Federal grant funds heroin trafficking investigations
A federal grant will pay local law enforcement officers overtime to investigate heroin trafficking in Minnesota.
The two-year $1.4 million grant is from the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.
Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans expects about $700,000 to be spent on overtime.
"All of our police departments across Minnesota are busy working on the cases they have day to day, so that's why we really focused on creating resources for overtime so we can dedicate additional hours to this," said Evans
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One area of focus will be heroin trafficking on Indian reservations across the state.
"Earlier this spring we had a meeting with many of our tribal police departments across Minnesota and one of the things they noted is they really needed resources to be able to do things like interdiction efforts, that they really flood the reservation with law enforcement resources to stop drug traffickers as they're coming in with the heroin," said Evans.
A second focus for the overtime money will be investigations of every opioid overdose death.
"We want to hold the people responsible for dealing those drugs, but then we want to work backwards on those cases to really disrupt that supply chain and take down that organization so that we have even a greater impact than just that one person that dealt those drugs that resulted in that death," said Evans.
Evans expects about 30 local and tribal law enforcement agencies across the state to participate in the grant program.