MONTICELLO, NY — Judith Giampietro, Sullivan County’s new crime analyst, says she’s in regular touch with all the professionals who can feed her useful information.

“I have contact with the sheriffs — all the different agencies,” she told the River Reporter during a recent interview. “Liberty, Monticello, the DHS. But then, since I’m stationed at the Crime Analysis Center, I also have access to anything in the Hudson Valley.”

Crime analysts go big: They share intelligence quickly and accurately as they target regional and even international organizations that traffic drug drugs and launder money. They focus on gangs and fugitives who commit “serious crimes with a drug nexus,” according to the high-intensity drug trafficking area (HIDTA) mission.

Before last July, when Sullivan was named a HIDTA, Sullivan was the only county in the Hudson Valley without the designation, which qualifies localities for more resources, such as a crime analyst. Giampietro started just last month and works out of the Hudson Valley Crime Analyst Center, part of the Orange County Emergency Services Center in Goshen, NY.

“We weren’t part of the web at that time,” said District Attorney Brian Conanty, who sat in the interview and works closely with the analyst. Sullivan was unable to benefit until now from the collection and sharing inter-county data.

Giampietro works exclusively in Sullivan County. She helps law enforcement increase their presence in problem areas and strengthens prosecutions in opioid-related cases, and uses data from other counties to identify persons of interest.

Data sharing has yet to have a direct impact on the county. But Giampietro said she was able to help Orange County identify a person of interest. 

Conaty gave another example. “If someone stamps their bags of heroin with a certain trademark, and that’s found across counties, they’ll share that, and we’ll figure out that they’re connected to the same supplier,” he said. “It’s similar with guns. If we recover a gun here that we think has been used somewhere else, we can check the striation patterns on the barrel to see if it matches shell casings from that in another county that was used in another drug offense.”

Giampietro said high numbers of overdoses on a certain street or building are also tracked. If she sees the numbers spike, she will convey that information to law enforcement.

“Distributing all this information to law enforcement agencies, so that way, we can have a higher police presence in hot areas,” Conaty said. Emergency medical services would also increase in those areas.

Giampietro can put the data she analyzes into timelines and maps that prosecutors can use.

“Complex investigations require complex prosecutions,” Conaty said. “Ultimately, when it gets to trial, I need to persuade 12 members of the citizenry about what happened and how bad it is. It’s hard to do that. Having a map, having the data and the analysis, the pinpoints connecting all the dots, truly sets things into the mind of jurors, and helps me to meet my burden of proof. So it’s instrumental.”

What isn’t tracked

Overdoses, both non-fatal and fatal, are tracked along with the type of drug that caused the overdose, said Giampietro. But some important data is not collected, she said, specifically, details about the people who die from overdoses and their drug histories.

Sullivan County is way out ahead of any other county in its rate of fatal overdoses, with 63.7 recorded in 2020—triple the statewide rate of 21.5. But it’s also an outlier in the way its residents get opioids: through doctors’ prescriptions, according to the New York State Opioid Data Dashboard. More than half of Sullivan County residents received a prescription for opioid analgesics in 2021, at a rate of 558 per 1,000 people, compared to 305 per 1,000 statewide. That same year, hundreds of Sullivan County residents who were “opioid naive” (defined by the National Institutes for Health as not having taken opioids for the previous two weeks) received prescriptions for more than seven days’ worth of pills. A total of 1,382 prescriptions were written in 2021 for the opioid-naive residents of Sullivan County, which may potentially start new addictions.

The dangers of prescription drugs have long been known. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) dates the current, third wave of the opioid crisis to 2013, when synthetic opioids like fentanyl began displacing heroin among users. But the CDC shows it was prescription drugs that started the whole crisis off—during the first wave in the 1990s, when doctors began prescribing opioid medications like oxycodone and hydrocodone much more frequently.

The DA said he is acutely aware of this reality.

“If you check the data over the last decade, for solid mechanics for the state of New York, but keying into Sullivan County, it shows an alarming rate of more prescriptions for opioids, like medical opioids, from oxycodone to hydrocodone and Percocet. Take your pick,” Conaty said. “But an alarming rate, prescriptions for those narcotics in Sullivan County relative to the rest of the state. Yeah, like a lot. I think that has a direct correlation to why we’re hit so hard by the disproportionate effects that it has had on Sullivan County in terms of the illicit opioid trade.”

But, Conaty said, tracking prescription drugs is “a much larger investigation.” And, right now, he said, “our task at hand is to focus on the illicit trade, and try to curb it, and try to find pathways for rehabilitation for those affected.”

See related story, "Repeat offender who sold fentanyl, crack cocaine at DSS housing is convicted."