PORT ANGELES — Police Chief Terry Gallagher knows first-hand the results of car prowls.
A few weeks ago, his vehicles parked in his driveway were illegally entered. His garage door was activated and tools were stolen, he said Tuesday at the weekly breakfast meeting of the Port Angeles Business Association.
That’s not good news for a
man who plans to spend more time remodeling his house after March 4, when he retires after 31 years on the police force.
Gallagher said Tuesday’s presentation was his last speaking engagement as a public employee after more than three decades in uniform.
Deputy Police Chief Brian Smith, who has applied to succeed his boss, will be the interim chief during a process of selecting a new department head that Gallagher said could take several months.
Gallagher, who succeeded former Police Chief Tom Riepe after serving as interim chief, has been the city’s top cop for 8½ years.
But all that police experience doesn’t mean crime can’t hit home.
“If you are smarter than me, it’s less likely you will be a crime victim,” the Port Angeles native quipped during a presentation to two dozen meeting participants.
“Most cars that get broken into do not get broken into at all; they just open the door and take your stuff,” said Gallagher, 62.
“What we tell people is, ‘Just lock your car, and the crime rate would go down dramatically.’ ”
The car-prowl rate sped north last year, hitting 330 incidents by Nov. 17 after an average of 155 a year from 2011-14.
But overall, crime in the city has gone down incrementally year after year, Gallagher said at the meeting.
“We are not going to hell in a handbasket, with the exception of vehicle prowls,” he said.
Gallagher was puzzled over that increase, speculating it might be driven by drugs — heroin use in particular.
Gallagher acknowledged the country has an addiction problem, with an overall drug and alcohol dependency rate of 10 percent.
“I would expect to see it reflected here,” Gallagher said later.
Juvenile addicts go through treatment an average of three times before it works, he said.
Gallagher has seen drug trends come and go.
In the 1970s, marijuana was “going to destroy the country,” he told the group.
From 1990-93, when Gallagher was on the Olympic Peninsula Narcotics Enforcement team, “cocaine was a big deal,” Gallagher recalled.
“Everybody thought cocaine was going to destroy the country.”
Then methamphetamine created its own scourge.
“Now, we’re dealing with heroin,” Gallagher said. “You have heroin addicts at all levels of society.”
But Gallagher said incarcerating people for drug possession does not work, especially given overcrowded facilities like the Clallam County jail, which has a 104 percent occupancy rate.
In the seven months since overdose drug naloxone has been kept in city police cars, a half-dozen lives have been saved, he said.
“If you have the ability to help people, then you have the obligation to help people, and naloxone has done really well.”
In that same vein, the police department, Clallam County Public Health and the citizens group of Port Angeles Citizen Action Network, or PA CAN, will coordinate an outpatient-based, drug-treatment-referral effort under the Police Assisted Addiction and Recovery Initiative, which began in Gloucester, Mass., and Arlington, Mass.
“We tell people if you are a heroin addict, you can come to the police department, throw away your dope and syringes, and we will get you into treatment,” Gallagher told the group.
“There are no consequences in the criminal justice system whether you complete treatment or not.
“We expect to kick it off in the next month or two,” Gallagher said.
Clallam County public health programs manager Christina Hurst said Tuesday in an interview that the program will be called Port Angeles Takes Hope, or PATH.
She said the county public health department will run test cases, and PA CAN volunteers will be instrumental in the effort.
“I’m thrilled about it,” Hurst said.
Here are other snippets from Gallagher’s speech:
■ Significantly more 9-1-1 calls are received from cellphones than land lines.
■ Detectives concentrate mostly on child abuse cases rather than property crimes.
■ Residents tend to want to talk to Gallagher about guns.
“I’d rather talk about your 9-iron,” he said.
■ Port Angeles Police Department overtime was $339,273 in 2007 compared to $153,361 in 2013.
■ The problem with officers wearing body cameras isn’t what they might show during interactions with the public.
Rather, data storage would cost thousands of dollars.
■ Most memorable cold case: The 1988 rapes of two 10-year-old girls by a single perpetrator.
“I just spent a couple hours with one of the victims two weeks ago,” Gallagher said, losing his composure for a few seconds.
“That was a crappy case. She has survived that event, but not without a struggle.”
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Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 55650, or at pgottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
