After a few-years hiatus, the Concord Police Department will return an undercover officer to the New Hampshire Drug Task Force this summer.
An officer will be selected for the full-time position by July 1 and work as a liaison between the police department and the task force, which is composed of local, county and state investigators.
The reassignment comes at no additional expense to city taxpayers. The state Attorney General’s office awarded Concord a $60,000 federal grant to offset the personnel costs associated with assigning an officer to the force. City councilors voted to approve the funding at a virtual meeting on May 11.
“Partnering with the task force provides the city with additional resources, information sharing and training to better serve our collective efforts in enforcing drug-related crimes in the Capital Region,” Concord Police Chief Bradley Osgood recently told the Monitor.
For about 20 years, a Concord officer served on the task force, which has several regional offices throughout the state. But in more recent years, the department did not have an official presence on the force.
Osgood said returning an officer to the task force is one way the department is planning to take a more regionalized approach in its efforts to combat the drug crisis.
“We will always have a drug enforcement asset at the Concord Police Department, but going forward we’re going to see some internal changes that affect how we approach and handle these cases,” Osgood said. “I believe that we are best poised to collaborate and, to a degree, regionalize our efforts across this county and across the state.”
While opioid abuse remains a top concern in New Hampshire, officers are growing increasingly wary of the rise in methamphetamine use. They say they’re now seeing less heroin and fentanyl and more of the stimulant drug.
“These drugs aren’t centralized here; they come in from all different places across the state,” Osgood said. “We need to work with our partners in law enforcement to have the greatest impact.”
The New Hampshire Drug Task Force was created in 1986 under the Attorney General’s office with the goal of creating a statewide, multi-jurisdictional framework to fight the increasing effects of illicit drug use in the Granite State. The task force began as a six-person unit, but there are now regional offices with roughly 20 people covering the seacoast, central, western and northern regions of the state.
Through the task force, Department of Justice staffers work with local law enforcement officers, training and equipping them to carry out drug prosecutions in their regions. The program is supported by state tax dollars as well as a federal match from Washington, D.C.
During the last state budget cycle, Attorney General Gordon MacDonald sought and obtained funding to add another regional team of four to the North Country.
Deputy Attorney General Jane Young said last week that discussions are ongoing about establishing the new unit to better serve communities in Grafton and Coos counties.