Narcotics unit in Costa Mesa axed

The Costa Mesa Police Department’s narcotics unit will be disbanded, and its officers will be reassigned to other parts of the department by the first week of the new year because of budget cuts, department officials said Monday.

Police officials said most of the seven detectives in the unit were informed two weeks ago that they will be placed into other parts of the department. Two will be reassigned to the Special Enforcement Detail, a unit that has some overlapping duties with the narcotics unit, two will be assigned into the general detectives bureau, and two will be reassigned as patrol officers, said Police Chief Chris Shawkey. The seventh officer will keep their role as part of a larger task force working with the FBI, he said.

The department’s reorganization is part of an effort across all city departments to cut off loose ends and streamline costs, City Manager Allan Roeder said.

The Police Department is on a hiring freeze, Shawkey said, and officers from the narcotics unit will be used to fill other gaps, such as with the patrols. The move also allowed the department to withhold promoting one officer to sergeant, which brings on a pay raise, he said.

Shawkey added that officers affected have been supportive and understanding of the changes given the state of the economy.

Police union President Allen Rieckhof disagreed, saying that not having a narcotics unit will cut off any serious efforts to get “the big fish” in the drug world.

“What’s disappointing for me, you take a full-time unit and you take away the experience and long-term dedication to work narcotics cases,” he said. “I think it’s detrimental to narcotics enforcement. You have to buy into it. I don’t think this chief has bought into narcotics enforcement on a [larger] scale.”

The Special Enforcement Detail (SED), where two of the narcotics detectives will move, generally nets smaller drug arrests, your typical street-level dealers, Shawkey said. But with the additional detectives, the detail should be able to support some of the longer, more involved drug investigations the narcotics unit was known to conduct, he said.

Reickhof said the involved investigations will be harder to come by with SED detectives being pulled from cases to serve warrants or do surveillance on other suspects.

The narcotics unit is the first unit in the department to feel the economy’s squeeze, but it won’t be the last, Shawkey said.

“We’re taking a look everywhere in the department — everyone’s subject to maybe making some cuts,” he said.

The department’s reserve officers will be gone by the end of June, Shawkey said. Also, at the request of city officials, the Police Department is reviewing the costs of its Airborne Law Enforcement Services program, which provides the city’s police helicopter.

“It’s a good program, and also a very expensive program,” Roeder said.

The reduction in fuel costs has helped, officials said, and department heads are discussing sharing the costs of the chopper with other police departments when it responds on mutual-aid calls to other cities.

Police officers on campuses like Costa Mesa High School and Tewinkle Middle School could also be laid off, officials said. The Police Department and the Newport-Mesa school district split the costs of having a police officer on campus, but there may be some funding issues for the school district depending on the state budget, Roeder said.

“Budgets are tough everywhere. If they don’t have the money to pay their half, we’ll have to look at it,” Shawkey said.

There have been some very preliminary discussions of cutting the Police Department and Fire Department altogether as well, Roeder said. Again, at the behest of City Council members, Roeder said, the city has sought bids for service from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and the Orange County Fire Authority. Neither has responded with a quoted cost, he said.

“It’s just something they were asked to look at, no more, no less. I think it’s important to keep in mind, when you look at both those agencies, obviously where you’d look for in terms of cost-efficiency would be cost of labor,” Roeder said.

Both agencies share similar costs for personnel, Roeder said, so there would likely have to be somewhere else they could save money if they wanted to move forward with that idea.

JOSEPH SERNA may be reached at (714) 966-4619 or at joseph.serna@latimes.com.