Yet another side effect of having a PD completely paralyzed by staffing issues: they are completely unable to function in a police capacity. Prime example is this major drug bust DPS did on a dorm room at Vista Del Sol. The irony here is Vista is merely a few blocks from the PD.
From abc15.com:
TEMPE, AZ – Arizona Department of Public Safety detectives have uncovered an ecstasy manufacturing operation inside an Arizona State University dorm room.
A DPS officer on Wednesday stopped a vehicle on Interstate 17 near Thomas Road for an HOV violation.
During a search of the vehicle, the officer found the 20-year-old driver’s backpack to be filled with ecstasy pills and cocaine, DPS said.
DPS was able to secure search warrants for the suspect’s home in Goodyear and for his dorm room at Apache and Rural roads near the ASU campus.
According to DPS, detectives found 30 pounds of product used to make ecstasy pills in his dorm room. They also found thousands of ecstasy pills.
DPS said the dorm room was “essentially a pill factory which included a ‘pill press’ complete with a motor.”
The 20-year-old is facing the following charges: possession of marijuana, possession of a dangerous drug, possession of a dangerous drug for sale, transportation of a dangerous drug for sale, manufacturing of a dangerous drug and conducting an illegal enterprise and conspiracy.
I can’t wait to see the administration try to explain that one way.
The department can’t even run day to day patrol operations effectively because we went from little staffing to no staffing. There’s no way in hell they are going to be able to combat serious crime.
The criminals will only get bolder as they realize how easy it is for them to operate freely on campus. This dorm is practically next door to the ASU Police Station. How many more drug factories are right under our noses? Drug interdiction under a narcotics should be a division within the department, not tossing off yet another officer to Tempe to do their job.
Command’s response will be a carefully crafted gift basket of lies and half-true excuses like every other time. For the love of god we don’t even have a drug dog on Party Campus USA.
When the director of DPS is on camera talking about how he can’t believe the Arizona State University Police Department let this happen right under their noses for so long…that’s a giant clue.
I’m starting to wonder how bad it has to get before the chief’s bosses do something and intervene to correct the nose dive flight plan. It’s beyond ridiculous now.
Nobody in the department is surprised by this; if they are they must be on the third floor still racking their heads over how students shouldn’t be smoking, riding in no ride zones, or how they should be locking their bikes.
ASU has drug rings, prostitution rings, and every time command is blindsided by them when they are found, releases PR blurbs like an octopus shooting ink out of its rear, and goes back to star charting the future with magic crystals pretending everything is just great! Well jolly G it’s not.
Better hire a PR person! Better give the commanders a raise! Better hire a recruiter! How about retaining good people and dealing with your predatory people who are actively attacking the beating heart of your department by driving employees out. Pam, Luke, Katie, thanks for driving Ortiz and so many others out, we don’t need experience, and you proved that. You sure showed them…what I have no idea, but you proved…I don’t know.
We are now reaping the rewards of negligent supervision because a dipshit band of good old boys/girls chased off potential squads of staffing we desperately need now. You think the people that witnessed it want to stick around, nope, looks like they are leaving to. Whether they were green or far more experienced in real world policing with prior narcotic specialty training we lost them all and this is a disservice to the people we serve, to us, and has gone unchecked.
We drove out the bodies we need to field a patrol presence and we shut up or threw out the talent that could have developed a program to take narcotics issues head on and stamp them out. Now our own chief doesn’t want to sit on the advisory board to hear the Nerf version of what’s wrong with the department? Come on. What’s next? Never mind I don’t want to know.
The news story says to all would be criminals that a random traffic stop by DPS is more dangerous than running a drug manufacturing depot just east of the ASU Police Department. Why the hell does U of A, a university half our size have a half-dozen drug dogs and we have none! Is this the message we want to be sending? Hell no. We should be actively doing sting operations on these scum bags rolling one after another and handing over non-ASU pieces to DPS to investigate. Instead we are again caught with our pants down, we might as well leave them off.
If command made itself useful maybe we could lessen our staffing exodus and make a dent in crime like this. If you catch one there are many more out there doing this, this one was just dumb enough to get caught.
If command doesn’t want to change what they’re doing then change what you’re doing. If they don’t want to change who’s in command, get rid of the issues and people causing all the problems, then maybe it’s time to make plans to leave for a place that not only recognizes they need a team environment, but rewards you for being a part of it. Let these guys repeat history as the University grows and grows and they maintain staffing levels just high enough to keep a few cars on the road.
I don’t know of anyone that wants to be out there with three supervisors on shift looking over their back on every call in order to find issues with how they did things. The logic here is if you are a supervisor and you find issues then you’re doing your job and worthy of further promotions. It’s not working out so well for the department is it?
This is the culture here at a university police department? I think they have gone underground for now, scared that they will upset their bosses who just now realized they might have a problem that won’t fix itself. When this punk goes to prison the public will have DPS to thank for a crushing a criminal enterprise that was doping up their kids for how long? He was a senior getting ready to graduate.
With the largest student population in the nation, with our proximity to CA and Mexico you think this was the only guy doing this here for years? Not a chance. We should be busting these guys out on a monthly basis, instead we are a laughing stock getting shamed by DPS, Tempe, and having to come up with excuses instead of results.
Operations like this don’t get started because an 18 year old kid had a wild hair in his rear and wanted to make some quick money after watching too many seasons of Breaking Bad. This is probably an uncovered root of organized crime with potential international implications.
You need a full service functioning police department to catch an operation like this and keep them down. He was a senior with tens of thousands of dollars worth of manufacturing equipment and probably earned deep into the six figures, possibly seven. With thousands of pills on scene with 30lbs of raw material, at an average plus or minus price of $35USD a tablet, tax free, he was making serious money putting a lot of students in danger.
Did he start as a freshman? If ASU had an active narcotics unit this dangerous drug production factory on the campus could have been caught years earlier when he started.
If you find one there are most likely many more manufacturer, dealers, peddling their brain altering poison to the thousands of partying ASU students on campus. It’s a shame and not a surprise we are caught with our pants down on this. We are in a crisis just to provide patrol coverage borrowing from other areas of the department to appear like we have more people than we do.
[…] statement, he asserts TWICE that this incident was NOT university sanctioned, and was off campus (in a recent dorm room drug bust, ASU press releases also emphasized that the incident occurred ̶…. After all, having a university which is known for partying, crime, and racism is bad for business. […]