Drug crime rate highest in Polson

Crime data released last month by the Montana Board of Crime Control shows that drug-related offenses are on the rise across Montana, with numbers skyrocketing in Polson and Lake County where drug offenses per capita are the highest in the state.

It’s a problem that has left the largely rural, agricultural county and lakeside vacation town with fallout problems including a rise in theft and burglary rates and housing contamination.

In 2014, the city of Polson had the highest rate of drug-related offenses of any city or town in Montana, with 35 offenses committed per 1,000 people, according to data logged in the Montana Incident-Based Reporting System Online Reporting system.

The system, in place since 1991, lets departments self-report the number of crimes handled by the department.

The city of Hamilton holds the second place spot with 24 offenses per 1,000 residents.

Last year Lake County also had the highest rate of drug offenses of any county, with 16 drug offenses committed per 1,000 people. That’s almost double the 8.5 offenses per 1,000 recorded for the county in 2005 and significantly higher than the 2014 rates for nearby Flathead and Missoula counties.

“We had a huge explosion of drug cases starting out in 2013,” Lake County Deputy Attorney James Lapotka said. Lapotka handles most of the drug cases in Lake County.

At the time, the Montana State Crime Lab had a backlog for evidence analysis that resulted in an average of a nine-month wait from the time someone was arrested until prosecutors got a positive analysis for suspected drugs or paraphernalia.

Oftentimes prosecutors would dismiss felony drug charges with prejudice so the issue could be brought up again after results were in, Lapotka said. In many cases, it took a year before the charges wound up in court, which caused a compounding problem.

“A lot of people in that intervening year are reoffending,” Lapotka said. “A lot of the these people are also committing violent crimes and burglaries, often to sustain their drug habit.”

The drug problem’s pervasiveness has had a significant impact on the community as thieves looted homes and businesses for guns throughout 2013 and 2014.

In one incident in January 2013, a particularly brazen set of thieves stole a car from Ronan Airport, tried to burglarize two pawn shops for guns in Ronan and Polson and ran the car through Westland Seed. The thieves admitted that they sold the guns for meth.

In another incident, 24-year-old Luis Denobrega of Spokane led deputies on a chase exceeding 100 mph in December 2013, almost hitting a dozen vehicles before he crashed into a snowy ditch in the North Crow area.

When he was questioned, Denobrega admitted participating in a drive-by shooting in Pablo days before at a place where five people including an infant lived.

Denobrega told officers he was “high as s---” during the crimes, and said that he had been ingesting meth every day for a while. He said he had been using meth for 13 years.

Aside from the high-profile incidents, meth also sneaked into other unexpected places in the community as very low-level methamphetamine contamination was found in a Head Start center and tribal senior citizens center in Arlee.

In March the Salish Kootenai Housing Authority announced that of 110 housing units tested during the previous 18 months, 62 had tested positive for meth, causing a massive remediation effort that totaled more than $325,000 at the time.

But as the problem grew, so did the response, and Lapotka said he thinks some turning point may have been reached in the community’s battle against meth.

In the past legislative session more funding was allocated to the state’s crime lab and the wait time has almost halved.

A new Lake County attorney, Steve Eschenbacher and a new sheriff, Don Bell, also took office in January and instructed staffers to change their strategy in drug cases. Instead of waiting for results from the crime lab, officers used field tests that are 98 percent accurate in cases, Lapotka said.

That was enough to get the cases into court.

“I’ve got a lot of cases where defendants will say, ‘Yes, that’s my meth pipe,’” Lapotka said. “We’re not letting the backlog at the crime lab hamstring our effort.”

With a new strategy in play, Lapotka and Eschenbacher agreed to try to flush out the county’s drug case backlog. Lapotka has spent much of the past year focusing on wrapping up the drug cases and as a result, the county’s number of felony cases prosecuted this year jumped to 400.

That’s double the number of cases handled in 2014. Almost all of the increase in caseload has been linked to methamphetamine consumption, dealing or related crimes, he said.

Lapotka said he believes there has been some positive result since his office ramped up the heat on drug offenders.

“If we can stop that individual person’s drug problem we can cut off any future crime wave that they may be committing,” Lapotka said. “If we can prosecute three out of five people who use methamphetamine, it can have a cascading effect on the people who we don’t catch who look around and see that their friends are in jail. I like to think that is one of the reasons that we have seen a decrease in our property crime. We are addressing the root of the problem.”

For those addicts who do enter the system, Lapotka’s office tries to focus on finding a treatment option.

“A lot of times the criminal justice system just acts as a stick,” Lapotka said. “You can’t smack someone with a stick enough to get them to quit drugs… Our big focus is in rehabilitating people so they can get back into being a productive member of society and not victimizing themselves or our community any more.”

Getting help for some clients in a rural setting is difficult. More than 22 percent of Lake County residents live below the federally defined poverty level, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

People with money can drive to treatment centers in Missoula or Kalispell, spend $250 for an evaluation, and leave with a plan for action fairly easily, but for people without money or a car, things are more difficult, according to Lapotka.

Almost all of the state’s treatment programs can only be accessed through a commitment to the Montana Department of Corrections, which requires a felony conviction.

“It’s extremely frustrating that the only way to get drug treatment for poor people is to make them felons,” Lapotka said. “I think that in a nutshell is the biggest problem with our drug addiction problems.”

The cost of locking up people is high. According to the Montana Department of Corrections, it costs an average of $35,635 to incarcerate someone for a year.

Lapotka points out that living in that prison setting often comes with its own set of negative consequences for recovery. That’s why he, Lake County District Court Judge James Manley and others who work at the courthouse in Polson hope that a different option might be at hand that is less costly for the taxpayer and more effective for people suffering from addiction.

Manley has spearheaded efforts in the last year to try to get a special drug court off the ground in Polson. Grant applications for federal funding have been filled out, with a January 2017 the desired start date for the project.

It’s something Montana Statewide Drug Court Coordinator Jeffrey Kushner said has worked in other places across the state.

“It’s a lot less expensive and our re-offense rates are tough to beat,” Kushner said.

Drug courts are courts put together by members of a judicial team in their home jurisdictions. They take a holistic approach and include a judge, prosecuting attorney, public defender, probation officer and other support staffers who meet weekly to discuss a plan for recovery for individual defendants who acknowledge that they have an addiction problem and want to beat it.

Participants are required to undergo drug testing twice per week, as opposed to the once-per-month testing in a typical probationary system.

The frequent testing is important, Kushner said, because some drugs will leave the body in three or four days time and are not detected by monthly urinalysis.

In addition to the intense monitoring, participants are connected with job training, parenting, and educational resources as needed.

Kushner said for many participants, it’s the first time anyone has ever expressed an interest in helping them recover.

It takes up to 18 months for a person to graduate from a drug court program, and the estimated cost to the judicial branch is between $4,000 and $7,000 per participant, according to Kushner.

Of those who have graduated from one of Montana’s 26 drug court programs, around one-quarter have re-offended, but only four percent of the subsequent offenses charged were felonies.

While statistics indicate that drug courts that are the best way for most addicts, getting them off the ground can be difficult, according to Kushner.

There is only $2 million in state funding allocated to the courts each year.

“It takes some financing,” Kushner said.

It also takes a judge willing to lead the charge.

“First of all, you have to have a judge that is willing to do this kind of a docket,” Kushner said. “Some judges think this is more social work than legal work. It’s not right for every judge. It takes a certain kind of judge to do it. We don’t have judges willing to do it in all of Montana.”

Kushner said he has been encouraged by the efforts of Judge Manley in Polson and that he also hopes there will be a drug court in nearby Flathead District Court.

Kushner said Kalispell is the only major city in the state that doesn’t have a drug court system. He added that the already sky-high caseload in the county makes it understandable that a Flathead County drug court is not in place because the judges simply don’t have time to get something started while they are already overburdened.

Flathead District Court Administrator Marcy Hall said drug court is something the current judges have on their wish list, but that it has not progressed past the idea phase.

As the court system works to find a long-term solution, Lake County Sheriff Don Bell said he believes some progress has been made in the methamphetamine battle.

His deputies recently broke up a theft ring of seven people who were burglarizing homes and storage units for drug money, and burglaries went down considerably, Bell said.

Tougher state laws limiting access to cold medicine and creating harsher penalties for meth manufacturers have also drastically cut down on the number of meth labs deputies run across. Bell said the drugs are now coming from out of state.

“Consumption of meth is at its worst,” Bell said. “People are really deceived by that drug. It’s a great deceiver. It tears apart families and it tears apart communities.”

As a response to the rise of crime, several community watch groups have formed throughout Lake County in the past year, including in St. Ignatius and the North Crow area.

“We’re getting a lot of that done — a lot of neighborhood watches and community meetings,” Bell said. “That really seems to be helping.”

According to Bell, one of the number one signs of drug activity is traffic that shows up at a property only one or twice per month and is in and out within five or 10 minutes. He encouraged people to call Lake County dispatch if they see that kind of activity.

“If you see something, say something,” Bell said.  

Reporter Megan Strickland can be reached at 758-4459 or mstrickland@dailyinterlake.com.