Pubdate: Wed, 11 Apr 2001
Source: Green Bay News-Chronicle (WI)
Copyright: 2001 Green Bay News-Chronicle
Contact:  http://www.greenbaynewschron.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1025

A DRUG DEALER'S WORST NIGHTMARE

Van Straten's Unit Is There When Education And Prevention Don't Work

Gary Van Straten is a Green Bay native whose daily duty is getting 
drugs and drug users out of Brown County.

As supervisor of the Green Bay/Brown County Drug Task Force, Lt. Van 
Straten of the Sheriff's Department has his binoculars on the 
channels that make Green Bay a distribution point for drugs to 
northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

"Ninety-nine percent of our cases never make the newspapers," he 
said. Patience, persistence and, ultimately, timing are what Van 
Straten said leads to drug arrests. The task force recently helped 
deal a fatal blow to an international chain, seizing 36 pounds of 
methamphetamines in possibly the state's largest drug arrest ever.

Van Straten does not go undercover himself but works as a silent 
observer with the six officers, two investigators and two 
intelligence analysts.

"Right now there's Sheriff's Department officers, Green Bay Police 
Department officers and Oneida Tribal Police officers working out of 
our office," he said. "They're all deputized as sheriff's deputies, 
so they have jurisdiction countywide."

The task force, he said, is organized under the sheriff's department, 
which feeds them county funds and federal grants. Lt. Tom Molitor of 
the Green Bay department is the director, and he is answerable to a 
board of directors.

Both men are graduates of the federal Drug Enforcement Agency Drug 
Unit Commander's Academy.

That agency and the Wisconsin Division of Narcotics work closely with 
the task force, Van Straten said, as do units from surrounding 
counties. The district attorney assigns a full-time attorney to 
process only the task force's cases.

Police work runs in the family. Van Straten's father was a Green Bay 
policeman for 30 years.

"I had an uncle who was an investigative captain with the sheriff's 
department," he said.

He lives barely one block from the house he grew up in.

After graduating in 1968 from Green Bay East High School, where he 
said he never saw a narcotic, Van Straten served four years in the 
U.S. Coast Guard. He found work back home at the Green Bay 
Correctional Institution. That was a brief stay, though, and he 
quickly took to being a sheriff's deputy.

He and his wife, Barbara, have raised three daughters after nearly 30 
years of marriage, and Van Straten said that each gentleman caller to 
his daughters is given a healthy interrogation.

Van Straten took time off from the drug war to chat with 
News-Chronicle reporter Jeff Decker about the ongoing effort.

News-Chronicle: What sort of work did you do before starting with the 
task force in 1999?

Gary Van Straten: I started out my career as a patrol officer, I was 
a K-9 officer for 11 years. Promoted to sergeant, promoted to 
lieutenant, spent seven years as the shift commander on 11-7 and 3-11 
shifts.

You seem to like what you do.

This is probably the best job I've ever had. It comes really close to 
being a dog handler.

The job is never the same, I never work the same hours. I try to work 
the hours that my agents do, and they work more at night than during 
the day.

We have to have a supervisor with them when they serve warrants or do 
controlled buys.

I do surveillance for them, watch them to make sure nothing happens 
to them. I do pre-surveillance, follow drug dealers around. It can be 
fun. There's a lot of people-watching.

Is it ever boring?

It's very boring. Say we put a guy to bed. We follow him home at 
midnight, and you want to do 24-hour watch on him. You sit there 
until he leaves in the morning.

You've always got another agent with you, either in his car or in 
your car, and we can talk.

They're the guys this article should be on. I'd love to drag all 
eight of my people out here, and say, "Hey, these are the guys who 
are doing it!" Y'know, to put their names and faces in the paper and 
get some recognition, but I can't.

How divided is the staff's work?

Thirty percent of our stuff is undercover, 70 percent might be 
surveillance. We do electronic surveillance, aerial surveillance.

Like with an infrared camera?

Well, we'll just say that we're using electronic surveillance. Some 
of the stuff we've used is almost out of James Bond.

Last year around this time, we were working a federal wiretap. It 
started right here in Brown County. At the end of it, we made arrests 
in Long Beach, Calif., Chicago. We know where it was coming in from 
Mexico.

We've got one guy that's ... still gathering stuff together for the 
rest of this wiretap case. Even though the main players are in a 
federal facility right now, there are still a lot of people who need 
to be charged.

Is there a sense of achievement after a really big bust?

If we make a really big bust, the supply kind of dries up here in 
Green Bay until you get more people coming in. We make a big bust, 
and three weeks later, they've got more people in place bringing in 
the same things.

I haven't got a message for them. They'll know who we are when we 
start knocking on their doors.

Have you ever had to bust a family member or friend?

One of the largest money seizures we had came from somebody I went to 
high school with. He recognized me right away. He wouldn't talk to me.

Do you ever feel for the addicts you arrest or their family?

I feel sorry for the people who are close to them, because they're 
the ones who are suffering. The dad takes his paycheck and buys $500 
worth of crack, that's $500 worth of food that the kids aren't going 
to get.

Yeah, you feel sorry for the kids. We do search warrants at these 
houses and it's unbelievable the way these people live. I mean, 
sometimes we'll call the city inspector and he'll condemn the house 
on the spot.

Don't get me wrong ... drugs affect all the way from very influential 
people here in Green Bay that we know of all the way down to the 
lower income brackets. $100,000 a year people to people on welfare. 
There's drugs at every middle school and high school in town.

With three daughters, do you ever worry for them?

My youngest daughter is 20. Yeah, we had a father-daughter talk. 
There's got to be an effort to educate people about it.

But, personally, I don't think we're ever going to stop it. I mean, 
we've had a war on drugs since the 1920s.

I'm sure that my kids were offered dope, and they said "No." How many 
kids do you have out there, drinking underage? They know it's wrong.

You mentioned the billions in costs of the drug war. Do you think 
financial resources are distributed correctly?

Yes, I do. There's all kinds of treatment programs and things 
available, but, it's like smoking: People have to decide not to do 
these things.

When I was a kid, drugs were around, but that wasn't the thing, we 
made our own stuff to do.

But you can't force them to go to the library, you can't force them 
to go to the Boys & Girls Club where there are structured things to 
do.

Just as more treatment and rehabilitation programs have come up over 
the years, have there been changes on the officer side?

The trend is education. In the early and mid-1970s, you came out of 
the military and went into the police department. Now we've got young 
officers coming out who've got master's degrees.

In the early '70s, you'd see tragedy and you'd just shrug it's off, 
y'know, ho-hum, that's life. And you didn't show compassion, because 
basically, it wasn't a manly thing to do. Now, they've got counselors 
available, and you get debriefings, and critical incident debriefings.

Gary Van Straten Job title: Lieutenant at the Brown County Sheriff's 
Department, supervisor of the Green Bay/Brown County Drug Task Force 
Age: around 50 Community in which he lives: Green Bay What makes him 
unique: He devotes his days and nights to keeping Brown County a 
drug-free community
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