Tim Ryan, tryan@wolfrivermedia.com
Shawano city and county authorities have been taking some heat on social media pages over the past week for a Halloween drug enforcement operation that resulted in one publicly known bust for a $10 marijuana buy.
But Shawano police and the county sheriff’s office say they will just have to ride out the frustration of not being able to share more about the operation that the public doesn’t know.
“There’s a perception out there, there’s some question, and we can’t answer it,” Police Chief Mark Kohl said.
“What we see is a lot of the proactive, very supportive, community-minded law enforcement people are frustrated we didn’t respond to a lot of these social media opinions, outcries and things like that,” he said. “They want us to defend ourselves.”
But, Kohl said, the full story of the operation, what it might have uncovered and what potential leads might have been turned up, can’t be shared.
“It may jeopardize our investigation,” he said.
The bust was part of an organized “bar crafting” operation at area taverns aimed at ferreting out suspected drug activity.
The operation was organized by Shawano police, working with the Shawano County Sheriff’s Department and officers from the Stockbridge-Munsee, Bonduel and Gillett police departments.
“I don’t think it takes any stretch of the imagination to say if there were five agencies working together, there was a little more involved than a $10 sale,” Sheriff’s Department Detective Sgt. Gordon Kowaleski said.
Authorities have not said publicly whether any other arrests were made as part of the operation or the circumstances that led to charges being filed in the one arrest that’s known.
“If we made any mention of how and why we did that, these guys would say, ‘Hey, I just read that in the paper,’” Kohl said. “It would be foolish.”
Sheriff’s Capt. Tom Tuma said drug cases are usually not isolated incidents and can be linked to other crimes.
“What people perceive isn’t happening in a vacuum,” he said “There are more and bigger crimes associated with it, and this is what we find as we unravel the ball of yarn.”
Kohl, Tuma and Kowaleski sat down with the Leader on Thursday to discuss drug enforcement operations in general, but declined to discuss any specifics of the Oct. 31 operation.
“Any investigation, you don’t start out at the top, with your top suspect and you’re done,” Kowaleski said. “You always go through the building blocks of putting the case together or investigation. You’ve got to start somewhere and there are times where, yeah, we start with a $10 buy.”
Kowaleski said law enforcement follows the chain up the ladder from there.
“Our ultimate goal is the person at the top supplying the large quantities and the harder drugs like the heroin and bath salts,” he said. “We have to have a starting point somewhere. That’s not to say every case is like that, but certainly this is one of them.”
Kohl said such operations usually pay off in ways the public doesn’t see connecting with local operations.
“Six months, a year down the road, you see that the DEA made a huge bust in Milwaukee or the Twin Cities, something like that. As a matter of fact, it may have originated from us here,” Kohl said. “We work with other agencies, we collaborate. There are agencies prepared to take our little piece of the puzzle and carry it out.”
Tuma said big drug busts don’t generally occur without the groundwork of smaller cases coming first. That’s largely because drug users are buying in small quantities and using them up as fast as they purchase them, forcing law enforcement to act fast.
“So when you get intel, you’re moving,” he said.
Tuma said the general public doesn’t always see the larger picture of small busts.
“Any one piece may not mean anything, but if you start to get enough of them, pretty soon you can recognize what that puzzle looks like,” he said.
Kohl said multiple agencies are involved in these operations because the crimes often cross jurisdictional lines and because city police don’t have sufficient resources.
“We do not have the personnel, the expertise or the unique qualifications needed for drug investigations,” he said. “We have officers that have been trained, and will continue to be trained, and that have special skills when it comes to that.
“But we need to collaborate with other agencies. We work very well with the Shawano County sheriff and (state) Department of Criminal Investigations. We can use those agencies to fill in those gaps.”
Tuma said there is ongoing collaboration and sharing of information between the departments.
“I can assure you there is frequent communication across jurisdictional lines,” he said.
Kowaleski said the public is often unaware of what it takes to carry out a drug enforcement operation.
“It’s not one or two officers going out,” he said. “You have two to four officers monitoring. You might have another two to four providing security, making sure if things really do go bad fast we’ve got the people there. Neither (the police) nor us can afford to take six people and put them out at one time on one night.”
There was no estimate on what the Halloween operation cost.
The city of Shawano last year started budgeting an additional $25,000 for police department drug enforcement efforts.
Sheriff’s department costs have depended on whether staff involved were on overtime.
“A lot of time our guys will move their hours around so we’re on shift and not paying overtime,” Kowaleski said. “That way it isn’t killing any one agency’s budget.”