Shift in war on epidemic

This is the latest in a series of stories on the city’s opioid epidemic.

The Daily News interviewed addiction experts, recovering addicts, police and prosecutors to provide an in-depth look at the drug scourge that police say killed more than 1,370 people in the city last year. The News watched as addicts injected heroin into their bodies. Reporters sat down with families grieving over relatives whose lives were cut short by opioid abuse.

And the highest levels of the NYPD weighed in, saying cops are taking a different approach — acknowledging police can’t arrest their way out of the problem.

Handcuffs and lockups are out as the weapons of choice in the battle against the city’s exploding opioid crisis. The NYPD, along with an assortment of agencies and activists across the five boroughs, is intent on handling the city’s spiraling opioid crisis with a variety of new ideas to keep addicts alive, out of jail and armed with options.

“One of the most overused phrases in law enforcement today is, ‘You can’t arrest your way out of this problem,’ ” says Dermot Shea, the NYPD’s chief of crime control strategies.

“It’s very true in this particular case, it really is,” Shea said at his Police Headquarters office. “There is an enforcement piece to what we see . . . . But it’s not going to deal (with) the entire problem.”

The new normal is apparent in a variety of ways in law enforcement and beyond: l The Heroin Overdose Prevention & Education (HOPE) program launched on Staten Island this year to steer lowlevel drug offenders into treatment instead of a cell. l Quarterly meetings of the RX Stat Operations Group bring together 25 agencies — law enforcement, health officials, local and federal prosecutors and other groups — to the front lines of the fight. The participants compare notes and develop new answers to old problems.

While addicts continue to shoot up in the Bronx (above), among other drug-plagued areas in the city, emergency medical technicians such as Robert Kelly (right, also in the Bronx) are newly equipped to fight New York’s growing opioid scourge.