Narcotics unit in Costa Mesa axed

The Costa Mesa Police Department’s narcotics unit will be disbanded, and its officers will be reassigned to other parts of the department by the first week of the new year because of budget cuts, department officials said Monday.

Police officials said most of the seven detectives in the unit were informed two weeks ago that they will be placed into other parts of the department. Two will be reassigned to the Special Enforcement Detail, a unit that has some overlapping duties with the narcotics unit, two will be assigned into the general detectives bureau, and two will be reassigned as patrol officers, said Police Chief Chris Shawkey. The seventh officer will keep their role as part of a larger task force working with the FBI, he said.

The department’s reorganization is part of an effort across all city departments to cut off loose ends and streamline costs, City Manager Allan Roeder said.

The Police Department is on a hiring freeze, Shawkey said, and officers from the narcotics unit will be used to fill other gaps, such as with the patrols. The move also allowed the department to withhold promoting one officer to sergeant, which brings on a pay raise, he said.

Shawkey added that officers affected have been supportive and understanding of the changes given the state of the economy.

Police union President Allen Rieckhof disagreed, saying that not having a narcotics unit will cut off any serious efforts to get “the big fish” in the drug world.

“What’s disappointing for me, you take a full-time unit and you take away the experience and long-term dedication to work narcotics cases,” he said. “I think it’s detrimental to narcotics enforcement. You have to buy into it. I don’t think this chief has bought into narcotics enforcement on a [larger] scale.”

The Special Enforcement Detail (SED), where two of the narcotics detectives will move, generally nets smaller drug arrests, your typical street-level dealers, Shawkey said. But with the additional detectives, the detail should be able to support some of the longer, more involved drug investigations the narcotics unit was known to conduct, he said.

Reickhof said the involved investigations will be harder to come by with SED detectives being pulled from cases to serve warrants or do surveillance on other suspects.

The narcotics unit is the first unit in the department to feel the economy’s squeeze, but it won’t be the last, Shawkey said.