Photo by Frank Couch.
Pelham Police Chief Larry Palmer, Shelby County Sheriff John Samaniego, Shelby County District Attorney Jill Lee and Alabaster Police Chief Curtis Rigney after a meeting for COMPACT 2020 held at the Shelby County Airport in Alabaster, Alabama. Hoover Police Chief Nick Derzis was unavailable for the picture.
Combating drug abuse might be a long and hard war, but Shelby County is preparing to take another step to continue the fight.
“The vision is that we’ll all work together to eradicate drug use in this county,” said District Attorney Jill Lee. “I know that’s a lofty goal, but it has to be our goal. If we’re going to make this work, that has to be our goal.”
Several segments of Shelby County are preparing to join in the fight against addiction as part of COMPACT 2020, a new initiative that will launch in July. The initiative was announced at the May 9 Shelby County Commission meeting and brings together law enforcement, community leaders and schools.
COMPACT 2020 is made up of three operating divisions — administration, education and communications; a tactical unit; and a compliance unit — that will collaborate on the initiative.
“We’ve always worked together, but now we’re really working together,” Lee said. “It’s one mission, one plan to try to stamp out drug use in this county. And when I say that, I mean that. If you’re going to dream, dream big, and that’s my dream.”
The three divisions stem from existing bodies in the county, said COMPACT director and Chief Assistant District Attorney Alan Miller, and the initiative is working toward breaking down any former walls of communication between those divisions. That means sharing information between school resource officers in different schools, opening discussions between municipalities and bringing more information to residents.
“I think the most important tool we have in order to get there, it just goes back to us sharing the information we have across those boundaries that used to exist,” Miller said.
Divide and conquer
The education and prevention division, headed up by Miller, will work to bring knowledge to teachers, parents, leaders and other community members. Providing information on drug use and abuse before someone ever uses drugs is an important step, Miller said, because sometimes all it takes is one hit for someone to experience an overdose.
“The only way to save every life is to make sure no one uses this in the first place,” he said.
Miller and his team will work to share information online and through presentations, and Miller said a goal is to make presentations easier to attend by working about families’ pre-established schedules.
“We’re going to try to coordinate opportunities where maybe we can make these presentations at places of employment, maybe at churches, maybe at places the families are so that we’re meeting them on their schedules,” Miller said.
In addition to prevention education, there are efforts to keep individuals in the early stages of drug use out of the justice system. The compliance unit, headed by Hoover Police Department Lt. Scott McDonald, will make sure individuals in the justice system are in compliance with court orders, but it will also involve non-justice involved individuals and school resource officers.
This unit will work to catch a potential problem in its early stages and prevent it from escalating to incarceration or other negative consequences.
“Ultimately that would be the goal, is to avoid having to bring someone into the justice system in the first place,” Miller said. “[To] identify the fact that we’ve got a problem emerging, get that information in the hands of the people who care about that person, and give them the education, the resources and the opportunities to address the issue.”
The compliance unit will also open communication across schools and school systems. Schools around the county might have similar trends or issues, but a system to communicate between School Resources Officers (SROs) in different schools systems has not previously been in place.
“We know that they have issues in common,” Miller said. “It’s just they may not have always had an opportunity to share that information with each other and develop plans and processes for how to address those problems. That information needs to be shared across the board.”
Outside of schools, McDonald’s division will also deal with drug testing and checking in on individuals who are already involved in the justice system. Rather than rely on old methods, however, Miller said this division of COMPACT 2020 will be more involved in the community. The goal is once again to be proactive.
“It’s going to create an opportunity for us to go out and help them in the community where they live,” Miller said. “The officers will be making regular visits with people who are involved in our drug court or our veterans court because we can’t just do it with drug testing.”
Officers will bring information about those communities back to the drug court team, who will then reevaluate current processes.
“We can look at it and go, what is it that we can do to help these people with these circumstances,” Miller said. “Are there more, better, different things that we can do now that we know they are struggling with addiction?”
The tactical unit, headed up by Shelby County Sheriff’s Office Lt. Clay Hammac, will work to develop intelligence and build criminal cases against individuals involved in the sale of drugs.
“Years and years of experience tells us that drugs and drug dealers don’t recognize city limits, they don’t recognize county lines, and they don’t recognize state lines,” Lee said at the May 9 meeting.
Hammac was announced as commander of the Shelby County Drug Task Force in September, and Miller said that timing was ideal. His experience with the Sheriff’s Office and his detail-oriented personality make him an asset to COMPACT, Miller said.
“We got the perfect guy in terms of what we wanted to do with changing tactics,” he said.
Future and funding
COMPACT 2020 will be in place for the next four years, until June 30, 2020, when it will be reevaluated as a whole. Changes and additions to the initiative, however, are likely to occur during the next four years.
“It’s going to be necessary for us to adjust as we go along,” Miller said.
On the morning of the announcement, Miller said he realized there was a lack of representation of the medical community. They are an important part in the battle against addiction and have knowledge on prescription numbers and other medical factors that are important to consider.
“They need to be a part of the conversation,” Miller said. “That, to me, was the biggest shortcoming this morning, is I’m looking around the room and I realize I haven’t done enough to engage the medical community on this.”
At the onset of the program, there are seven initial full partners and investors, including the county commission, district attorney, sheriff’s office, Alabaster, Pelham, Hoover and Chelsea.
In addition to the four cities categorized as full partners, COMPACT 2020 will also be engaged in Montevallo, Helena and Calera, meaning there will be a presence in the seven cities that have a population of more than 5,000.
Each municipality signed on the COMPACT will provide some funding and one full-time law enforcement officer. In addition to that funding, the commission will provide in the first year an initial $600,000 with an additional $60,000 from the special projects fund and $500,000 for IT and equipment. In the next three years, the commission will fund an additional $600,000 per year.
“We have had enough. It’s time to put a plan into action,” said Commission Chairman Rick Shepherd. “We have recognized that drugs kill more people in Shelby County than all auto accidents. We are committed to using all resources available to combat this problem and ensure a safer county for all of our 206,000 residents.”
