has three community service officers dedicated to those types of offenses.
Also in 2016, the department emphasized two training programs that were part of President Barack Obama’s 21st century policing initiative that provided guidance on best practices for law enforcement.
Those included training in fair and impartial policing, which seeks to identify what might sometimes be unconscious biases held by either police or community members, and creation of a crisis intervention team skilled in addressing situations involving the mentally ill and ways of de-escalating those situations without the use of force.
“I think it’s great we were able to do that,” Mauel said.