Tag Archives: Randy Plumb

Bremerton Police add online drug tip form, bios of top brass

photoThe Bremerton Police Department’s web site is looking a little different these days, as new Bremerton Police Chief Steve Strachan continues an effort to reach out to the city’s residents.

Biographies of Strachan, as well as ones for captains Jim Burchett and Tom Wolfe and lieutenants Pete Fisher and Luis Olan, can now be found online.

Additionally, the department has added a first-ever online tip form to report drug activity. The department says the information can be anonymous but that “it can assist our detectives if we can contact citizens directly to obtain vital details.”

Questions on the form are broken into five parts:

1) Why do you think this is a drug house?
2) Where is the activity occurring?
3) Who is involved?
4) What cars are involved?
5) Any additional comments?

Strachan said the changes were made to both update the web site but also “provide a direct link” for residents to send in questions or comments about the department.

Bremerton Police Sgt. Randy Plumb, in charge of the department’s Special Operations Group, said the new link streamlines information so it can get to an investigating detective as quickly as possible. He also noted that providing the anonymity online may help bring forth new tips of those previously concerned their identities might be revealed.

Those wanting to report drug tips can still go through the department’s phone line: (360) 473-5217.

Bremerton Police Community Resource Specialist Joe Sexton said additional citizen reporting tools and web site features will be coming in the months ahead.

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Is meth on its way out?

 

Methamphetamine, that crystalline psycho-stimulant that’s been plaguing our communities for years now, appears to be on the decline around the nation, according to results of a survey released by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

As penned in a USA Today article:

“… methamphetamine use, which raced across the USA for a decade, has declined sharply. The number of past-month users fell from 731,000 in 2006 to 353,000 in 2010.”

So could this be the beginning of the end for methamphetamine?

In our area, I’m not seeing any slowdown in police reports from around the county. But we have certainly seen heroin rear its ugly head in the past couple years. And, as you can see from this one sentence I’ve posted from a real police report, it appears, at least anecdotally, that at least one drug seller was having a tough time pushing meth.

I’ve spoken to Bremerton Police Special Operations Group Sgt. Randy Plumb about that very sentence, and he told me not to give it much credence. There’s still plenty of demand out there.

As the report shows, it certainly isn’t the end for marijuana use, which is ingested regularly by almost 7 percent of Americans, up from 6 percent in 2007. But newer laws and education efforts appear to be working in the fight against meth.

UPDATE: The National Drug Threat Assessment, authored by the Department of Justice, is out and says that actually, meth demand is increasing in some markets in America:

“High levels of methamphetamine production in Mexico, along with increasing smallscale domestic production, have resulted in
increasing methamphetamine availability,” it says.

Apparently, the federal government’s public health arm and its law enforcement arm appear to be contradicting each other a bit.

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