$18M rescue
NYPD commish’s plan to tackle OD ‘heartbreak’
THE NYPD will spend millions to step up its fight against the city’s opioid epidemic — which has already claimed 344 lives from overdoses this year, a 21.5% spike from the same time in 2016.
Police Commissioner James O’Neill walked through the $17.9 million plan Monday and said cops plan to visit an open-air South Bronx shooting gallery documented by the Daily News “to make sure people there get the help they need.
“It’s a bit heartbreaking. We will be back there,” O’Neill told the City Council Monday. “It was a disturbing story on multiple levels.”
The News interviewed addicts at the shooting gallery known as “the hole” and published startling images of users on St. Anns Ave. near E. 149th St.
In the midst of the highest overdose death spike in five years, the NYPD plans to assign 84 detectives to work on overdose and drug investigations, and hire 50 drug lab analysts.
O’Neill also intends to finish training and equipping all 23,000 patrol officers with naloxone kits that can reverse overdoses. More than 13,000 officers are now equipped with the devices.
“Each overdose will get the same focus that we do on a homicide,” said Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce. “Our focus is not on the individual addicts, our focus is on the distribution.”
Police say 1,370 died of overdoses last year. Cops fear the 2017 yearend total will eclipse that number.
The highest number of overdose deaths this year — 56 — have been in northern Manhattan. The highest number per capita is Staten Island, with 36 fatal overdoses per 100,000 people. Two Staten Island precincts lead the city in overdose deaths — 14 in the 122nd Precinct, and 12 in the 120th.
Most of the overdoses have been caused by cocktails mixing heroin and fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid.
In all, the NYPD is getting more than half of the $34.3 million allocated by Mayor de Blasio for an anti-opioid plan in the fiscal year that starts in July.
At the shooting gallery on St. Anns Ave., a fence into one entryway was padlocked on Monday. There were no cops or users.
“These are folks living really on the fringe . . . we have to go in there and give them help,” Boyce said.