Tackling the Heroin Problem in Concord

Like many law enforcement agencies across New England, the Concord Police Department is seeing a major increase in heroin arrests, incidents, overdoses and death, along with a slight dip in other drug and narcotic violations, according to the latest city data.

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In 2013, the department tracked 96 heroin incidents along with 79 arrests for the year, twice as many incidents and arrests as the previous year and more than three times the number of arrests and incidents from a decade ago, according to data.

In 2012, there were 38 heroin related arrests and 44 incidents.

Lt. Timothy O’Malley, the commander of the criminal investigations unit for the Concord Police Department, said the department had been noticing an increase in the amount of heroin being consumed in the city in recent years, especially after individuals are arrested, an inventory of a vehicle takes place, and paraphernalia is found.

However recently, mostly due to the changes in makeup of the drug itself, police are seeing a lot of individuals overdose from the drug.

“Our best measure is our reported overdose deaths,” he said. “We get a lot of overdoses.”

O’Malley said that when the Concord Fire Department is called to the scene of an unresponsive person, if they see something suspicious, police will be called in to assist and investigate.

“They’re fairly well-trained,” he said. “But it’s not always clear what the overdose is. It could be pills, it could be heroin, it could be alcoholic, it could be a number of different things or combination thereof.”

O’Malley said in the last eight months, there have been five heroin overdoses that took a person’s life in Concord and one Methadone overdose death. He said it may not seem like a lot, but that’s just the deaths. Prior to 2013, there was only one heroin overdose death during the previous two years.

O’Malley said the department relies on the state for its specific data and that can take anywhere from four weeks to four months to get the information, so the investigation process can be a bit slow. 

The community has seen some wild drug incidents recently from a Concord School District teacher getting involved with alleged drug-dealing with a former elementary school student, to random drug dens being discovered in all areas of the city. 

Connecting heroin to other crimes

Investigators say that there is a glaring connection between the heroin problem in the city and other crime incidents, especially when it comes to home break-ins, thefts, and store related shoplifting. Perpetrators will often steal a product and then attempt to return it for cash or gift cards, which are then sold to others around the city, to buy cash for drugs. In many cases, junkies or dealers will perform sweeps of incidents, drive down to Massachusetts with the cash, buy the heroin, return to the city, and then use and/or distribute it to others. 

The next day, the process starts all over again, according to investigators.

O’Malley said the evidence linking the two crimes was definitive, especially in some of the major burglary cases police have solved during the past couple of years, with the criminals admitting they were driven to steal by the addiction.

“I wouldn’t say 100 percent of the cases, but the vast majority of cases, the suspects had some kind of dependency on heroin,” he said. “A lot of them were very forthcoming … (the addiction) was driving the crime.”

Police don’t know exactly why heroin usage has increased in the past few years. They speculate that it could be the change in prescription medication industry and the tightening up of rules and regulations. Pharmacy robberies spiked in the past but have now dissipated.

“The industry has recognized that those types of pills have been physically manipulated to induce abuse,” O’Malley said.

There is also speculation that the opium trade, especially in Afghanistan, has opened the floodgates to cheaper and more accessible quantities of the drug. Word on the street, he said, is that the heroin being used in recent months is more potent, although it could also be that more people who don’t have experience with the drug are using it.

Non-heroin incidents, arrests

At the same time that heroin incidents and arrests have risen, non-heroin drug and narcotic violation incidents and arrests are trending down or flat. 

Incidents increased just a tad, from 333 to 353 between 2012 and 2013. But those numbers are much less than 10 years ago, when the city recorded 458 incidents in 2004, showing some improvement. 

Drug arrests overall in the city have both risen and fallen during the last decade, going from 333 in 2004 up to 388 in 2008, down to 307 in 2010, and back up to 353 in 2013. On average, the trending numbers are flat. 

O’Malley didn’t know exactly why other drug incidents and arrests had been flat, on average, or trending down, but the department was looking at the information to determine if recent strategies, such as the South End initiative, were showing even more positive results than before.

Tackling the problem

Moving forward, the department is taking a multi-faceted approach to the heroin issue with hopes of showing improved statistics in the future. 

First, getting the word out about the drug problem and making sure residents and businesses know the signs of addiction and theft were priorities. While there is no indication that crime is increasing by numbers, there are more aggressive incidents and those crimes are fueled by the need to get cash for heroin, O’Malley said.

“The question is, Is our crime artificially high to begin with?,” he asked. “Could it be a lot lower, to begin with … we’ve looked at our numbers; some are up, some are down. But what could our crime rate be if we didn’t have this issue?”

Police also hope that other law enforcement agencies will come together to combat the problem. 

Locally, O’Malley said, prosecutors and agencies “are getting on the same page,” including better coordination when it comes to prosecutions and going after people involved in overdose deaths.

“It’s more of a communication effort,” he said. “But we believe this is a big community problem … we’re hoping to investigate and educate.”

But part of that strategy also includes the state government coming up with specific initiatives to address the public health aspect of heroin and other substance abuse addiction as much as the criminal activity, something O’Malley and others are waiting for and an issue Gov. Maggie Hassan, D-Exeter, mentioned in her State of the State address last week. 

“It’s obvious it’s not just Concord,” he said. “New England, generally, heroin has been the drug of choice. The rest of the country got meth … we don’t have the meth problem up here … it’s heroin and it’s here; we’re seeing a huge increase.”