2017 boasted an overall successful year for BGPD with an overall reduction of 224 criminal offenses from the previous year, but drug abuses relating to alcohol and marijuana are still on the rise.
“Our traffic crashes were down, and our criminal activity was down,” Bowling Green Police Chief Tony Hetrick said. “One thing that does concern me, and has concerned me for a few years and is what I think is our number one public health and public safety emergency, is the number of drunk driving incidents we have. We had an increase this year in drunk driving arrests.”
From 2014 to 2016, there were 1,031 drunk driving arrests just for the city of Bowling Green, and four fatal crashes in that time period relating to alcohol.
“That’s an enormous amount of people out there driving drunk,” Hetrick said.
There were a total of 347 drug abuse offenses in 2017, an increase of 81 incidents from 2016.
One drug still hails as the source of Bowling Green’s number one drug offense: marijuana.
“Marijuana is still king here,” Hetrick said. “We do see some of the opiates, but as far as drug abuse goes, marijuana is still our number one problem. A lot people think because it was voted in by the legislature that the ability to get it by a recommendation from a doctor that it’s somehow lessens the penalties from having it illegally. We’re seizing a lot of it. We’re making a lot of arrests. We’re seizing a lot of cash from drug dealers as well. 2017 has kind of been a banner year for seizures of marijuana.”
Under House Bill 523, effective on September 8, 2016, medical marijuana is legal in Ohio, but not for recreational use. Hetrick has employed new tactics to combat the rise in offenses.
“We started planning for this when Colorado made recreational marijuana legal. We have put in pace a drug recognition expert. If he comes across an intoxicated person, he can tell by their symptoms the likely drug that person is on. We also ordered that all our patrol officers be trained in Advanced Roadside Impaired Driving Enforcement. That links driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs. It gives us the mechanism to determine what the level of impairment is, for probable cause to make an arrest for drunk driving under the influence of the drug,” Hetrick said.
One problem that officers face, however, is the difficulty determining someone’s impairment level when someone is under the influence of a drug. It’s 0.08 percent for alcohol, but what about marijuana? Hetrick said they are consistently thinking of new ways to curb abuses.
Overall, the police chief was content with the reduction in criminal activity.
“I thought it was good year. We had a great start to the Fall. Summer wasn’t bad. Spring was good as well. It was kind of a wet spring, so there wasn’t a lot of outdoor activities for people to engage in and party. The start to the fall was very quiet to us. I would say 2017 was a pretty solid year public safety wise,” Hetrick said.
