Police in Hampshire County on Saturday praised the investigation resulting in 203 arrests in Holyoke over a three-week period in an effort to stem drug and gang activity.
The Holyoke Police Department announced Friday the arrests between March 1 and 22. Police also reported confiscating 8,000 bags of heroin, 28 grams of cocaine, 20 grams of crack, three firearms and $14,000. Officials from the Hampden district attorney’s office, FBI and Massachusetts State Police assisted in the investigation, called “Full Throttle II.”
“Holyoke is the heroin capital of western New England, so anytime there’s an operation where there are dozens of arrests and heroin off the street it’s good for the opioid crisis,” Easthampton Police Capt. Robert Alberti said Saturday. “It’s always good when our neighbors have such an impact.”
“It’s going to have ripple effects throughout Hampshire County,” said Alberti, who worked for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI Gang Task Force for eight years before taking the Easthampton position in 2013. “It can’t be underscored how much time goes into these efforts, so we should all be very grateful for these police officers.”
Still, local officials will need to be vigilant because there is no shortage of potential dealers waiting in the wings, Alberti said.
“We’re still in the midst of a crisis and there’s plenty of people to step up and take off where these dealers left off,” he said.
Northampton Police Chief Jody Kasper said collaborative efforts to curb heroin-related deaths in the area continue.
“Anytime a police agency from a surrounding community confiscates a significant amount of illegal substances and arrests the people engaged in the distribution and sales of those substances, we know it disrupts the flow of these drugs into our own city,” Kasper said in a statement emailed to the Gazette. “We will continue to aggressively seek out and arrest dealers in our community and we are thankful that other police agencies are doing the same. We are all working together to best respond to this crisis and ultimately to prevent citizens from dying as a result of an overdose.”
Dr. Niels Rathlev, chairman of emergency medicine at Baystate Health in Springfield, praised the efforts of law enforcement, adding that “getting heroin off the streets is only a positive thing.”
Still, Rathlev said, the hospital has seen a steady number of overdoses over the past month.
“We’re not seeing a drop in the number of cases, that’s for sure,” said Rathlev. “We’re definitely up in terms of heroin overdoses that we’re seeing in comparison to last year.”
Amanda Drane can be contacted at adrane@gazettenet.com.