The Bellevue Police Department is working closely with a little-talked about ally in the fight against drugs: The United States Postal Service.
“They’ve been a valuable resource for us, for the federal resources and the network of support,” Bellevue Police Department Sergeant Colin Sullivan said.
The department recently merged their vice and special enforcement team members with the narcotics officers who had previously worked in the Eastside Narcotics Task Force to create a new special operations unit. While the postal service’s inspections team has worked with Bellevue officers for decades, their relationship has changed in the last few years.
Three years ago, an inspector was formally assigned to work with the Bellevue Police Department and the Eastside Narcotics Task Force. Since the task force’s end in June, the partnership between the two entities has continued on an unofficial basis.
Mail crime has existed since the birth of the nation. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service is the nation’s oldest federal law enforcement agency, with Benjamin Franklin as the first postal inspector.
The U.S. Postal Service is now investigating more cases of narcotics traveling through the mail than ever before.
Through the country, inspectors initiated 2,560 investigations in 2015, which led to 1,898 arrests and 1,785 convictions. That is more than double the 1,075 investigations conducted five years prior. They do not keep regional or city-specific statistics.
Over the past five years, that has been a bit more of an emphasis and time invested in narcotics trafficking through the mail, Postal Service spokesperson Jeremy Leder said. That is in part due to the Department of Justice’s focus on drug crime.
In the Puget Sound region, the postal service has been an increase in the use of “dark web” applications like the Silk Road to buy and sell illegal drugs.
Criminals shipping drugs are markedly different from those who steal mail, Sullivan said. The people stealing packages are often the same people breaking into homes and cars, looking for cash and expensive items they can sell in order to buy drugs.
“When we investigate car prowls, our goal is to get a search warrant for the suspect’s car and home. Nine times out of 10, we find stolen mail. Then, we can charge them with identity theft. It’s a gold mine,” he said.
But the men and women shipping drugs are often savvy, knowledgeable about technology and not actually using any drugs. These are challenges cases because criminals use bitcoins, move shipments through intermediaries and are hard to track down because they can scramble computer IP addresses.
That’s where their work with the postal service comes in.
“We actively partner with them on cases involving people sending and receiving narcotics through the mail,” Sullivan said. “It’s moving to the point where they call us when they’re on to something, because they don’t have the resources to waste on ‘smaller cases’ — say, 50 pounds of drugs or less.”
Last month, the department and postal inspection service intercepted a package containing roughly 350 pills of ecstasy and another with a pound of pure MDMA in two separate operations.
Though the two entities are still working on an informal basis, their successful teamwork in the past has them thinking about the future. The police department is planning on setting up regular meetings with federal agents, though they are still want to focus on crimes unique to Bellevue, according to Sullivan.
