Proposal to Be Outlined Sunday Transitions Inc. will sponsor a presentation Sunday on the residential recovery center it hopes to build and operate in Latonia for 100 male drug addicts. The recovery center would be modeled on the Healing Place in Louisville, which has been offering detoxification, residential and continuing care for men and women for 15 years. Sunday's session will include a short video on the Healing Place with stories of people who have recovered there, according to Mac McArthur, executive director of Transitions. It will run from 2 to 4 p.m. at Latonia Baptist Church on Church Street. [continues 353 words]
Cat and mouse. Officer Megan Tucker has played this game often, and this evening she was playing it again with a young man she suspected of dealing drugs. She steered slowly past him. He pointedly ignored her, looking down at something in his hands. Officer Tucker couldn't see what, but she could guess. Today's drug dealers carry hand-held, text-messaging pagers so they can relay the word, "The boys are out" -- street jargon for the police. An officer for five years, Tucker is a second-generation Covington cop, and like her father before her, she's spent many a night patrolling the Eastside. [continues 282 words]
It was the kind of crime that barely raises an eyebrow in Covington's Eastside. A woman, driving alone into the Jacob Price Homes public housing project, suddenly found two men in her car asking if she wanted to buy drugs. No, she told them. And as quickly as they'd gotten in the car, they got out, taking her purse with them. Add one more crime to the Eastside's police blotter. At least no one was hurt. To read just a week's worth of police calls to the Eastside is to read of rapes, robberies, drive-by shootings, knifings, gang frays, drug deals (marijuana, cocaine and heroin), vandalism and prostitution. Stretched over the past year and half, those weeks account for nearly 2,000 calls dispatched to a neighborhood just eight blocks long and half as wide. [continues 1598 words]
The new chief of a regional agency that targets illegal drugs in Northern Kentucky will update his board today on his progress in expanding the agency's dismal membership. Participation in the Northern Kentucky Drug Strike Force is voluntary, and now only three of the region's 33 police agencies contribute officers. But James Paine, who took over in April as executive director, says he has commitments from at least four other police and sheriff's departments. Paine is trying to elicit more cooperation by varying the length of time officers are loaned to the agency, by vowing to be accessible to police chiefs and by emphasizing the training benefits that serving on the task force provides. [continues 578 words]
An incensed Campbell County judge on Thursday threw out a felony case against a man accused of getting two dentists to prescribe painkillers for him, saying the detective who filed the charge must have bigger fish to fry. District Judge D. Michael ''Mickey'' Foellger also criticized the Northern Kentucky Drug Strike Force detective for using valuable time to question the dentists who gave Kelly Snow, 28, of Covington, prescriptions for pain medication when he complained of a toothache. ''I really hope that the narcotics unit of Northern Kentucky has got better things to do than start snooping around the people who go to the dentist twice,'' Foellger said during a hearing on the case. [continues 547 words]
