By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
CASSOPOLIS – Adapt or die.
Or, in the case of Cass County's well-armed and paranoid drug dealers, if you can't stand the "heat," get out of the "kitchen" or risk cooling off in the slammer.
"We've put a lot of heat on these people the past two years," Sheriff's Capt. Lyndon Parrish said Thursday in presenting the Cass County Drug Team's 2006 annual report to the Board of Commissioners.
"They either get smarter or they go to jail."
"I think we've gotten a good return on our investment," Sheriff Joseph M. Underwood Jr. added.
"I think the drug team's doing a fantastic job," Commissioner Minnie Warren, D-Pokagon Township, commented. "I do, too," agreed Vice Chairman Ron Francis, R-Cassopolis, who conducted the meeting in the absence of Chairman Bob Wagel, whose mother-in-law passed away.
At one bust made after Parrish and Det. Sgt. David Toxopeus of Dowagiac Police Department shared their report on 2005 activities with Dowagiac Rotary Club last January, contraband confiscated included this newspaper's article on their remarks.
"They keep an eye on us. They want to know what's going on, too" Parrish said. "You can buy little surveillance systems at Wal-Mart. We see a lot of those. They change their habits. In one of the villages near here, they figured out we were recording" undercover buys, "so now, they don't talk. They change their tactics, we change ours."
A tougher pseudoephedrine law, which limited purchases to two packages, leaves meth makers shopping from store to store and law enforcement combing pill lists to identify targets.
Adding two canine units helped. Deputy Tim Gondeck's four-legged partner, GiGi, sniffed out marijuana hidden deep inside a rusty door during one of their 173 deployments.
Law enforcement authorities sold the 2004 millage to taxpayers by connecting a narcotics crackdown with crime reduction.
"We put a lot of people in jail the past two years," Parrish said, "and I think there's a direct correlation with why we've had a 38-percent decrease in burglaries. We don't find a lot of meth labs, but a lot of meth clean-ups, which are (toxic) dump sites along the road. What we saw in 2006, through October, we were down a lot," then meth started cooking again as drug dealers figured out ways around tougher laws.
"A lot of people we put in jail are back out," Parrish said. "We're seeing old names, but we're not seeing a lot of new ones. We're not known anymore as a place where they won't get caught. We've got a very proactive team to go after them."
In eastern Cass County, which is more rural, methamphetamine and marijuana are the prevalent narcotics, compared to crack cocaine and marijuana on the west side of the county.
Parrish anecdotally highlighted some of 2006's noteworthy cases, such as the citizens who drove marijuana from Mexico into Silver Creek Township taped to the undersides of vehicles.
"When we entered the house," he said, "the first thing we saw were the guns," loaded assault-style weapons leaning against a door. "Quite a bit of marijuana and cash inside the house. Children were involved," as evidenced by a baby on a bed with marijuana concealed beneath the mattress.
Referrals to the state Department of Human Services (DHS) dropped in 2006. "Hopefully, that's a good sign," Parrish said. "Less children taken."
A Marcellus Township case "highlights how crime and drugs tend to go together," Parrish said. Contacted by a farmer about the dumping of meth byproducts, the drug team dispatched a detective who lived nearby.
The officer observed a vehicle unloading stuff from a car on a two-track and preparing to burn it – indicative of a meth lab aftermath.
"They had burglarized a house in the area," Parrish said. "Come to find out they had actually burglarized places from Kent County (Grand Rapids) down to Cass County. Over 50 burglaries were solved."
In Calvin Township, a man was selling marijuana from an auto repair business. "Of course, guns were involved," Parrish pointed out. "We find guns almost every time we find drugs."
Mason Township saw a female cancer patient exploited by her family, who sold her prescribed morphine suckers around the neighborhood.
A "pretty nice" marijuana grow operation north of Cassopolis in LaGrange Township "is long-term. It's been going on quite a few years. We were finally able to get into that property and shut him down."
A Dowagiac woman looked like she was growing money, with cash stashed everywhere. "We had to go through every stitch of clothing because she had 20s and 50s stuffed in there. That was a long-term investigation in the city," where cases can usually be wrapped up in a day or two.
Another part of the millage voters approved in the summer of 2004 to expand the joint city-county drug team added a prosecutor for drug cases. "We had six trials last year with 100-percent convictions," Parrish noted.
The team notched 160 arrests and 310 total charges, including 198 felonies and 105 misdemeanors.
The 160 arrests included 112 males (71 whites, 32 blacks and four Hispanics) and 48 females (43 whites and five blacks).
By ZIP Code, Dowagiac paced the county with 61 arrests, followed by: Edwardsburg, 26; Cassopolis, 22; Marcellus, 16; Union, 14; Vandalia, nine; Niles, seven; Three Rivers, three; Jones, two; and South Bend, Ind., one.