MONTICELLO, NY — Sullivan County now has its own crime analyst.

The new position is part of a federal program to help local governments cope with high-intensity drug trafficking areas, or HIDTAs. The analyst will give the county the data it needs to more effectively investigate narcotics and violent crimes, and also provide rapid assistance in a fast-moving crisis. The analyst will develop leads and share information with local law enforcement agencies, the ten Crime Analyst Centers located across New York State, and all Crime Analyst Centers across the country. 

Sullivan’s new hire, Judith Giampoetro, will work out of the Hudson Valley Crime Analyst Center, located in the Orange County Emergency Services Center in Goshen, NY. She previously worked for nearly three years as a police assistant and crime analyst for the Village of Wappingers Falls Police Department.

Brian Conaty, the district attorney, hired the analyst in conjunction with local police department. He said the analyst, whose position is funded by the New York County District Attorney, will work with the support of his office. 

“This analyst is directly assigned to Sullivan County and will provide law enforcement with the critical tools and information desperately needed to combat this opioid epidemic that has disproportionately affected our county,” Conaty said. “I look forward to working with the federal government and law enforcement across the state and nation. I want to thank Senator Chuck Schumer for his efforts in facilitating this designation and all members of the Sullivan County Drug Task Force for their tireless work in preparing this application.”

Sullivan County joins HIDTA

Congress created the HIDTA designation in 1988 to funnel support to the nation’s most-afflicted areas. To qualify for a HIDTA designation, an area must be a significant center of illegal drug production, manufacturing, importation, or distribution. Local agencies must also be determined to respond aggressively to the problem but lack the federal resources they need to do their work effectively. 

Last July Sullivan County joined the New York/New Jersey HIDTA, one of 33 HIDTA areas spread across the country.

“For years, despite having the highest overdose death rate in New York State, with 218 overdose incidents and 24 fatalities in 2022 alone, Sullivan County has remained the only Hudson Valley county not in the HIDTA zone,” said Chuck Schumer, the Senator from New York, when announcing the designation in July in front of the county courthouse. That means “it has lacked access to critical federal resources needed to stop the overdose epidemic and go after drug traffickers,” he said.

Schumer and Conaty were joined at the courthouse by an official from the White House, Dr. Rahul Gupta, director of National Drug Control Policy and the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Sullivan County really is an outlier. According to the New York State Opioid Data Dashboard, which is updated by the health department, Sullivan County’s opioid overdose death rate per 100,000 residents in 2020 was 63.7 — nearly double the rate of the next-highest county, Broome, at 36.4, and triple the rate statewide.

In 2020 Sullivan County had a rate of 135.3 emergency room visits for opioid overdoses per 100,000 residents, compared with 62.6 statewide.

Prescriptions more than dealers

The dashboard offers some clues to why the overdose death rate is so much higher in Sullivan than in other New York counties. For one, naloxone, a medication that rapidly reverses opioid overdose, is not being used at the same rate here. Naloxone administrations by EMS agencies, per 1,000 EMS dispatches called into 911, was 7.1 in Sullivan County and 7.3 in Orange County in 2021. But Orange County’s overdose death rate was much lower that year, 26.9, compared to Sullivan’s 63.7. The rate statewide is 5.8 naxolone administrations per 1,000 EMS dispatches and an overdose death rate of 21.5 per 100,000 people.

Another clue for Sullivan’s outlier status may be found in the way its residents get addicted — and it is not always because of the illicit drug trade that the new crime analyst will focus on. 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.

Making matters worse, hundreds of Sullivan County residents who were “opioid naive,” which the National Institutes for Health defines 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 for this population, potentially creating more drug-dependent residents.

In offering reasons for Sullivan’s high rates of addiction, Schumer said Route 17, one of the county’s main thoroughfares, is used by drug traffickers because it sees fewer police patrols than bigger state highways. And the rural county’s thinly spread emergency resources, which cannot reach people in need in a timely way, has contributed to its high overdose rate, he said.