How Drug Seizures And Drug Funds Go Hand In Hand

WEBSTER COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – Law enforcement’s goal is to get the bad guys behind bars and drugs off the street.

However, getting drugs off the streets can be harder for smaller departments, such as the Webster County Sheriff’s Office.

“We don’t have any kind of task force. We don’t have any kind of narcotics officer here. Each officer is his own narcotics officer. We rely a lot on the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics,” says Webster County Investigator Landon Griffin.

Since the department lacks a drug force team, deputies rely on their instincts while responding to calls and making arrests every day.

“They do a lot of narcotics arrests through just general traffic, traffic violations. They have, you know, sometimes, just general calls to a home, turn into a narcotics arrest.”

Drugs arrests and seizures vary each month.

Those numbers depend on how many deputies are working and how busy they are on other cases.

“We’re in a little bit of a shortage on deputies, with one in the academy and things of that nature, so we don’t have the free time that we could possibly have to do things like that, traffic stops and watch houses,” says Webster County Chief Deputy Jeff Mann.

Mann says there have been about 10 narcotics arrests this year.

If money is involved in a drug bust, it can be seized and later put into an account that deputies use to help their narcotics investigations.

“We have to be able to prove that it was used, specifically used to buy and purchase narcotics, or for any of those types of purposes, so you know, a lot of times when we do a small narcotics bust, especially misdemeanor stuff, we’re not going to get any cash off of it.”

What little cash that is kept, once there is a conviction, has to be used for a specific purpose.

“It has to be strictly used for narcotic purposes. We can’t use it to support the jail.”